Every pundit in Scotland had St Mirren measured for the Championship before a ball was kicked. Two wins later, they’re sitting atop the Premiership, and suddenly the entire sport has entered a dimension where the laws of football physics no longer apply.
Let’s be clear: this is not a feel-good underdog story. This is a warning sign. When a club that was supposed to be fighting for survival in May is instead lecturing Rangers and Celtic on how to win matches in August, something has gone fundamentally wrong with the fabric of Scottish football. Either the entire pre-season assessment apparatus has collapsed into pure fiction, or St Mirren have discovered a loophole in the rulebook that the rest of us haven’t noticed yet.
The most charitable explanation is that everyone was catastrophically wrong about them. The less charitable one—and frankly the more entertaining one—is that St Mirren have simply decided the usual hierarchy doesn’t apply this season. They’ve looked at decades of Scottish football tradition and said: no, actually, we’re going to do something different. We’re going to win.
If this continues, we’re looking at a complete reordering of the sport. The big clubs will have to accept that their historical leverage means nothing. The bookmakers will need to delete their entire database. And somewhere, a referee is probably wondering if they’ve been accidentally issuing penalties to the wrong team all along.
Maybe St Mirren aren’t clowning around. Maybe they’re the only ones taking this seriously.