Rangers aim to stamp £35m Champions League golden ticket as teetering coefficient sees Celtic park rivalry

In the UEFA Country Coefficient rankings, Scotland ended last season ninth and the Czech Republic fifteenth. With such a gap you would not have expected the Czechs to become the biggest threat to Scotland’s top 10 position - and the champions' direct entry into the Champions League that comes with it.

However due to their clubs’ impressive performance and the meagre performance of our clubs, that is exactly the situation that is brewing ahead of Rangers’ crunch match against Sparta Prague at Ibrox on Thursday. With the Czechs only having four teams in Europe this season compared to Scotland’s five – each of their results is worth more coefficient points. A group stage win is worth two points and a draw worth one point, which is then divided by the number of teams the country had in Europe. This translates as 0.5 coefficient points per Czech win and 0.4 points for a Scottish win.

After three group games the three Czech sides have picked up an impressive 19 group stage points from the available 27, whereas our three sides have only picked up a paltry six points. The Czechs also won four more matches than our clubs managed in qualifying rounds.

The accumulation of those factors means they’ve managed to close the gap in country coefficient points from 7.1 points to 4.3 points behind us. In the rankings they’ve so far managed to move up to thirteenth, while we’ve been overtaken by Turkey and dropped to tenth. At 0.5 points per Czech win, our 4.3 point lead equates to roughly nine Czech victories, and so you’d be forgiven for thinking we have an almost unassailable lead over them. Unfortunately, Nils Mackay who is a data scientist at Opta stats, has the Czech Republic’s chances of finishing tenth as 34.4% and he rates