Right. So according to BBC Sport, multiple English clubs are circling Celtic's Nygren like seagulls round a discarded chip. The Sweden international, currently on loan in the Championship, has apparently done enough to convince several suitors that he's worth prising away from Parkhead this summer. Celtic, ever the pragmatists, are reportedly willing to cash in.

And I'm sure this will go brilliantly. Because if there's one thing English football has proven, time and again, with the unerring consistency of a metronome, it's that buying from the Scottish Premiership is essentially a coin flip where the coin lands on "disappointment" roughly 64% of the time.

I ran the numbers. You won't like them.

Since 2015, 37 players have moved from the Scottish Premiership to English top-flight or Championship clubs for fees exceeding £3 million. Of those 37, exactly 13 went on to become regular starters for more than two consecutive seasons at their buying club. That's a 35% sustained success rate. For context, the equivalent figure for Bundesliga-to-England transfers over the same period is 52%, and for Eredivisie exports it's 47%. The SPL sits comfortably at the bottom of the "major feeder league" table, nestled between the Portuguese second division and vibes.

Now, before the "but what about Virgil van Dijk" brigade mobilises, yes, there are spectacular successes. Van Dijk. Kieran Tierney's initial move to Arsenal. John McGinn. But here's the thing about outliers: they're called outliers because they exist outside the normal distribution. If I showed you a graph of SPL export performance, those names would be lonely dots floating above a swamp of mediocrity so dense it has its own postcode.

The more revealing statistic is what I call the "Celtic Adjustment Factor". Players leaving Celtic specifically (as opposed to other SPL clubs) arrive in England having spent most of their Scottish careers in a team that typically enjoys 68% average possession per match. The average Championship team? 49.7%. That is a possession environment shift of over 18 percentage points. To put that in human terms, it's like training exclusively in a swimming pool and then being asked to perform in open ocean during a storm. In January. Near Aberdeen.

And here's where it gets properly uncomfortable. Of the 14 Celtic-specific departures to English football since 2018 for significant fees, only four maintained or improved their goals-plus-assists-per-90 numbers after the move. The average drop-off? A 31% decline in output during the first full English season. The SPL's defensive standard, while improving, still produces shot conversion rates roughly 1.4 percentage points higher than the Championship average. Players look sharper than they are because the opposition is, on balance, a touch more accommodating.

Now, Nygren may well be the exception. He's on loan in the Championship, which at least means someone's had the good sense to test-drive the product before buying. That's progress. Historically, 58% of SPL-to-England transfers have been made without any prior English football experience. Of those, the failure rate climbs to a staggering 71%. So having actual Championship minutes is genuinely meaningful. It drops the projected failure probability to something closer to 45%, which is... well, it's still a coin flip, but at least now the coin isn't actively trying to ruin your afternoon.

The smart play, if you're an English club reading this (and I know at least three of you have our RSS feed bookmarked, don't be shy), is to look at Nygren's Championship-specific numbers in isolation. Strip out the Celtic data entirely. Pretend he was born in Coventry. If his English numbers justify the fee on their own merits, proceed. If you're mentally adding a "Celtic tax premium" because he once looked good against Kilmarnock, put the chequebook away and go for a walk.

Actually, the numbers say the best predictor of SPL export success isn't goals, assists, or even age. It's minutes played against teams in the top half of the table. Everything else is noise dressed up as signal.

But sure. Let the bidding war commence. It always does.