With the Scottish Premiership Season starting tomorrow (and with it our Fantasy Football Scotland Contest), I thought I'd look through an old Shoot magazine from 25 years ago, dated July 27th 1996, and find some Scottish content to share with you.

One thing I've found interesting about the Shoot magazines of this era, is the (relatively) high regard that Scottish football was held in. There would regularly be articles relating to Scottish football and posters, normally featuring Celtic or Rangers.

This particular magazine's double spread was focussed on transfers to and from the continent and as you can (sort of) tell from the post title, a Swedish player took the limelight. His name? Joachim Bjorklund.

Note: Before you tell me that Bjork is Icelandic, I'm well aware of this - it's the title they used in the magazine so I went with it!

Source - Shoot Magazine 27th July 1996

To reinforce the strength of Scottish football in the mid-90's, Swedish International Bjorklund said upon signing:

I think they are in the top two clubs in Britain and among the top six in Europe

There's obviously an element of bias to this but both Celtic and Rangers were highly regarded at the time. Rangers had Gazza, Brian Laudrup, Richard Gough and Ally McCoist (who we'll get to later) amongst their ranks and Celtic had just signed the mercurial Paolo Di Canio and already had Pierre van Hooijdonk - so there was some proven quality about. In the top 2 clubs in Britain and top six in Europe though? I'm not so sure but they were considered to be good enough for the Premier League.

Bjorklund's career went from strength to strength and after leaving Rangers, helped Valencia reach back-to-back Champions League Semi-Finals in 1999/2000 and 2000/01 and played 78 times for Sweden (Source).

Moving away from Scotland, John Collins had signed for Monaco (to earn a small fortune) and Ally McCoist was being chased by plenty of J-League clubs offering him 7-figure sums in wages, especially after this goal against Switzerland in Euro '96 added to his price tag.

Source

But he didn't move to Japan, instead choosing to stay at Rangers. Can you imagine a player saying this now...

I never found out how much money was in their offer and I didn't want to. Cash never really came into it. Money isn't everything.

Rangers went on to win the championship that season to clinch a record 9th league title in a row (does that number sound familiar?) but it was Celtic's Jorge Cadete who was the division's top scorer (with 25 goals, 9 more than Rangers' Top Scorer, Brian Laudrup).