Essentially, Rangers and Celtic have a lot in common – both working class supports of big fish teams in a small league that are more famous (at least in modern era) for their fans devotion than their footballing successes.
The big difference culturally/historically is their relation to Britain/Britishness. An offset of that is religion. Protestantism is the main religion of UK – Queen/King is head of the Church of England. Catholicism is main religion of Irish diaspora in UK.
Celtic set up as a charity mainly to feed Irish immigrants to Glasgow. Irish diaspora traditionally not huge fans of Britain/the monarchy.
Rangers and their support traditionally had a much more positive view of Britain/monarchy.
There are certain political persuasions that flow easier from each starting point. If you are critical of Britain, you probably are more open to causes like Palestinian liberation or anti-conservative views. If you support Britain, you might have a more positive opinion of the military/veterans and have a more hardline view of non-state political agitators as terrorists. But this is obviously not uniform and there’s plenty of Tory Celtic fans (least of all the board) and plenty of progressive rangers fans.
But what the clubs represent politically are very much opposed. Which is a shame considering both are majority working-class folk from Glasgow.
Also, most of these religious, political or societal opinions flow from a club you are locked into from birth. So, what you find is that a Celtic fan who’s conservative in every other view, might still hate the queen. And a ranger’s fan who’s progressive in every other sense might have a blind spot when it comes to the British army in Ireland.
So basically, you can say that somehow at some extend, Celtic represents the Irish community and Rangers represent the unionists but as explained above it’s not always the case.
There is another club in Glasgow that most of you probably never knew existed, Patrick Thistle. They have a much smaller base than the other two we mentioned above, but they have a good group of royal supporters.
If we talk in percentages, there is no real data that represents the true numbers of supporter’s split in Glasgow, but it could probably come down to this:
Rangers: 55%
Celtic: 40%
Patrick Thistle: 5%
But this is just inside Glasgow, if we are talking worldwide then Celtic has the upper hand and has a much bigger fan base especially in countries where there is a big Irish community.
Here is a map that we found during our research but it’s hard to make a 100% correct one, we would need to do a big survey in the city of Glasgow which was not yet done by anyone and only some demographics were taken into account when it came to the fan bases.
Wow !