Some stories in Scottish football grow so fast you barely notice the ground disappearing beneath them, and Falkirk under John McGlynn are now at the stage where folk are looking down and realising just how far they’ve climbed. A year ago they were celebrating the Championship title. The year before that they were dragging themselves out of League One. Now they’ve walked into Fir Park, beaten Motherwell again, and sealed a top‑six finish in their first season back in the top flight in fifteen years . It’s the kind of rise that makes you stop mid‑sentence and shake your head a little.
What makes it even stranger is how normal Falkirk make it look. There’s no smash‑and‑grab about them. They play with a bit of swagger, a bit of cheek, and a belief that doesn’t feel borrowed from anyone else. McGlynn keeps talking about attacking football and refusing to sit in for scraps, and you can see it in the way they move the ball, the way they commit bodies forward, the way they trust each other to sort out the mess if it all goes sideways .
Calvin Miller is playing like a man who’s been plugged back into the mains. Barney Stewart looks like he’s been waiting his whole life for this level. Scott Bain’s back in the Scotland squad after seven years in the wilderness, which tells its own story about how far the club has come and how quickly it’s happened . There’s a core there, a proper group who’ve lived the climb together, and you can feel that in the way they celebrate goals, in the way they argue with referees, in the way they carry themselves.
And then there’s the noise around McGlynn. Some folk are whispering Celtic. Some are laughing it off. Some are genuinely wondering if a man who’s dragged a club from the third tier to the top six in two seasons deserves a crack at something bigger. Others say he’s the wrong age, the wrong profile, the wrong kind of fashionable. But you can’t watch Falkirk right now without thinking he’s doing something that goes beyond tidy coaching badges and neat CV lines.
They’ve got a Scottish Cup semi‑final coming. They’ve got a sniff of Europe. They’ve got a say in the title race. They’ve got momentum that doesn’t look like it’s slowing down.