2018–19 Scottish Premiership

The 2018–19 Scottish Premiership (known as the Ladbrokes Premiership for sponsorship reasons) will be the sixth season of the Scottish Premiership, the highest division of Scottish football. The fixtures will be published on 15 June 2018 and the season will begin on 4 August 2018.

Twelve teams will contest the league: Aberdeen, Celtic, Dundee, Hamilton Academical, Heart of Midlothian, Hibernian, Kilmarnock, Livingston, Motherwell, Rangers, St Johnstone and St Mirren. Celtic will be the defending champions.

Teams
To Premiership St Mirren secured the Championship title and promotion to the Premiership on 14 April 2018 after a goalless draw with Livingston, who were also promoted after winning the play-off final.

To Championship Ross County were relegated to the Championship on 12 May 2018 after a 1–1 draw with St Johnstone. Partick Thistle were also relegated following a 3–1 aggregate defeat to Livingston in the play-off final.

Basic
In the initial phase of the season, the 12 teams will play a round-robin tournament whereby each team plays each one of the other teams three times. After 33 games, the league splits into two sections of six teams, with each team playing each other in that section. The league attempts to balance the fixture list so that teams in the same section play each other twice at home and twice away, but sometimes this is impossible. A total of 228 matches will be played, with 38 matches played by each team.

Positions by round
The table lists the positions of teams after each week of matches. In order to preserve chronological progress, any postponed matches are not included in the round at which they were originally scheduled but added to the full round they were played immediately afterwards. For example, if a match is scheduled for matchday 13, but then postponed and played between days 16 and 17, it will be added to the standings for day 16.

Premiership play-offs
The quarter-final will be contested between the third and fourth-placed teams in the Scottish Championship, with the winners advancing to the semi-final to face the second-placed Championship side. The last remaining Championship team will play-off against the eleventh-placed Premiership team in the final, with the winners securing the last place in the 2019–20 Scottish Premiership.

Live Matches
The SPFL allows Sky Sports and BT Sport to broadcast up to six live home matches (combined) for each club, although this is only four for Celtic and Rangers. The TV deal allows the broadcasters to show 30 games each (and the play-offs for BT Sport) and provides approximately £21m to the SPFL per season.

Highlights
Sky Sports hold the rights to Saturday night highlights and show the Scottish Premiership goals on Sky Sports News in their Goals Express programme. Gaelic-language channel BBC Alba can broadcast in full the repeat of 38 Saturday 3pm matches "as live" at 5.30pm. The main Premiership highlights programme is BBC Scotland's Sportscene programme, which shows in-depth highlights of all six Premiership matches every weekend. STV show the goals on Monday nights during the Sport section of their News at Six programme as well as during their weeknight football-debate show on STV2. The SPFL also uploads the goals from every Premiership match onto its YouTube channel - available from 6pm on a Sunday for UK and Ireland viewers and 10pm on a Saturday for those worldwide.