Glasgow has been hit by a costly wave of football sticker vandalism.

City cleansing chiefs say they are spending a fortune removing layers of rival Rangers and Celtic symbols from bins and lamp-posts.

The latest craze dates from the pandemic but is now so serious that council workers are having to repaint street furniture affected.

Stephen Egan, the official in charge of keeping Glasgow’s streets and parks clean, reckons those stickering the city do not realise how hard it is to fix the damage they cause.

He told The Herald: “I don't really get why people choose to do that. But it does appear to be a kind of phenomenon that that's popped up over the last couple of years.”

“I think that it's just a culture amongst some fans of the football teams in the city, it’s almost kind of marking their territory.

“These stickers are by no means just on bins. If you look about the city, it is all over street furniture and buildings or whatever else.

Most of the stickers are associated with the two predominant Glasgow football teams. Personally, I don't really get it, but it is something that I think has become a big issue.”

The problem is that the stickers are hard to remove. Often workers have to use chemicals to peel them off. And they damage the paint work.

Glasgow installed about 150 new large capacity litter bins in the city centre ahead of the Cop 26 conference last year. Mr Egan said each of them “had been repainted a couple of times, at least over the last 12 months”.

The official has already acknowledged that Glasgow - in common with other big cities - has seen increased graffiti since the pandemic. The downturn in retail and dining has left a fair number of boarded-up premises ripe for spray-painting. And the lockdowns meant there were fewer people around in downtown areas - leaving more opportunities for vandalism.

Stickering may seem like at the lower end of this. But officials say it is a specific and serious problem: because of the cost of removal.

As The Herald on Sunday revealed yesterday Glasgow bucked national trends in 2021-22 with an improvement in its scores for how clean and tidy its public spaces are.

We obtained data from LEAMS, the Local Environment Audit and Management Systems report carried out by independent charity Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB). It gave Scotland its lowest score since it started inspections back in the early 2000s. More than a tenth of the country’s streets and public places were unacceptably littered. And inspections were worse in two out of three council areas. But not in Glasgow

City officials are hardly crowing about this. Glasgow, after all, is still worse than average. LEAMS scores for individual local authorities have not been published. But The Herald understands that the city got 86%. That might sound high - but it means that 14% of its public spaces checked were unacceptably littered, compared with a record high national average of 10.3%. A year earlier, at the height of the pandemic in 2020-21, Glasgow was given a score of 82.4%. Only Edinburgh and Falkirk did worse.

The numbers do not include the last bin strike but they do suggest that Glasgow was already improving during a period of intense “rubbish” politics ahead of this spring’s council elections.

Mr Egan now has an extra £2m team of “deep cleaners” who will be targeting hard-to-reach litter, flytipping and other environmental blight, including in the city centre. They started work last month.

Enforcement activity on flytipping and littering had fallen during the pandemic but as The Herald on Sunday revealed yesterday it has picked up in Glasgow again. By several factors.