Ryan Christie Reflects on Scotland's Bittersweet Return to International Football

The wait lasted 28 years. The comedown took about 72 hours.

Scotland finally walked back into international football’s biggest arena, only to be ushered out again at the group stage. The disappointment lingered, but for Ryan Christie, the overriding feeling now is something else entirely.

Hunger.

“It was an amazing experience,” the Bournemouth midfielder told BBC Scotland, reflecting on a tournament in which he featured in all three group games. For a generation of Scottish players and supporters, this was the long-promised land. For Christie, it was a first real taste of it.

He talks about the stands before he talks about the football. That tells its own story.

“Seeing all the Scotland fans over there was incredible. The atmosphere was electric.”

Tartan blue everywhere. Songs belted out long before kick-off and long after the final whistle. A support that had waited nearly three decades to follow their team to a major finals again, determined to make every minute count.

Then came the silence.

“The first 72 hours afterwards, you feel a bit gutted because we were desperate to get out of the group and it wasn't to be,” Christie admitted. The ambition was clear: not just to turn up, but to stay a while, to push Scotland into the knockout rounds and rewrite the country’s tournament story.

That part never arrived. The exit hurt. It was meant to.

Yet inside the camp, something else had taken root. A feeling that this was not a one-off adventure, but the start of something more durable.

“I had such a good time with that bunch of boys that have been together for so many years now,” Christie said. This is a core that has grown together under pressure, carrying the weight of history and expectation, and finally breaking the qualifying hoodoo. Shared scars, shared joy, shared responsibility.

When it ended, there was no sense of closure. Only appetite.

“When you finish, you're just hungry for more,” he added. The line lands with the clarity of a promise rather than a cliché. For Christie, the tournament has not scratched an itch; it has deepened it.

“I'm desperate now to go to more tournaments, just thinking when's the next one?”

That question now hangs over the entire Scotland squad. The drought is over. The standard has shifted. The next campaign will not be about proving they belong on the big stage.

It will be about proving they can stay there.