The Disaster Index logs the Clarke era at 5.1. That number does not resolve cleanly into success or failure, which is precisely the point.
Seven years. Two major tournaments reached — Euro 2020 and the 2026 World Cup, Scotland's first World Cup finals since 1998. No knockout round in either. The group stage remains the outer boundary of what this generation has managed, as it has remained the outer boundary of every Scotland generation since the men's game first sent them abroad in 1954. Nine World Cup finals appearances. The record does not change.
What the Clarke tenure did change is the baseline expectation. Scotland qualified for consecutive tournaments. That had not happened before in the modern era. The wilderness — which stretched from France 1998 to a penalty shootout in 2020 — established the terms under which Clarke's achievements were received. When the qualifying campaign for 2026 ended with Kenny McLean's stoppage-time strike from his own half against Denmark in November 2025, the response was proportionate to the preceding drought, not to the task of reaching a World Cup alone.
This is where the dual register requires attention.
Gratitude and relief, arriving together, are not ambivalence. They are not supporters contradicting themselves or softening a harder judgment out of politeness. They are a precise description of the shape of what was missing before Clarke arrived and of what remained missing when he left. The gratitude names the tournaments, the qualification, the fact of Scotland being present in Group C in Miami and Boston in June 2026. The relief names the group stage exits, the 70-second Saibari goal at Foxborough, the 78 percent possession surrendered to Morocco in a first half that Scotland did not control.
Neither feeling cancels the other. Together they locate the exact position Clarke leaves the programme: further forward than it was, not as far forward as the moment demands.
The incoming management structure inherits a different problem than Clarke inherited. Clarke was asked to end an absence. The absence ended. The next appointment is asked to end a ceiling — the group stage barrier that has held across nine World Cups without exception. That is a harder assignment, and it carries a heavier burden of expectation because Clarke's work made expectation legitimate again.
The Index does not record this as tragedy or as vindication. It records it as a finding: that a managerial tenure can be both a genuine advance and a completed limit, simultaneously, and that supporters identifying both conditions at once are not confused. They are reading the evidence correctly.
Qualification is no longer the ceiling. That is what seven years established. What comes next is the question the record has not yet answered.