To paraphrase dear old Oscar Wilde, to lose one major Scottish club from the Premier League is unfortunate. However, to lose two would be careless.
The game north of the border has barely recovered from the demise of Rangers last year. Were Hearts – who have entered administration – to be similarly lost of the top flight, that would represent an almighty blow to a game which can hardly afford to lose any more of its more illustrious names at this point.
Even the most avid supporter of the Gorgie club could surely have predicted that the reign of owner Vladimir Romanov was destined to end in tears. With debts amounting to a horrific £25m, Hearts had simply lived outwith their means for far too long, and now they are paying a hefty price for an astonishing lack of financial prudence.
Incredibly, it’s little over a year since Hearts thrashed their great rivals, Hibs, to claim the Scottish Cup. Twelve months on, the gloating has certainly stopped, as Hearts’ entire first team squad has been put up for sale, and the grim faces of the dreaded administrators have started to pour over the accounts, aiming to secure any kind of future for the stricken club.
What that future looks like is frankly anyone’s guess at this point, of course. Already, several players and staff have lost their jobs, and by all accounts Hearts need in the region of half a million pounds to see them through to the start of the new season. Should they survive that long, it is being suggested that demotion is unlikely, with a 15-point deduction at the start of the season being the most probable outcome.
What a dreadful state of affairs. Why, you wonder, did the Hearts hierarchy not see this coming? Even allowing for the fact that Romanov’s previously infantile aspirations of usurping the Old Firm had long since waned – the Lithuanian’s previous largesse is a thing of the distant past at Tynecastle – it is frankly ludicrous that more wasn’t done to stop the slide into the abyss.
It’s likely that the attitude that prevailed was one of ‘We’re far too big a club, with a rich history and fan-base, to go into administration. It won’t happen to us.’ That a club far bigger than Hearts, with a fan-base they could only ever dream of, suffered financial meltdown just over a year ago, appears to have been lost than the powers-that-be at Hearts. The Rangers lesson, it seems, went ignored.
When he took over in 2005, Romanov made a number of promises to the Hearts fans which, looking back, never reached higher than an impossible dream. That now seems overly diplomatic – for many now, they were the rantings of a lunatic, and the end was always going to be thus.
To be fair, money was spent on players, and salaries were attractive enough to make Hearts appeal to a variety of footballers, most of whom, of course, turned out to be sub-standard.
Romanov’s tactic of utilising players from his other club, Kaunas, and selling them on to European clubs for a tidy profit backfired spectacularly. Good idea for sure, but there was a tint fly in the ointment – most of the players weren’t worth a shilling!
A line-up that featured players with surnames like anagrams simply didn’t deliver, and the club lurched along. The fans naively thinking that, so long as they continued to beat Hibs most of the time – which they did, given their rivals had problems of their own – that would be fine for now.
To make matters worse, the transfer market being such as it is in Scotland, few if any of Hearts’ players are likely to attract a fee worthy of the name. This summer we are seeing a vast number of players being released in a bid to drive down costs, a situation which is unlikely to see cash making its way towards Tynecastle any time soon.
Like most clubs, Hearts had been relying on youngsters in recent months, and these guys, whilst representing the future in many ways, are not bankable assets as such. They do not play with heavy fees weighing their young shoulders.
No, for Hearts it’s now it’s a question of easing the wage bill, and even then the club themselves won’t be making the decisions in terms of who stays and who moves on.
The administrators are calling the shots, and for all that is hardly a pleasing scenario for the Hearts faithful, it will surely represent the best chance they have of having a club to support at all this coming season.