‘Do I believe that we could win the league?” ponders Heart of Midlothian chief executive Andrew McKinlay. “It might not be this season, but yes, I do think we could win the league at some point.”
The smartest man in British football takes a more bullish approach to these things. After paying £9.86 million for a 29 per cent stake in the Tynecastle club Brighton owner Tony Bloom claimed that club have ‘a very good chance of at least being second’ in this season’s Premiership. Backed by the recruitment expertise of Data Analytics, Bloom also said that he would be “very disappointed if, in the next 10 years, we don’t win at least one league title.”
What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago a run of eight straight defeats saw Steven Naismith relieved of his Hearts duties. While Jamestown assisted with the search for a replacement there’s a quiet acceptance now that data might be more useful for finding players than it is for finding coaches and managers.
The appointment of Neil Critchley was a mistake and, when the time came to search again, Hearts set the parameters no further than the Scottish market. Derek McInnes came in from Kilmarnock and, after five leagues games, the team are tied on points with champions Celtic at the summit of the SPFL Premiership, trailing by a single goal. Excitement is building.
“People say, ‘Tony Bloom says you’re going to win the league’ McKinlay says over coffee. “Well, some time in the next 10 years is what he actually said.
“But he also said we need to believe. And do I believe we are at the start of a very exciting journey.
“I couldn’t put a timescale on how long it might take because there’s so many variables around not just what we’re doing, but what others are doing.
“We do believe that we’ve got the best analytics you can possibly have. But there are other analytics out there that others might bring in, who knows?
“I think it’s a classic case of ‘make hay while the sun shines’.”
Speaking before today’s home game with Falkirk McInnes offered the view that people are already itching to see Hearts lose. The widespread desperation to see a club from outside Glasgow win the title might be a bigger issue. The last team to do it were Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen in 1985 and the merest hint of a challenge creates a level of hype and scrutiny most teams find it hard to withstand.
“People are desperate to see a challenger to Celtic,” acknowledges McKinlay, the club’s chief executive since 2020. “Those of us that have not seen anyone from outside Glasgow win the title since 1985 want it because it would be so exciting. The story would be incredible. It would give Scottish football a huge shot in the arm.”
It’s too early to say how likely that is. Jimmy Thelin’s Aberdeen began last season with a run of 16 games unbeaten, winning 10 of their first 11 league games. When the wheels fell off, the crash was spectacular and that’s just one of the reasons why pundits and fans of other clubs find the idea of Hearts finishing second, let alone first, difficult to compute.
A case study in Belgium offers hope. When Bloom seized control of Union Saint-Gilloise alongside longtime friend and business associate Alex Muzio in 2018 the struggling outfit had narrowly avoided relegation to the third tier and hadn’t featured in the top flight since 1973.
Seven years later USG are champions of Belgium. In their opening game of the Champions League league format they travelled to Eindhoven and overcame PSV with 11 of the 14 players they used signed for fees of £2m or less. Five were free or signed for six figures. Most were harnessed from the likes of Estonia, Latvia, Norway and the English lower leagues.
“Union were bottom of the second tier in Belgium,’ nods McKinlay. “Now here they are, with the Champions League music, beating PSV in Eindhoven and they started at a lower level than Hearts in Scotland.
“Along the way they had their struggles getting to a place where the player trading model was really working and self-financing.
“Our model at the moment is not self-financing. It’s just not. But we are doing a lot of work at the moment on the whole structure of the club to get us to a point where we are not reliant on benefactor money, as we are at the moment.
“Union have uncovered some incredible players. And it took time for them to get it together.”
Autumn in Scotland is usually marked by the leaves on the trees turning brown and the sacking of another Rangers manager. Celtic, too, have their off-field issues – with supporter protests over the club’s corporate governance likely to be a feature of today’s home game against Hibernian.
While unrest at the Glasgow clubs opens a window of opportunity for Hearts, it comes sooner than expected.
Read more:
- Why Christian Borchgrevink could make Hearts return
- Derek McInnes on where Hearts can take motivation from
Despite dropping just two points from their opening five league games, caution is natural. Derek McInnes insists no one will get carried away by the start to the season and McKinlay agrees with his manager’s assertion that the time to gauge progress will come after the 12 teams have all played each other twice.
“People are always already saying, ‘oh, look how far ahead of Rangers Hearts are.’
“I think the bookies have even got us favourites for second now.
“And it’s just like, ‘would you calm down?’ Just calm down.
“I think we start the third round late January against Dundee United looking at the fixtures. And that will tell us more accurately where we are.
“Rangers and Celtic tend to go into overdrive around about Christmas time because other teams suffer suspensions and injuries. And while we have a big squad, we don’t have the depth of squad that they would have.”
McKinlay would like to reduce the bloating of the squad in January, but accepts the need to maintain forward momentum. The plan is to reduce the ‘legacy signings’ and have the entire squad drawn from Jamestown Analytics recommendations in the next year or two. Kazakhstani winger Islam Chenokov has already signed a pre-contract agreement and plans to join his new team-mates before Christmas.
The last time Hearts came close to winning a league title was 1986, when a traumatic collapse at Dens Park cost them a tilt at glory in the final minutes of the season. After a 2-0 win over Rangers on a bone-hard Ibrox pitch in December ’85 manager Alex McDonald stormed into the dressing room and told his players they were now in a title race. While McInnes and his team have already chalked up a win at Ibrox, it’s a little soon for that yet.
“Let’s say we’re still in the hunt when you go into that post-split fixtures and you’re against a team like Celtic who have been over the course.
“They’ve still got a massive advantage because every one or most of their players will have been there, seen it, done it.
“Our players won’t have and when you look at many sports you see how how many people have to suffer a defeat before they get over the line.
“Andy Murray showed amazing resilience to come back from big blows, but I certainly hope we don’t go through that.”
They’ve already come a long way in 12 months. A left-field appointment, Neil Critchley looked like an actor on the wrong set from day one. While fears of a relegation dog fight failed to materialise the team finished seventh and missed out on Europe. The relative success of Aberdeen and Hibs only added to the anguish.
“I’ve said this publicly that we got it wrong with Neil,” adds McKinlay. “I was listening to TalkSport on the way in here and they were talking about Russell Martin, but it wasn’t specifically about him. They mentioned Graeme Potter as well and they mentioned Michael Arteta to a slightly lesser extent, and how fans were turning against what they termed ‘platitude managers’.
“Managers who are very nice people, very good coaches, tactically brilliant, but come across as something that the supporters can’t necessarily buy into.
“I thought that’s probably where Neil was in some ways. Do not get me wrong, Neil is a great football coach, and I think he’s been a No.2 at many places. He maybe sees himself as a No.1, and maybe somewhere he’ll be successful and I wish him all the best. But you learn lessons and what we needed was not that.
“We knew we needed a different type of coach, a different type of manager, and a huge amount of that was about the personality, someone that understood the Scottish game.”
Sitting down with McInnes – the two men barely knew each other – McKinlay tested the new man’s compatibility with data-based recruitment. To work fully the Jamestown experiment to needs a level of buy in too often missing at other clubs.
“If you don’t buy into it you’re only half pregnant, so to speak. Jamestown have worked with a load of clubs over the years where it hasn’t worked for that reason.
“Clubs have sort of half done it, not really done it, and so when Derek came in we tested that a lot, we tested a lot of the myths – and they are myths around what Derek is and what he isn’t.
“From the first meeting I had with Derek I really liked him. The other thing that’s really important is that his relationship with the sporting director Graeme Jones has to be really strong, because it’s the sporting director that effectively manages the interface between the analytics company and the head coach.”
Central to the club’s funding model, Foundation of Hearts have bought into Bloom’s audacious model as well, a fact which became pretty clear when fans chanted the Brighton owner’s name during the win at Ibrox.
“One of the Rangers directors asked me if they’ve got a song about me,” laughs McKinlay.
“I said, ‘yeah, but mine ends with the words get tae…’”
