Tony Bloom rarely wastes money on a hunch. Every bet placed by Britain’s smartest gambler is based on research, data, patterns, trends and form.
He raked in a fortune for bookmakers Victor Chandler the day he tipped France to beat Brazil in the 1998 World Cup final. He backed Robin Soderling to beat Rafa Nadal in the quarter-finals of the French Open and won £1.2million.
Now comes a £10m stake on Hearts breaking the stranglehold of Celtic and Rangers in Scottish football. The days of a two-horse race, he claims, are over.
The list of things people want to change in Scottish football is longer than the average King’s Speech. A bigger Premiership. The Sky television deal. High ticket prices. Pyrotechnic use. VAR and the standard of refereeing. Don’t get them started on Neil Doncaster.
Celtic and Rangers finish first and second in the SPFL Premiership so often that an uncompetitive league barely merits a mention. People are desensitised to reality.
The notion of Hearts disrupting the natural order invites ridicule and derision. On the SPFL’s William Hill “Warm Up’ season preview show, former Dundee midfielder Charlie Adam said he thought the best they can hope for is third.
Celtic have wrapped themselves so tightly around Scottish football that even Rangers can barely catch a breath. If the champions ever actually spent that £80m in the bank, they’d be out of sight.
Brendan Rodgers has pretty much warned his own board that they have four weeks to splash the cash on first-team starters or its Terminado 2, and the expectation is that [[Celtic]] will bring in four players in the final weeks of the window.
As yet, no one knows if they’ll get their act together before a Champions League play-off or sign players with enough pedigree to persuade the manager to hang around for another year. If he cleared off again, a disgruntled fanbase would be hard pressed to find fault with his thinking this time.
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Rangers should be best placed to take advantage of the unrest across the city. Throwing the usual suspects under a bus after a lacklustre second-half display in the opening day 1-1 draw in Motherwell, Russell Martin sounded equally unhappy with his lot. Despite new owners, a new sporting director and a new manager, old failings were there for the world to see at Fir Park. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Teething troubles at [[Celtic]] and [[Rangers]] should strengthen Bloom’s conviction that Hearts can give the Old Firm a run for their money and bookies seem to agree. While Aberdeen and Hibs are priced at 100/1 for the title, Ladbrokes and Coral are quoting the Gorgie outfit at 16/1. You need a long memory to recall the last time the odds on a team outside Glasgow were as stingy as that.
A bullish Bloom spent last night taking questions Foundation of Hearts members at Tynecastle. He’ll spend this morning explaining to journalists how he plans to sustain a title challenge before tonight’s opening league game against Aberdeen.
History shows that challenging [[Celtic]] and [[Rangers]] is devilishly difficult. Forty years have passed since [[Aberdeen]] became the last club outwith Scotland’s biggest city to win the top flight, and you could count on one hand how often any team has come vaguely close since.
Alex Smith’s Dons needed a point at Ibrox on the final day of season 1990-1991 and came up short. Hearts finished within touching distance in 1998. And, during the chaotic, ego-driven megalomania of Vladimir Romanov, a Paul Hartley penalty saw the Tynecastle side split Glasgow’s big two and secure a place in the Champions League qualifiers. Even that was 19 years ago.
When it comes to disruptive acts, Bloom has form. In 2018, he and his business partner Alex Muzio snapped up Belgian outfit USG after they had narrowly avoided relegation to the third tier and hadn’t featured in the Pro League since 1973. They utilised smart recruitment of players and coaches to secure promotion in 2020-21 before reaching the quarter-finals of the Europa League and the last 16 of the Conference League in successive seasons.
In 2024, they won the Belgian Cup and the Belgian Super Cup. Last season, they claimed their first Belgian league title since 1935.
Spotting untapped talent, they bought cheap and sold big. Deniz Undaz signed for free and joined Brighton for £6m. Victor Boniface signed for £5m and joined Leverkusen for four times as much. Mohammed Amoura pitched up for £3m and left for £14m. Signed for £3.5m, Franco Ivanovic joined Benfica for £22m.
Success in Belgium, or even England’s south coast, offers no guarantee of a title challenge at Hearts. What it does offer is the commodity missing from Scotland’s footballing landscape for far too long. Hope.
When the board of the SFA relaxed their rules on multi club ownership, they were pretty much acknowledging that the league was broken. [[Celtic]] and [[Rangers]] had spent so long banking UEFA’s prize money, the rest were drifting further and further off the pace.
While the top-six split, the race for Europe and the annual relegation dogfight have their good points, a league is ultimately judged by the number of teams capable of winning it. In Scotland the record has been stuck in the same groove for so long someone needs to shift it. Backed by data and hard evidence, don’t bet against Bloom doing the needful.
Miracles rarely happen quickly. It took USG seven years to reach the pinnacle of Belgian football and, in mid October, Jamestown were part of the flawed process which ended with the appointment of Neil Critchley as manager.
Finishing seventh in the league – 40 points behind champions Celtic and 23 points adrift of runners-up Rangers – the Englishman departed in April. Since then, Hearts have played eight games and won them all.
This summer they’ve brought in nine new signings and, while it’s surely too soon for Jamestown’s magic dust to start sprouting beanstalks, the season could be more intriguing than Adam and co seem to think.
Derek McInnes says Hearts have no plans to go around shooting their mouths off about what they might or might not achieve. Scottish football has a strange micro-climate and McInnes knows better than most how hard it is to shift the thermostat.
Celtic and Rangers won’t spend the next four weeks standing still. Hibernian have thrown £1m at a new striker. Aberdeen’s owners have just ploughed another £8m into the Pittodrie coffers ahead of a visit to Tynecastle likely to have some bearing on the battle for third.
Bloom thinks Hearts should aim higher than that. And, unlikely though it sounds, it might be worth staking a tenner on the matter. Just in case.
