Broken Hearts

Hearts Enter Administration

Yesterday, my club Hearts went into administration. What this means is at the moment unclear, but there is a real chance that the club's days are numbered.  Very few of the club’s current playing squad will be lining up for the JT’s* next season, if indeed any team does line up next season. Anyway, here is a biased, personal and probably inaccurate account of the situation.

It’s strange how when things like this happen, it seems so obvious. In hindsight there’s such a clear path, such an obvious chain of events that was leading to this eventual outcome that you feel like an idiot for not seeing it all along. My mind immediately jumps to the ‘credit crunch’ of 2008 –the world getting high on cheap credit and booming property, all along ignoring what, in hindsight, were the obvious warning signs. And this happens with all kinds of other stuff, problems in your personal life, issues with work or studying where you wish you had the benefit of hindsight to stop yourself driving off the cliff-edge.

But it’s not just that you don’t see the signs. What’s interesting is that I think you choose not to see them, you make a conscious refusal to see what’s right in front of you.  And you do this because whatever that thing is, that’s staring you in the face, scares you, or annoys you or makes you uncomfortable or maybe all of these and a million other things. But what you don’t want to do is confront it.

Anyway, I can now say that I have also been guilty of this lack, or rather denial, of foresight in the case of Hearts and their current state of financial ruin.

All the warning signs were there for years; it began with Vladimir Romanov’s so obviously, massively, ridiculously ambitious aim to take Hearts to a Champions League final. Just writing that makes me realise how preposterous and unsustainable the vision was. But I was young and I didn’t question it. Then there was the influx of players a club like Hearts couldn’t dream of affording. Edgaras Jankauskas, for example, joined Hearts only one season after being part of Porto’s Champions League winning team, while Takis Fyssas played in the Euro 2004 final for champions Greece before joining.

Players reportedly earned up to £10,000 a week, as Hearts tried to compete with the Old Firm, and for a while they did. In 2005/6 they split the Old Firm for the first time in 11 years and won the Scottish Cup, marking the club’s most successful season of the modern era. Being a Hearts supporter was, for the first time in my brief fanhood, exciting and unpredictable. In my naive, 16 year-old, ‘just saw my team lift the Scottish cup’ mind, the future was bright for Hearts.

But it wasn’t really. Alongside the early success there was always the nagging suspicion in the back of the mind that Vladimir Romanov wasn’t actually the messiah, that he wasn’t sensible or even sane enough to run a football club. But what do we do with those nagging suspicions, those warning signs? Ignore them, deny them, shove them to the back of our mind and enjoy the good times. Over a succession of manager changes that showed no discernible strategy or long-term vision and a series of incredulous disputes with the SFA, SPL and Old Firm establishment (some of which were grossly unprofessional but wholly justified), those nagging suspicions should have become alarm bells.

But they didn’t. I carried on, willfully unaware of the reality. The reality being that Hearts were actually a small, vulnerable ship in the stormy waters of Scottish football’s collapsing finances. And the captain of that ship was an increasingly uninterested Lithuanian banker with no idea of how to sustainably run a football club (the irony in this metaphor being that Romanov actually did captain a Russian submarine in the Cold War).

It was easy to pretend though, under the guidance of Portuguese cult-hero Paolo Sergio Hearts won their second Scottish Cup of Romanov’s reign in 2012. It was the greatest game in the club’s history, humiliating arch-rivals Hibernian 5-1. But it was not a team built to last. The cup winning side was quickly dismantled, Sergio, Skacel, Black and McGowan, the core of the side were sold or let go as the club slashed the wage bill to adapt to an SPL without Rangers. Then as the 2012-13 season began, the club could not even afford to meet that reduced wage bill as it seemed every second month players and staff wages were delayed. As fans mobilised to produce some noble and praiseworthy fund-raising efforts to keep the club going, the team lumbered through the remainder of the season, finishing 10^th. Last week Hearts placed every squad player on the transfer list as cash-flow dried up, and yesterday the club called in the administrators. Shit.

Throughout the whole of this season, I denied the now obvious inevitability that Hearts had to enter administration to clear their debts and start a new chapter. I saw the headlines about the delayed wages, but I didn’t click the link. I changed the channel when the news turned to Hearts and their latest crisis. I avoided JambosKickback, the biggest fans forum, for fear that I would read something that scared me. I didn’t want to know. I shoved it to the back of my mind and read something else. Administration happened to other clubs, but not my club. We would be fine I told myself. And then it’s happened and it’s staring you in the face and you think “Fuck. I should have seen that coming”. But I did see it coming, I just didn’t allow myself to.

- CursetheseMetalHands

*Cockney rhyming slang: Hearts = Jammy Tarts