Give Tony Bloom credit for one thing: He has ba… er… courage. The owner of Brighton & Hove Albion, who this summer invested £10 million in Edinburgh club Heart of Midlothian, has bold plans. He has given the Tynecastle side access to his Jamestown Analytics company to support player recruitment and, earlier this week, he claimed the Jambos have “a very good chance of at least being second [in the Scottish Premiership] this season.” Then, he added, Hearts can even win the league title within the next decade.
Wow!
The Full Scottish
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For the uninitiated, such statements are big news because Aberdeen are the last team not named Celtic or Rangers to win Scotland’s top flight—and they did so in the 1984-85 season. So yes, it’s been more than 40 years.
Hearts last won the league in 1959-60, and they most recently were runners-up in the 2005-06 campaign, pipping a struggling Rangers side by one point.
The only other time Celtic and/or Rangers didn’t finish one-two in the league was in the early 2010s, when the Ibrox side were relegated due to financial difficulties and had to work their way up through Scotland’s lower leagues for several seasons. In other words, history doesn’t exactly support Bloom’s argument.
However, as brash as the Brighton owner may be, we applaud his ambition. Frankly, knowing that history—not to mention the wide budgetary gulf between Glasgow’s big two and the other teams in Scotland—most club executives haven’t even bothered to aim so high.
Ambitious Hearts
Indeed, as “big” as Aberdeen, Hearts, Hibernian and, perhaps, Dundee United may be in Scottish terms, none have ever declared their intent to finish anywhere higher than third in the Premiership table (at least with Rangers in the top flight)—usually, even before the season begins.
For more than four decades, the plan has been to qualify for Europe (and flame out ever so quickly) and hope to upset either Celtic or Rangers on their way to a domestic cup, as Aberdeen did in the Scottish Cup final last term.
We can’t help but think that lack of ambition (and, well, money) discouraged more than a few players from signing with Scottish clubs not playing in Glasgow.
So, is this the dawn of a new era? New Hearts head coach Derek McInnes is a believer.
“You want your owners and people that you work for at the club to have that ambition,” he told the press this week. “There’s a clear ambition from everybody at Hearts … to try and drive the whole thing forward here.”
We’ll see where that drive takes them.