Before the transfer window closes, Sevco will sign Hearts’ most promising player, young Jamie Walker.
They will not pay anywhere near for him what the club expects to get. They will do this because their strategy of unsettling him has succeeded, and because Ann Budge has shown her weakness in the decision not to support a real inquiry on the EBT years.
She wants a quiet life. She wants the game to “move on.”
For a while, it will, or it will look like it has.
And to Hearts and others, this is what that will look like.
It will look like we never left the years when Glasgow was the centre of the football universe here, when a club from Ibrox, with the media in lock step with them, did its business through those organs and preyed on other sides.
It will be people not asking questions about where the money was coming from.
It will see a lot of people bending over to accommodate their every whim.
It’s the fate Hearts deserve, and other clubs will get exactly the same.
Even Aberdeen will pay a similar price somewhere down the line, probably when their manager leaves for Ibrox taking some of the first team with him. It has a certain tired inevitability about it, and we recognise it from much prior experience.
Only complete mugs could fail to see where this is headed, yet even with fair warning Budge and her board are just not getting it. Hearts fans are furious with their decision to allow a decade of cheating to go unpunished; they know how this ends.
When you’ve given people no incentive to act responsibly, when you’ve told them there’s no consequences for recklessness or outright corruption how else do you expect them to behave? They will behave outrageously. They will act without fear.
That’s the message Scottish football sent to Sevco last week; act without restraint.
Hearts have already paid part of the cost for it.
Their draw against Dunfermline has already sent them out of the League Cup.
They left Walker out of that game because he wasn’t mentally in the right place to play; Hearts are already counting the cost of Sevco’s pursuit of their player. They’ve as good as given up on keeping him, and when you do that you’re not going to get the price you want either.
He will end up at Ibrox, because Hearts lacks the spine to stop it. They could have fought for Financial Fair Play and stopped this kind of nonsense in its tracks. They will be paying the price for that far into the future.
In Scottish football now, the most unscrupulous clubs will have an edge. At Ibrox they’ve always been willing to go the extra mile, safe in the knowledge that the governing bodies will protect them and help them and look the other way.
The week past, almost every club looked the other way.
Yeah, for a while things will return to “normal”.
I do not know why so many of them are in a hurry to embrace that.
“Normal” is what sent a lot of them to the wall.
“Normal” is why so many of them haven’t won a thing in years.