The SPFL has fined Hearts £10,000 and taken two points off them in the League Cup Group Stages because the Tynecastle club fielded an ineligible player in the last round. This was, they said, absolutely accidental. They forgot to file paperwork.
This was not concealment. It was not fraud. It was a simple mistake, and for that they have been sanctioned.
They deserved to be sanctioned. It’s a clubs responsibility to make sure that everything is up to par.
They are lucky that they didn’t suffer a 3-0 reversal which the punishment UEFA imposes for a club which does this in one of their competitions, as Legia Warsaw found out to their cost against us. (And they are still moaning about it to this day.)
The SPFL is the successor organisation to the twin bodies of the SPL and the SFL.
It was the SPL, which guidance from the SFA, which set up the Lord Nimmo Smith inquiry, which decided against title stripping although Rangers played dozens of ineligible players during a ten year period, taking into hundreds upon hundreds of games.
Had every single one of those games ended in a two point deduction and a fine of £10,000 that club would have been obliterated. Titles and trophies would have been ripped from the history. No verdict in Scottish football history stinks as much as that which Lord Nimmo Smith delivered. It remains a stain at the heart of our national sport, an absurd verdict which was actually guaranteed in advance by the grubby and shameful Five Way Agreement.
You can read my article from yesterday about that document here.
Hearts will probably not appeal this, because they are pretty much bang to rights. They held up their hands and accepted responsibility. The Ibrox clubs have done everything they can to dodge their own, and they were helped to do it by a corrupt cabal at Hampden who walked away with their pension pots intact.
No wonder they are laughing in Sevconia.
That will not be the final word though.