Just the other day, I was stunned to hear the latest display of ignorance coming from Roger Mitchell, the former CEO of the SPL, on Celtic and the “intolerance” of our fans.
I initially thought this would be the worst commentary on Scottish football I’d hear this month. However, I soon found myself listening to an online discussion on YouTube—on a site I won’t give the satisfaction of naming—featuring Gordon Strachan, Craig Levein, and The Village Idiot. And let me tell you, this was a level of nonsense that Mitchell couldn’t even dream of reaching in a lifetime.
The topic? Whether Aberdeen or Hearts could, through a takeover and massive investment, challenge Celtic. They framed it as “catching the Glasgow two,” but that’s immediately misleading, given that one of the Glasgow clubs is currently nine points behind Aberdeen. So, even as a question, it’s pretty nonsensical.
Any show featuring The Village Idiot isn’t likely to challenge anyone’s intellect. A conversation with Craig Levein is more likely to leave you shaking your head in disbelief at the idea that he’s considered an elder statesman of Scottish football.
Once upon a time, I could listen to Strachan all day, but these days, his views are dated, as though football in Scotland is still stuck twenty years in the past.
Each of them spoke about investment possibilities in terms of £50 to £100 million. Right there, they lost me. There will never be that kind of investment in a Scottish football club—not even in Celtic—because there’s simply no way to guarantee a return on such an investment. The conversation is entirely divorced from reality, and it’s where the madness begins.
The central idea, from Boyd’s perspective, was that Hearts could be the team to mount this great challenge, primarily thanks to fabled investment from the Brighton owner.
Apparently, The Village Idiot has missed the fact that Aberdeen are already in the midst of their own challenge. But the narrative goes that the Brighton owner will bring in all sorts of analytics-based solutions and change the game entirely for Hearts.
First, the idea that an investor would throw millions into a Scottish club, without expecting a return, is preposterous. These investors would want to see profit, and spending that kind of money on a Scottish club outside of Celtic would never offer any return. That’s your first problem with this theory—a problem that seems to escape many in Scottish football.
Even if such an investor did exist, UEFA’s Financial Sustainability Regulations would not allow any club to spend that amount of money unless their earnings could support it.
The first thing that would happen is the club would be hit with a fine, then face withheld European funds, and eventually, it would be banned from European competition altogether. I’ve covered this before—those financial regulations also allow for domestic points deductions, which would render the entire venture pointless.
Straightaway, you can see where this whole idea falls apart. It’s pure Narnia stuff.
What exactly is the proposed investment in Hearts supposed to achieve?
Well, no one is really asking that. No one’s questioning why someone would pump millions into a club like Hearts, or what they stand to gain from it. Sure, they might want to make some profit from later player sales, and I can understand that to an extent.
But how realistic is it? Will Hearts see any of that profit, or will it all go straight into the investors’ pockets? It’s unclear. What if Hearts don’t make those big sales? What then? Does the investment get pulled out? And if so, what state does that leave the club in?
Let’s dig deeper. The idea is that all this money would help Hearts generate more income and give them access to better databases and analytics to sign players. But those pushing the “Hearts could be the next Brighton” narrative are massively overstating what Brighton has done, and completely underestimating the difficulties of replicating their model, especially on a shoestring budget. Brighton didn’t get where they are by spending cheaply.
Take a look at Matt O’Riley.
While it’s true that analytics likely helped Brighton identify him, it was only after Celtic pulled the trigger first and snapped him up for a mere £1 million. Now, would Brighton have liked to spot him first and secure him for a fraction of the price? Absolutely. But they didn’t, and they could afford to splash £30 million when O’Riley proved his worth.
We all know that Hearts could not afford that £30 million for a finished product like O’Riley; the truth is, they’d probably just to buy him for the £1 million we paid to get him from MK Dons. And O’Riley wasn’t exactly a high-end target; he’s one of the cheaper players Brighton has identified as offering good value. When you have big budgets—backed by massive TV deals and guaranteed Premier League survival—you can take those kinds of risks. But the clubs in the Scottish Premiership, especially Hearts, don’t have that luxury.
That’s why most signings for Hearts tend to be free transfers or low-cost players, often from the bargain bin. It’s not because they want to sign these players; they have to. Hearts simply don’t have the financial power to compete for higher-value players.
And this investment? It doesn’t change their transfer budget—it just helps them spend what little they have more wisely. But that’s still operating on a very low bar. In fact, there are clubs in England’s third tier that could easily outspend Hearts.
Every idea like this has its bottlenecks.
If you wanted to buy Hearts and transform them into a football powerhouse, you’d need deep pockets and the willingness to never see a return. In that case, you’d invest in state-of-the-art training facilities and pour money into developing youth. But even then, you’d eventually hit a ceiling. The financial sustainability rules governing all football wages would impose limits. You can’t just keep throwing money into the club without consequences.
Let’s say someone wealthy invests heavily in Hearts, building them a state-of-the-art training complex and staffing it with high-level coaches. That’s all well and good, but what comes next? To attract better players and higher-quality coaching, they’d need to raise significant revenues. How do you do that? The obvious answer is a stadium upgrade.
But here’s the problem: what’s the ceiling for Hearts’ fan base?
A 40,000-seater stadium would likely be difficult to fill regularly.
When Hearts play in cup semifinals at Hampden, they struggle to sell out their allocation, never mind filling a full 40,000 seats at Tynecastle every single week. So, the idea that Hearts could sell 30,000 or 40,000 season tickets is, frankly, absurd. The earning potential is already limited by a fan base that isn’t going to stretch that far.
Let’s take this hypothetical investor—a local boy made good—who’s returned to invest his millions into his hometown club. He builds the multi-million-pound training complex and pushes ahead with a multi-year stadium upgrade to bring Tynecastle up to a 30,000 or 40,000 capacity. Even if he’s willing to shoulder the huge running costs, the economics are tough.
To afford to run a world-class training facility, the club would need to fill that larger stadium regularly. To do that, they’d need to sign a higher calibre of players, but that takes time.
So, we’re already looking at a multi-year project to get the infrastructure in place, and then another multi-year effort to run everything efficiently. Realistically, this process would take at least 10 years—if everything goes according to plan.
And don’t even get me started on the fantasy of attracting huge corporate sponsorships to boost revenue. If that worked, Celtic would have found out how. While clubs like Manchester City have tried to finance their spending using their owners as the sponsors, they’ve faced major legal hurdles—and they’re backed by the kind of wealth an oil state can provide.
Here, we’re talking about a private investor or group of investors, who are unlikely to be motivated by altruism and are in it to make a profit.
After considering all these factors—too many to count—I’ve come to a conclusion. The likelihood of this type of transformation happening at Hearts is virtually non-existent.
That’s not to say it can’t be done, just not in sugar-daddy fashion.
A club that’s sufficiently motivated and astute can develop and grow its potential and earnings over time. But it requires a long-term approach. The notion that a club can simply rely on a sugar daddy or oligarch to tilt the playing field in its favour is, in my view, misguided.
I fully disagree with The Village Idiot, though it’s no surprise to anyone, when he claims that Hearts are more likely to succeed than Aberdeen.
They’re not. Aberdeen has a savvy owner, a strategic business plan that includes a new stadium, and—most importantly—they’ve found the one thing that really matters: a manager who knows what he’s doing. That’s already a huge step forward.
Aberdeen have also demonstrated that it doesn’t take oligarch wealth to compete at the top level in this league. What they need is to be a little bit better, a little bit smarter, than everyone around them—especially the club across the city, who are currently nine points behind them, and rightly so. A sustained challenge over a longer period of time is more difficult and expensive, but right now, no one at Aberdeen is talking about crazy, unrealistic targets. They’re focused on seeing out the season and taking that momentum into the next one.
What Aberdeen are doing is sustainable. They’re building for the long term. That’s why they stand a better chance than those waiting for someone to come in and write a cheque.
The era of relying on a benefactor to bankroll success is over. It’s not surprising to see people like Craig Levein not understanding this, nor is it surprising that The Village Idiot misses the point. But Gordon Strachan’s comments are disappointing. Although I’ve always found him aggravating, he used to be more sensible than this.
In his podcast, Strachan discussed how Celtic is run, talking about the importance of operating like a business. While I don’t fully agree with everything he said, I get the gist, and that mindset is why Celtic has been so successful. It’s the only way any club seeking to challenge us can compete.
When a club understands that and starts getting its act together to make a genuine challenge, that’s when I’ll start losing sleep over it, but I’m not going to be spooked by tales of how the Brighton owner is coming to take our ball away.
Save that for the Sevconites.
There is always a price to be paid.
“Investment” – “Inversment” – “Inversment” – “Inversment”
This word seems to be the equivalent of desperation for Sevco fans and their Scummy media fanboys…
Just as heroin, cocaine, speed and marrowanna are the desperation for drug addicts –
Just as whisky, vodka, gin, sherry, lager, cider and beer are the desperation for alcoholics…
For what it’s worth – whisky and lager are ma fixes – definitely not this word “Investment” !
Strachan should know better, he had to cost cut after taking over from Martin O’Neil.
Neil Lennon then sold Aiden M to fund an almost full team rebuild and that was over 15 years ago .
Sevco or hearts will not topple celtic for the foreseeable future.