Bad leadership at Hearts has made them Scottish football’s most abject failures.

So today we know the makeup of the top six.

It’s ourselves. It’s the Ibrox club. It’s Aberdeen, Hibs, Dundee Utd, and it’s St Mirren. We’ll have three games away and two at home.

What will be, will be.

The first one is a title decider. So now we just await the fixture list and a full understanding of where and when we get to celebrate properly.

Here’s the thing. I look at the top six and I see all the teams you would expect to be there, but one.

It looks more like a Scottish Premier League top six than we’ve seen in many, many years. Those are arguably the biggest teams in the country—save for the one that’s missing. And the one that’s missing, of course, is Hearts. And the reason Hearts are missing is that Hearts are Scottish football’s joke club.

There is no other club in this league I have such contempt for in terms of its overall leadership and decision-making.

Their new investors—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—were supposed to transform them into contenders. But Hearts aren’t contenders. Hearts are a club stuck in the mud. They’ve been content to be who they are for a long time. They have a level, a position, and they’re perfectly satisfied in that position.

That position was third place. I find it amusing they’re not even in sixth now, and will finish this season outside that bracket. No European football unless they win the Scottish Cup. I think Aberdeen will clean their clock.

They’ve been a club going backwards for years, but because all the teams around them were worse, they’ve gotten away with it. They appointed Naismith as manager—a raging mediocrity—a shocking decision that cost them massively at the start of this campaign. For that alone, they deserve everything they get.

I’ve written about that club plenty of times over the last few years, and I’ve always said the same thing. They consider third place and the occasional good cup run to be a successful season.

That’s why they’re in the doldrums now—because they set their sights low. They don’t try to be more. They are the ultimate example of a club that cannot chart a forward path and doesn’t even try to.

Ann Budge has been CEO there since 2014. She’s been living off that 2016 SPFL CEO of the Year award for a long time.

But that was nearly a decade ago.

If we’re sometimes critical of the length of time Peter Lawwell spent at Celtic, we can look at Hearts and say that all the same problems—lack of strategic vision, lack of original thinking, questionable hiring practices (if we’re being generous)—are all repeated at Hearts. And they struggle because of it.

How can someone who’s been at the club as long as she has offer any kind of original vision? Whatever great ideas she had back then have long since gone by the boards. Hearts have settled into a position of abject mediocrity.

They’ve embraced it. They’ve accepted it. And now they’re paying the price. But to be honest, they’ve been paying the price for a while. Where are the major honours at Hearts? Where’s the sustained run of form that makes you think they might—just might—put up a title challenge or any kind of challenge at all?

Aberdeen, after their great start, slipped back shockingly.

They tossed that game away today, and they should hang their heads in shame over it.

But give them their due—they had the great start. They moved decisively ahead of the Ibrox club and into second place during the early stages of this campaign. If it weren’t for a collapse in form—not just a slump, a collapse—they’d be in the race for second right now.

They showed enough in that early part of the season to suggest they could do it.

And they’ve shown enough since getting back to winning ways to suggest they can next season.

Worse for Hearts is that if you look at Hibs, they’re the same. David Gray looked like a dead man walking. He looked like he was going nowhere and achieving nothing. And yet he was good enough to turn it around.

Now they’re contenders for a European place.

Hibs have been a mess and have gone through cycles of being a mess. Aberdeen have too, but there’s a difference between Hibs and Aberdeen; the Pittodrie club do not “settle for.” Aberdeen want to challenge. Aberdeen seek to overtake at least one of the clubs from Glasgow.

They’ve gone through as many cycles of crisis and disaster as the rest, but they still have the swagger and the arrogance of a side that has two European trophies to their name. And they’re the last team outside Glasgow to win the league. They believe their time will come again.

And it might—if they’d just stop tripping over their own feet.

Hearts’ time is never going to come. Because Hearts are not a serious club.

They’re not a serious club because they don’t take themselves seriously. And I wish they would. I wish their Edinburgh rivals would as well. I wish both of those clubs would take themselves as seriously as Aberdeen do.

As seriously as the Ibrox club does.

Because there have been plenty of opportunities for all three of them to stomp that lot when they were at their lowest ebb—and all three have failed, in their own way. But Hearts have set themselves up to fail. I’ve been saying this for years. They are the ultimate “settling for” club.

And all those years they spent in the revolving door of third and fourth place—pretending that represented success—have cost them, big time. A lot of it was Naismith’s fault, and he’s no longer around, except at the BBC who can’t get enough of failed managers and coaches, especially if they have an Ibrox connection.

But Hearts had plenty of chances since he left to turn it around, finish in the top six, and maybe even qualify for Europe. And they blew those too. Part of that was hanging onto Shankland and depending on him to too great an extent; like many others, their coaching team fell for the hype, and that’s all it ever was.

Hearts are exactly where they belong today and until the mentality at that club changes they will never make progress. They are a club stuck in the mud.