Tony Bloom will need more than talk if he wants to take Celtic on.

There’s been a lot of talk these past few days about Tony Bloom at Hearts. Much of it has been wild, speculative nonsense. Some of it borders on hero worship, with a distinct lack of objectivity.

Everyone who follows Scottish football, it seems to me, wants stronger clubs to emerge. I do myself. I’ve written plenty on this site about it. I would love to believe there’s a serious player out there who could come in and radically change the way things work in our league and in our game.

I’ve said for a while now that there needs to be a challenger from outside Glasgow—some club that gets things sufficiently right to go on a long unbeaten run and do more than just finish 30 points behind the big two.

It must start with someone saying, “Third place isn’t enough.” I always come back to Alec Baldwin’s searing Glengarry Glenross speech: “Third prize is you’re fired.” That’s the mentality clubs need to bring.

But Bloom isn’t in full control at Hearts.

He’s taken a stake—about 30%—but he doesn’t wield all the power at the table. Nor should he, perhaps, but that also means the chances of him leading a football revolution are slim at best. If he’d taken over entirely—if he was the outright owner and threatening to do things radically differently—then maybe you could say Hearts were about to try something bold.

Instead, Bloom is talking a good game from a position of relative weakness. People are banging on about him being a data guy, an analytics guy, as if that’s new, as if it’s proprietary, as if the tools he’s using aren’t available to others. But at the end of the day, he’s one voice around the Tynecastle boardroom table.

And their choice of manager for next season doesn’t suggest a club gearing up to embrace a radically new approach.

Yes, Bloom reportedly had an outsized role in the appointment of Hearts’ last manager, Neil Critchley—who turned out to be a disaster. Just like Steven Naismith before him.

Hearts are a club locked in a revolving door of disasters. And adding another voice to that chorus of confusion doesn’t strike me as a recipe for success.

I think the rest of the boardroom gave Bloom his say on the last manager and then decided he wasn’t getting a vote on the next one. Derek McInnes is a limited boss, but he will bring things Hearts don’t currently have—structure, stability, a degree of professional steadiness—and they’ll probably improve, relatively speaking. But relatively is the key word there.

It’s not the appointment of a club determined to be a disruptor. It’s not the appointment of a manager who’s going to get behind a “data-led, every-signing-is-a-project” model. So already, you’ve got two parts of the Hearts board seemingly pulling in opposite directions, with no clear coordination. That never ends well.

A lot of people talk a good game.

To his credit, Bloom has some genuine experience in backing that up—his time in Belgium and, of course, at Brighton are impressive. But Scotland is a different environment.

I’m not saying tougher—but certainly more complicated.

He won’t get anything from the media beyond the current polite curiosity. They’ve given him a hearing, but they don’t expect him to succeed. And if things go sideways early, there’ll be no honeymoon period.

People seem mesmerised by the whole “data and analytics” approach. But as I’ve said before: if you can afford it, you can have it.

It’s not unique. It’s not secret. The thing about Moneyball—because that’s really what this is—is that the big clubs already have all the best analysts and the best data.

The raw information itself is out there for anyone who knows how to use it. Which means every club is essentially drawing from the same well.

So the limitations Hearts faced before still exist now. The same financial constraints. The same ceiling on ambition. Financial sustainability rules will prevent them from spending more than they earn. That puts a hard cap on what they can realistically achieve.

If Hearts want to challenge either of the Glasgow clubs, they’ll have to do it on a fraction of the resources. And that’s the brutal truth.

It’s not impossible—if it were, nobody would even attempt it. Nobody would invest in a project with no chance of success.

But it is hard. Incredibly hard.

This isn’t the ideal environment for trying it either. But Hearts are one of the few clubs where you can take that kind of risk—you might lose money, but you won’t lose your shirt. The people who’ve bought into the Ibrox operation are far more exposed than anyone at Tynecastle.

Still, the idea that there’s a mountain of money waiting to be discovered in Scottish football, or that all we need is someone with the right data to come in and fix everything, just isn’t grounded in reality. It’s basically Mission Impossible.

But Bloom talks a good game, and I’ll give him that. And if he had more control around the table, maybe he’d have a real shot at reshaping Hearts into something worth keeping an eye on.

But Derek McInnes? Come on.

That’s where the fantasy collapses. And yet I do wish him well. I wish anyone who wants to challenge the Glasgow duopoly well—because we need a serious challenger from outside the city. There has to be some real competition in this league, beyond the one the media obsess over.

For a brief period last season, it looked like Aberdeen might provide it. Near the end, it looked like Hibs were about to come alive.

Anything that makes this league more competitive is good.

Anything that shocks our board into realising that we don’t have it all our own way unless we’re at the very top of our game—that’s very, very good.

So if Bloom is really up for it, and Hearts are ready to back him, I say “bring it on.”

Because we all need this. I’m just not convinced we’ll get it.