Celtic may be facing a threat from Tynecastle after all.

Before the season started, I wanted to do a deep dive into Hearts.

Not into what happened last season, because I thought last season was a freakish confluence of events which you would probably never see repeated in Scottish football if you lived to be 150 years old. I wanted to write about this season at Hearts, what we were likely to see and what might happen next.

I started thinking about that piece after literally everything at Hearts had changed.

They went through one hell of a difficult spell over the summer months, and there are a lot of clubs which would not have recovered easily from that. They lost their manager. They lost their captain. They lost one of their most influential midfielders.

The guts were ripped out of the Hearts team and, to some extent, the club itself. That all three of those individuals ended up across the country at Ibrox must only have made Hearts fans feel more dejected, because after all, that was the team which had finished below them in the league table. Derek McInnes left Tynecastle for Ibrox in June, while Lawrence Shankland and Cammy Devlin subsequently followed him there.

My thesis on Hearts was going to be rather strange because I was not 100 per cent sure whether I believed they would fall into mediocrity or somehow emerge from all of that fortified and better off.

But I leaned towards mediocrity. Not because what Hearts were doing was inherently wrong or inherently bad, but because they had taken such a blow, or rather a series of blows, that recovering from it looked incredibly difficult.

Added to that was the prospect of having to play European games if they made the league phase, and I did not see how Hearts, as a club, could survive all of that disruption, carry a European programme and still put together a sufficiently good domestic run to make it stick.

Then Hearts made a decision I did not expect.

They actually went out and hired a very good manager.

They did not retreat towards an SPFL-known face or anything like that. There had been people talking about the likes of Stephen Robinson and John McGlynn, and Hearts completely rejected that kind of thinking.

They went to Europe. They went to Belgium.

And they hired Wouter Vrancken, a guy who had done big things, important things, who had actually won something and who had a very clear football identity and a very clear idea of what he wanted to do at the club. He had won the Belgian Cup with Mechelen and arrived at Tynecastle after taking Sint-Truiden from relegation candidates into Europe. Hearts also described him as a two-time Belgian manager of the year.

McInnes, right from the start, when all the hype surrounding Hearts last season was at its fullest, was always to me the wrong guy in the wrong movie.

Part of my dismissal of Hearts was a dismissal of McInnes as a manager. I have never believed that he is the right fit for any club which wants to build sustainable success, and I will write about that a little later on.

But Vrancken has a record of winning things. He has a record of overachievement. He has a record of developing players and turning good footballers into better ones. That is what Hearts should have had last season.

I am not saying they would have got closer to Celtic. I am not saying they would have prised the league title out of our hands. So much of what happened last season still depended on us having that shaky start and then that calamitous interregnum involving Wilfried Nancy.

But what Hearts fans will tell you now, and it does not matter whether that is with the benefit of hindsight or not, is that they feel their club is in a better place structurally than it was last season under Derek McInnes.

Now, I caveat that by saying structurally because at the end of the day Hearts came within four minutes of being champions. To say they are simply better off than they were last season, when you look at the fact that Celtic is not in the same atrocious form which allowed them to build that enormous lead, would be wrong and inaccurate.

But in structural terms, in terms of identity, in terms of fit and in terms of what the Bloom project undoubtedly intends to become, yes, I think they are a stronger club.

And I write that as somebody who has no great love for the Tynecastle side, or for Tony Bloom himself, who in my view lied about our fans and smeared us. I am never going to reconcile myself to that. I am never going to accept what he did there because I thought it was outrageous.

But if I have to analyse him on the footballing decisions he has made since the end of last season, then by and large I have to give the guy a pass.

And whilst I am no great lover of the Tynecastle support and their increasingly paranoid and crazy theories about what happened last season, which sometimes make them sound more like Ibrox fans than they would ever want to admit, I share their sense of satisfaction at seeing McInnes, Shankland and Devlin all in one form of pain or another right now.

Hearts may not have been able to spend the kind of money the Ibrox club has spent, but they have spent it with a purpose. They have spent it within a structure. They have spent it according to a philosophy and as part of an overarching plan.

That is already more than our club appears to have right now.

Watching Hearts last night against Hibs, I saw a very good, very well-organised team which I think may actually be better than last season’s.

Now we have to caveat this.

Celtic is a much better team and a much more subtle team, and we are in a much better place than we were at this stage last season. For all the anger, for all the scorn I have poured on this board and for all my growing frustrations with O’Neill and some of what comes out of his mouth, Celtic is in a better place.

There is no question about that.

We are not going to have the kind of season we did last season. O’Neill will secure us 90-plus points, I have very little doubt about that, and any team which wants even to stay on our tail is going to have to be damned good to keep up.

I do not see any sign yet that there is such a side in this league. But Hearts do not need to catch Celtic for this to be a big year. They only need to be better than everyone around them, including the club across the city, which is stumbling from one shambles to another and doing so at enormous expense.

It is early days and Hearts do not have a 100 per cent start to the season, but little by little they are getting there. Little by little, something is emerging.

And I believe that is happening because the manager is the right pick and the right fit, because he knows the type of players he wants and because Hearts, although they lost their captain and one of their key midfielders to Ibrox, have kept a large part of the core of that team. The other players they have lost, they have replaced.

And they look like an organised, capable unit.

Yeah, I think that unit has the beating of most of the other sides in this league. That is all it was ever going to take to create a proper third-team challenge.

It was the key last season too. Be sufficiently good to become the best of the rest, open a gap between yourself and the clubs around you and then rely on slips from the Glasgow clubs which you can take advantage of and exploit.

Last season played into Hearts’ hands beautifully because both Celtic and the Ibrox club went through periodic spasms of crisis.

I do not think that will happen with us this season. The Ibrox club, on the other hand, appears forever in the middle of one crisis or another, and it must be sweetly satisfying for Hearts fans to see McInnes standing at the centre of this one.

But the best thing Hearts can do right now is ignore everything going on in Glasgow or anywhere else and concentrate on themselves. Concentrate on becoming the best version of themselves they can be.

Hearts fans should not get overexcited and turn this into another title-tilt season. It does not have to be. Another second-place finish would be an astonishing result if they could manage it. It would send shockwaves through the game here, and suddenly Tony Bloom’s five-year plan starts to sound considerably less ridiculous.

Depending on where Hearts go with academy development as well, the challenger which many of us have always said Celtic needs, and which this whole game needs, may just have arrived on the scene after all.

Someone will do it. That is the fact of it.

Someone will eventually put together a winning side which is good enough to beat all the teams around it consistently. They will cement themselves as a force to be reckoned with, as a side everybody has to take seriously. They will start winning silverware consistently. And then they will come for the crown.

I said in the piece earlier today that the first Scottish team which cracks elite player development will have all the marbles, and there is absolutely no guarantee that team will be Celtic. Someone will do it.

Some club from outside Glasgow will eventually emerge from the pack and mount a serious, sustained, long-term challenge to Celtic.

And I am no longer as ready as I was last season to dismiss the possibility that it might be the Tynecastle side.

I always thought it would be Aberdeen, for the simple reason that they have the history and they are still a significant club, albeit a badly run one. If Aberdeen gets the infrastructure right, including everything it wants to do around the new stadium, there is no reason it cannot eventually become Scottish football’s dominant club outside Glasgow.

But the east of Scotland has always been capable of producing that challenger too.

Obviously, I would prefer to see it at Hibs, but my preference was never going to matter very much. It was never going to come into the equation.

Somebody was always going to do it. It was simply a matter of time, and a matter of somebody believing strongly enough that they could.

And Bloom believes it. There is no question about that. He absolutely believes in everything he is saying.

Now, I do not buy the secret sauce. I am not drinking the Kool-Aid. I do not believe that Bloom is everything he says he is or everything other people say he is.

But he is smarter than the average person in Scottish football, and his ideas are better than many of those around him.

They are certainly more advanced and more progressive than the ideas of anybody currently running Celtic. That, just on its own, makes him a threat.

So, I will keep an eye on Hearts. Keep an eye on Edinburgh.

Keep an eye on what is happening at Tynecastle.

Because this is potentially a better side than the one we saw last season. It certainly has a better manager, and it certainly has a clearer identity and a clearer structure. That makes Hearts very difficult to dismiss.

There are interesting things happening there, and it is going to be fascinating to see how this season develops for them.

I do not wish them well.

I cannot quite bring myself to do that, even if last season and the way it ended had never happened, because of course you do not wish well to the side which may ultimately become your biggest challenger. But if the Ibrox club collapses in the manner that it might, Scottish football is going to need some kind of challenge.

And of course, there is the beautiful possibility that Hearts could conceivably push them into third and keep them there for a sustained period, just long enough to do maximum damage. Then second place becomes Hearts’ position to lose.

And at that point, they come for us.

We had better be ready when they do.

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