Jambos take £1m virus hit
Tynecastle shock as Budge reveals finance bombshell
HEARTS are staring at a £1million black hole after their remaining Premiership and Scottish Cup fixtures were suspended.
Owner Ann Budge confirmed the club are facing a “serious situation” with the coronavirus halting football across Europe for the time being.
The Jambos were banking on four remaining home fixtures banking them over half a million in gate receipts, while their last-four Hampden showdown against city rivals Hibs on April 11 was due to net them the same amount again.
A conference call between UEFA and leagues across the continent resulted in a deadline of June 30 being set for domestic fixtures to be completed but that’s “should the situation improve and resuming playing be appropriate and prudent enough”.
If not, then Hearts are set to take a huge financial hit. Budge said: “We have four home games and in terms of income to the club, that’s well over £500,000.
“We have the semi-final and again, that’s well over half a million pounds.
“So in the blink of an eye, £1m we had in terms of income in April is gone.
“That’s a huge impact on any clubs and all clubs will have similar problems – maybe not to the same extent – but that’s money that we thought we would have that we won’t have.
“Add to that we’ve spent a lot on infrastructure. Why? So that we can actually run events and have an income stream outside of football. But we can’t run events any more.
“From last Friday, we were having all sorts of things cancelled. So our non-football income has also taken a hit.
“We’ve had the immediate impact of cancelling the games, we’ve got the knock-on effect to the rest of our business and we’ve got the uncertainty of when we can out our season tickets on sale.
“Normally, all of that would happen in April and on top of that, the potential to be relegated with the financial issues that brings.
“There’s no point in me pretending; this is a serious situation.”
Budge was also due to hand over her majority shareholding in the club to the Foundation of Hearts.
The fan group have contributed over £10m in pledges from punters over the last five and a half years.
But the transfer of Budge’s 75.1 per cent holding may have to be delayed in light of the coronavirus crisis.
She said: “I don’t know that it’s my choice to delay it but we will have to talk about it.
“I have said previously that when it happened, it should be a damp squib and the club should continue to run on a day-to-day basis as it always has.
“But what it would then mean is the supporters would be in the chair, the supporters would be the owners and if the club gets into financial difficulty, then where does it go? “Continuity would be good. It’s not really a matter of whether shares change hands or not but it’s easy for me to say that. It’s really up to the supporters what they want to happen. “We were planning basically a big party but clearly that can’t happen. There’s also some discussion about should we delay the actual transfer of shares and until this is all behind us and might that not be the most sensible thing to do? “I think it might be.”