Hearts set to lose income of £1m in April says Budge

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group Foundation of Hearts, who are backed by around 7,500 members. That move might now be postponed.

“I don’t know that it’s my choice to delay it, to be frank,” said Budge. “I said previously that, when it happens, it should be a damp squib and the club should continue to run on a day-to-day basis as it always has. What it would then mean is the supporters would be in the chair. They would be the owners and, if the club gets into financial difficulty, then where does it go?

“My own view is 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.

“There is already some discussion about should we delay the actual transfer of shares until this is behind us, and might that be the most sensible thing to do.”

Budge explained the issues already surfacing and said relegation would hit Hearts’ finances further. “It would be very, very bad news. It’s not just relegation, which is bad enough in itself. It’s relegation on top of the implications of the coronavirus,” she said.

“On Friday morning when that decision [to suspend football] was made, we had four home fixtures. In terms of income for the club, that is well over £500,000.

“We had a [Scottish Cup] semi-final. In terms of income to the club, again well over £500,000. So, in the blink of an eye, £1m that we anticipated as income in April has gone.

“That has a huge impact on any club. All clubs will have similar problems, maybe not to the same exent, but that’s money we thought we would have that we won’t have. Add to that the fact that we’ve spent a lot on infrastructure. Why? So that we can actually run events and have an income stream outside of football.

“We can’t run events any more. From Friday, we were having all sorts of things cancelled. Our non-footall income has also taken a hit.

“We’ve had the immediate impact of cancelling games, we’ve got the knock-on effect to the rest of our business. We’ve got the uncertainty of when we can put our season tickets on [sale]. Normally, all of that would happen in April.

“On top of that, the potential to be relegated with the financial issues that takes. There is no point in me pretending. This is a serious situation.”