Hearts faithful should call out Budge’s record
INTERESTING to see the Foundation of Hearts come out all guns blazing over the ‘incompetence’ within the SPFL that has left Scottish football battered, discredited and impossible to have any kind of belief in. Shame they have never felt the need to say anything at all about the similar levels of incompetence that have left their own club staring into a financial black hole and facing an uncertain future after burning through more than £10million raised by Foundation members.
No one said that fan ownership, a new concept still being shaped on the hoof, would be easy. For any supporters’ group, throwing rotten tomatoes from the outside has to become much more nuanced when you get inside the tent.
Politics come into play. Divergent forces pull you in many directions.
In Hearts’ case, there is a particularly delicate line to tread when the owner of the club still hasn’t transferred her majority shareholding.
However, if it is okay to lash out at the shameless shower who run the league in this country over the dismal situation Hearts currently find themselves in, as FoH chairman Stuart Wallace did on Friday, there surely has to be some reflection on failings within, too.
You see, for all the moaning and groaning about dodgy votes and double-dealing behind the scenes, Hearts’ problems remain almost entirely of their own making.
Whatever you think about the SPFL preparing to call the Premiership on current standings and relegate them unless chairman Ann Budge can somehow deliver league reconstruction, there are clear reasons why the side with the country’s fourth-biggest budget were lying bottom of the Premiership with no sign of getting out of the mire.
What has been unfolding at Hearts over the past few years has been a slow-motion car crash.
Budge put way too much faith in director of football Craig Levein, who hired the wholly unsuitable Ian Cathro as manager and then took over himself — bringing in upwards of 80 players over five years and proving there was no real long-term plan at first-team level.
Over and above all that, there was the construction of a new main stand now set to cost almost double the initial £12m estimate — and looking, from the front at least, like a 1970s secondary school.
Club accounts make it clear that JB Contracts (Scotland), run by Budge’s brother, were brought in as a contractor via a structured tender process run by an independent third-party construction manager and that the board have always been ‘satisfied the services were purchased on an arm’s length basis’.
Fair enough. Why does a club like Hearts need a stand costing more than £20m, though? How much concern was raised at management level over this overspend?
Wallace and Donald Cumming are on the board as representatives of the FoH. Maybe they did post questions and get the answers they desired, but a swathe of members are becoming more vocal about a failure to communicate any of that.
When the fanbase were outside Tynecastle screaming for Levein’s head after a home loss to Motherwell last September — a good month before Budge relented and removed him from the dugout — Wallace stated that fans threatening to withdraw payments to the Foundation in protest would play ‘right into the hands of those rivals who want us to fail’.
This month, when Budge was blundering her way through the three-act play that forcing pay cuts on staff became, he responded to one of her statements by tweeting: ‘Strong, powerful and, importantly, the facts. A desire to hand the club to our fans in rude health, that’s always been our unshakable (sic) vision.’
Right now, Hearts are bound for the Championship, back where they were six years ago. Rude health? With Budge talking about relegation bringing a £3m shortfall and no one able to say how much the fall-out from the coronavirus outbreak will cost on top, it is hard to feel at all confident about their future — and that is quite shocking when supporters have piled in more than £10m on top of season tickets and strips and keep on digging deep.
The FoH need to be seen to ask hard questions about where Budge has taken the club rather than posting sycophantic remarks on Twitter and taking aim at imaginary enemies.
Instead, the party line is that she will remain in charge when the official handover of power has finally been completed, but why?
In truth, this SPFL ‘task force’ she is co-chairing to reconstruct the leagues should be pretty much her last act at Tynecastle.
When Budge saved Hearts in 2014, she looked capable of bringing fresh thinking. Now, she is hamfistedly trying to deliver reconstruction to the benefit of her own side — the ultimate act of self-interest — and extend the league to 44 clubs after stating previously that Scotland had twice as many senior teams as it needed.
She admits it ‘ironic’. It also reeks of all principles being betrayed in a bid to salvage a failing reign from disaster.
From the outside, it looks like the FoH have been too close to Budge, too scared to rock the boat.
Sure, there is no guidebook in terms of what fans should do when they get into the boardroom and it isn’t easy to square representing Joe Punter with running an efficient business.
The FoH has been a phenomenon as a fundraising exercise. At the moment, though, it is hard to see how their members are being particularly well served or informed.
Certainly, when all this is over, way more clubs than Hearts will soon be needing their punters to stop them from going to the wall.
Fans will have more influence than ever. They just have to figure out the best way of using it.
Going by events at Tynecastle, firing potshots at others after watching your own club go from bad to worse without at least raising some red flags is hardly a model to follow.