Harry Reid

If you were looking for examples of how businesses should not be run, some Scottish football clubs have been world class.

ONE of the criticisms I hear regularly about our education system is that little if anything is taught about the basics of personal finance and indeed finance in general. Many young people leave school ignorant about how businesses are run, or should be run, let alone how to manage their own finances.

Over the weekend I realised that it had not really bothered many Hearts fans that their club had been run badly and irresponsibly. For many people, particularly young people, a big football club is, apart for their employer, if they are lucky enough to be employed, the one business in which they have a direct interest, in which they have some sort of stake. It’s an organisation to which they are emotionally attached, one that they pay money to regularly, and confidently expect to be supporting for the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, if you were looking for examples of how businesses should not be run, some Scottish football clubs have been, for quite some time, world class.

Many older Scottish football supporters are guilty of a certain cynicism. They are prepared to ignore the overspending, the serial mismanagement, the blatant bypassing of the most basic tenets of business integrity, if along the way there’s going to be some supposed glory – the odd cup win, bragging rights against local rivals, that sort of thing.

Meanwhile I know several Hearts supporters who last year generously gave cash they could hardly afford to help to “save” their club. Now they are being asked to give even more, and many of them will do so, despite knowing that they may be tossing their honestly-earned money into a gaping maroon void.

But it’s not such older supporters that I worry about. It’s the younger ones. They have watched the business that means so much to them being run on the phoney premise that debt doesn’t matter. Pile it up, pile it up; tomorrow will look after itself.

And then, when disaster finally and inevitably comes, many of them actually welcome the process of administration. Never mind that people immediately lose their jobs, never mind that other