DONALD FORD 

THE impending disaster of a departure from Tynecastle is quite bad enough for Hearts, but the apparent admission by Chris Robinson that the board of directors has stewarded the company - knowingly - to massive accumulated losses over the past few years is staggering.

Let's put things in perspective here. When Heart of Midlothian reached its previous financial "gutter" towards the end of the 1970s, there were two fundamental differences from the current plight of the club. The first was that the financial deterioration took place over a long number of years. It probably began in the early years of the previous decade, then gathered pace as holes in dykes were plugged and short-term fixes were found to stave off the inevitable demise of the company. Ultimately, Wallace Mercer arrived to save the club from liquidation. The present crisis, in contrast, is short-term and of specific creation.

The second major difference is that the club was then a private limited company and therefore operated under a set of rules quite different from those which are laid down for a public limited company (PLC) - now, of course, the vehicle through which the club's activities must be directed. For the chief executive of a public limited company to declare that "our real problem isn't just the debt, but the fact it gets there from year upon year of losses" is staggering. It is a complete admission of financial mismanagement from which he now seeks a swift, but temporary, exit by selling the company's only asset.

By confirming that the board can only guarantee the future of the club "for another two to three seasons" after selling Tynecastle and then by further admitting that there is no alternative financial plan in place should the proposed tenancy at Murrayfield not work, he is confirming what many Hearts supporters have suspected for a long time - that a vast amount of guesswork and finger- crossing accompanies the current decision-making. It is a bad enough for a small private company to do that, but for a chief executive of a public limited company to confirm that his financial planning is both deficient and, in places, non-existent, is unforgivable.

Can I also direct criticism towards Robinson's attempted appeasement of supporters when stating that no-one complained when the club made expensive investments in players, or when the club won the Scottish Cup? The absence of solid financial guidance and awareness of the near-certain losses which would rack up in a fairly short space of time following the signing of players on financially unsupportable contracts is damning. As most Scottish football followers are aware, the levels of wages paid to players in the past five years have been the root cause of the game's crisis. Until realistic sums are negotiated with both agents and footballers, things will get worse.

The solution, hard as it will be to swallow for supporters who are desperate to see silverware coming their way, is simple and stark. The future of the game rests in youth development, structured at club and national level, with an end to ridiculous wage deals.

The huge losses at Tynecastle are not in any substance due to the "black hole" of Robinson's "not fit for purpose" Tynecastle. The stadium's problems have cost money, but the mountain of debt is due to one major factor only - the level of player salaries. Nevertheless if the directors at Tynecastle had taken the correct path at the end of the last century, and had shown sufficient courage and wisdom to adopt proper financial controls, they would immediately have instructed:

a) Strictly limited budgets to the manager for the acquisition and salaries of new players 

b) A public relations exercise to prepare fans for no trophy winning for at least five years, while financial plans to cement the long-term future of the club were given time to mature.

I believe that true Hearts supporters would not have balked at such honest but painful action. I believe they will not object to it even now, if they hear the words spoken with honesty and determination. In the short term, the medicine is hard to swallow and the spectacle might not be ideal. In the long term however, it almost guarantees a regaining of stature and the feeling of pride when success does come.

The board stands accused of failure on these fundamental issues, and can offer no defence. There is patently no brain, foresight or unselfishness within its members to allow such a reconstruction of Heart of Midlothian Football Club to proceed.

There are nothing but distress signals, lifeboats and short term fixes. For a public limited company to be run in such fashion, with doubts raised about the very people who are in control and the transparency of their dealings, is unforgivable, especially when the ultimate consequence might be the death of the club. We all know at whose door blame will be laid if the unthinkable happens.

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