The world turned upside down in Scottish football

When I first became aware of football in the early 1950s Hearts appeared to be one of the top Scottish sides and I liked the idea that they were known as ‘jam tarts’.

A famed fund manager and one of the UK’s best-known sports gamblers are backing a data-driven bid to break Glasgow’s hold over Scottish football and deliver the first league title for a team outside the city in four decades. Heart of Midlothian sit top of the Scottish Premiership with just a third of the season left, as they seek to achieve what no club has done since Sir Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen side in 1985 and end the dominance of Celtic and Rangers.

The fortunes of Edinburgh-based Hearts, whose last title was in 1960, have been transformed under a new approach, with fresh investment and expertise, that has also outsourced key elements of player recruitment to computer algorithms. Central to Hearts’ rejuvenation has been the arrival of Tony Bloom, a high-stakes poker player and chair of Premier League Brighton & Hove Albion who paid just under £10mn for a 29 per cent non-voting stake in the club in June.

Hearts also have support from benefactor James Anderson, one of Britain’s best-known investors who forged his reputation at Baillie Gifford with a series of far-sighted technology bets. Anderson, a Hearts board member who identified the long-term potential of Amazon and Tesla as co-manager of Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, said a strategic vision of what the club wanted to achieve had been vital to its recent success. “We’d not [previously] been able to answer the question . . . what would give us a chance to close the gap. I think what you’re seeing on the data front is that.”

“What Hearts have done this season, and what it looks like they’ve got a good chance of continuing, is quite extraordinary,” Stephen Morrow, a sport management professor at Edinburgh Business School, part of Heriot-Watt University told the Financial Times. “We have a duopoly — and more recently a monopoly — where the same teams win . . . [and ending that would be] transformative for Scottish football.”

Andrew McKinlay, Hearts’ chief executive, told the Pink ‘Un that access to the “business acumen” of Bloom and Anderson had been crucial, as he hailed a “brilliant” first season under experienced manager Derek McInnes, ahead of Sunday’s table-topping clash with Rangers, who are five points behind. Bloom, who built his fortune from sports betting and data-driven gambling, came in with a mission to “disrupt” Scottish football and end the Old Firm’s supremacy.

Hearts also struck a deal with sports data provider Jamestown Analytics — which has strong links to Bloom’s Starlizard company — whose player identification tools have underpinned Brighton’s rise and fired Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, another in its stable, from the Belgian second division in 2021 to the Uefa Champions League four years later.

Calum Ross, assistant director in the sports business group at Deloitte, told the leading business paper that the analytics helped Hearts get around their financial disadvantage. Celtic, who have won the Scottish league in 10 of the past 11 seasons, posted revenues of £144mn in the year to June, compared with Rangers’ £94mn and £24mn for Hearts. “That revenue disparity is huge,” said Ross, who also noted how Hearts were in administration as recently as 2014, before supporters led by businesswoman Ann Budge stepped in to save a club now majority fan-owned.

McKinlay said on-field success would help level the playing field, with more money from regular European competition and player trading. The new approach “will help us get better players in, who we can make a profit on and sell,” he said.

Professor Grant Jarvie, chair of the University of Edinburgh’s Academy of Sport, agreed top-class analytics was important, but an algorithm alone could not secure a title. A club still required a top manager, “a football identity” and to ask the right questions of the data. “You still need human interaction, human knowledge, to make it all work,” he told the FT.

Hearts’ run has been helped by errors at Celtic and Rangers, who both changed managers midseason. Some in Scotland view Hearts’ challenge as a one-season wonder, while the club’s fans are still haunted by losing the league on the final day of the 1986 season. But McKinlay insisted they were no flash in the pan. “If we don’t do it this year, I’m not worried,” he said. “I firmly believe we’re going to get better and better and . . . compete with Rangers and Celtic on an annual basis. And if we don’t do it this year, we’ll do it very soon.”