Find £1m each year then rent your club back from mad Vlad.. SIMPLES

By BILL LECKIE
Published: 12th November 2012
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WANTED. A few good men who love Hearts and can raise £1million.

Their brief? To offer that million to Vladimir Romanov, with the same to follow each January 1st for the next 19.

Just as long as he p***es off back to Vilnius and never shows his smug little face again.

In other words, rent your club back. And save its life.

Simples, as another strange little creature with a Russian accent would put it.

There’s a decent business there. A full stadium every second Saturday, plenty demand for replica kits, no shortage of sponsors and a sharp commercial department.

They’ve just won the Scottish Cup, had glamour European nights against Spurs and Liverpool and brought in £17m in transfers over the past few seasons.

The only mystery is where all the money goes. But trust me, trying to unravel it would twist Scooby Doo’s melon until he thought he was a panda.

So forget getting to the bottom of what Vlad’s all about, because you’ll end up 20,000 leagues below the deepest submarine while the Jambos sink 20,000 miles below the bottom league.

Forget it all. And just make the mad wee meerkat an offer he can’t refuse.

It’s not just one way out of this mess Hearts find themselves in. It’s the only way.

Unless someone at Tynecastle phones those little old ladies at Wonga and asks for a loan — but that would be about as long-term an answer as this whole gun-to-the-head share issue.

Buy into Hearts the way Romanov runs the place? Might as well hit the Comet closing down sale, pick up a half-price blender and turn your spare cash into smoothies.

No, propping up a failed regime is pointless. Giving in to emotional blackmail delivered by an owner with zero emotions is nothing more than assisted suicide.

The only way to even begin getting Hearts beating again is to remove the Lithuanians using the only common language they understand. Hard cash.

What they need right now is a group who understand the city, the fans and the heritage and who have enough up front to do a deal guaranteeing Romanov £20m over 20 years.

By the reckoning of those close to the club, there’s an annual income there of around £8m from tickets, merchandise, TV and sponsors. Get the wage bill down to around £3m — and remember, it’s been nearly four times that in the past — and any halfwit can see you’ve got something more than viable.

How Vlad can’t make that work is beyond me, what with him having his own bank and everything.

But the fact is he can’t — and it’s time he stopped getting away with putting the blame onto everyone else and was shown the door before that door gets boarded up.

While we’re at it, the same goes for Dunfermline chief Gavin Masterton. Here’s a guy who was Treasurer of the Bank of Scotland — basically, the guy who signed all the notes. Yet when it comes to football, he clearly couldn’t run a bath, never mind a stable club.

The Pars are staggering from month to month with no one knowing whether their wages will be paid, directors have resigned in bulk, the new job lot have been co-opted on and split into two companies, hereby known as The Left Hand and The Right Hand, neither of which is likely to know what the other is doing.

I know a lot of good people in Dunfermline. Some of them with a fair bit of dosh.

Like their fellow sufferers over in Gorgie, they’re being pressured into handing that dosh over to tide their club through the worst.

But surely they must see what a waste that would be, because all their generosity does is plummet into a bottomless pit. There must be enough of them to band together and take back the thing they’ve invested their lives in.

Hearts and Dunfermline are two perfect examples of how football is far worse off as a business than it was as a sport. Both once solid entities at the centre of their communities, now fragile strands of complex accountancy processes.

And the more complex those processes are allowed to become, the less chance there is of any solidity ever returning.

In these two, depressing cases, the time to grab that fading chance is now. The opportunity to stop pretending a football club is something it will never be may never come again.

Those Jambos who trekked all the way to Inverness on Saturday, they know what a football club should be. Those Pars who stood and took it as their team were pumped 5-1 at Firhill, they know what a football club should.

Romanov? Masterton? They’ll never know. Which is why it’s way past time for them to go.