Emotional blackmail of Hearts fans is another example of clubs treating punters like mugs
16 Dec 2012 00:01

By Hugh Keevins

IT'S disgusting that Sergejus Fedotovas had the gall to accuse the Tynecastle faithful of lacking loyalty.
Hearts director Sergejus Fedotovas Hearts director Sergejus Fedotovas

IT'S a mug’s game right enough.

The Hearts fans raise £800,000, saving their club from the disastrous consequences of an unpaid tax bill, and what thanks do they get?

They get told off by Vladimir Romanov’s placeman, Sergejus Fedotovas, for not doing enough in a time of crisis.

It defies belief he could accuse supporters of lacking loyalty with his pathetic request for the fans to ask themselves if they’ve done enough to help the club.

It’s repellent he should question their bravery by challenging the fans to stump up even more cash.

And it’s an insult to the intelligence to threaten supporters that if they fail to come up with more money then it might be the end of the Jambos.

Tynecastle has never struck me as the kind of place that contains too many shrinking violets among the Hearts of Midlothian.

The fans can create a hostile atmosphere that would make Attila the Hun think twice about entering but Mr Fedotovas appears to believe they have heads that zip up the back.

And he applies that line of thinking to the game’s authorities. Hearts have a long track record of failing to pay their players’ wages on time – and a transfer embargo that’s in place until December 23 as a consequence.

But they will stick two fingers up to decency by signing a new player if they can get away with it while
showing contempt for the principle which says you can hardly add to your staff while struggling to pay the
squad as it stands.

John McGlynn can question the morality of a new signing but the manager isn’t in charge of the club’s conscience. And arrogance appears to have reached epidemic proportions in Edinburgh.

Hibs chairman Rod Petrie addressed his club’s AGM last week on the subject of who should be doing what at Easter Road.

The stewardship of the club is in the hands of the board of directors but the future of the club is in the hands of the supporters.

That was the gist of Petrie’s take on what’s happening at the club as he reflected on an operating deficit of £957,000. The sting in the tail being that if fans don’t turn up in even greater numbers the chairman can’t be held responsible for the consequences.

It might have been an idea, then, to follow up the derby win over Hearts with something better than a 3-0 defeat at Inverness.

To call the Hibs fans long-suffering would be an understatement. So you really need to offer them something on the park that entices them into the stands in the first place Or is that not how it works any more?

Have we now got the SFA, the SPL, the SFL and the GGM?

The last set of initials standing for Gonnae Gie’s Money.

It’s not good enough to say the board are the stewards of the club but if they run the business at a loss then the fans have to accept responsibility for cleaning up the mess.

Unless, of course, any club wants to give their supporters a representative on the board in the interests of
achieving collective responsibility.

Every year at Celtic’s AGM a member of the Supporters Trust stands up and makes an articulate case for that.

And every year it is refused with a pat on the head and a patronising reference to the fans being the greatest supporters in the world.

So long as they don’t want to come in off the street, that is.

The logic employed is that the board aren’t just custodians of the club they’re committed Celtic supporters into the bargain. Presumably that’s the case at Hibs, Hearts and Dunfermline as well.

The Pars have just launched a share issue appealing for help to bail them out of murky waters that threaten to drown the club in a sea of debt.

But what about the morality of asking ordinary people to find extraordinary sums to bolster tottering clubs in a country where food banks are on the increase?

Or attempting to blackmail them by playing on their sentimental side and saying they could be responsible for the death of the thing they claim to love.

If directors are fans with voting rights they should accept culpability when things go wrong. The Hearts fans could always strike a blow for the disenfranchised by telling Fedotovas where he can stick his veiled threats.

Then he might have to report back to headquarters in Lithuania and the man who created the mountain of debt would be forced to do something other than be an absentee landlord with a barefaced cheek.

Taken from the Daily Record