Relegation next season is least of Hearts' worries

IT was the year bullets were fired at Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan; Peter Sutcliffe was convicted as The Yorkshire Ripper; Bobby Sands died on hunger strike; Charles and Diana married; Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest; Muhammad Ali fought for the last time.

And Hearts were relegated.

The Tynecastle club were rotten that season, 1980-81. They finished rock bottom of the old Premier Division, a point below Kilmarnock and 38 behind champions Celtic (in the days of only two points for a win). Hearts managed only six of those in 36 league games. It was the last time the club were demoted, but that could change soon enough. It's already staring them in the face next season.

First things first: if relegation becomes the predominant worry for Hearts over the coming months then at least they will still be around to fight on as a going concern. The likelihood of being relegated at the end of the Scottish Professional Football League's inaugural season is a very real one, although if they are around to face that they will, at least, have staved off possible liquidation. At the moment, falling a tier next year is a secondary threat which must be confronted once the brutal realities of going into administration – people losing their jobs, the club fighting for its survival – have been addressed. But there is no getting away from the fact that if they get through that, season 2013-14 already has the look of a bleak march out of the top flight.

Hearts will start 15 points behind everyone else, an inescapable consequence of the new Financial Fair Play rules they signed up to along with all the other Scottish Premier League clubs last May. As an indicator of how likely that is to plunge them into trouble, they finished only 14 ahead of relegated Dundee in the season just finished.

Next season their team is likely to be much poorer than the one that just finished 10th. They face the cherry-picking of whatever talent is left in their already pared-down squad. Andy Webster and Marius Zaliukas are out of contract and cannot be offered anything like their current terms. Mehdi Taouil, Darren Barr, Fraser Mullen, Gordon Smith and Denis Prychynenko have gone.

What will they have left? Very few, if any, senior players – John Sutton, Ryan Stevenson, Jamie MacDonald and Jamie Hamill may all have to be moved off the wage bill – and the prospect of youngsters such as Callum Paterson, Jason Holt, Jamie Walker and Kevin McHattie being vulnerable to any bids which could raise some precious money.

Nor can replacements be signed while subject to a Scottish Premier League registration embargo for not paying the players' June salaries, although it remains to be seen if and when that embargo would be lifted if the unpaid players have been made redundant or sold. If a successful buyout was to be delivered, perhaps by Foundation of Hearts, the club could conceivably have the means to rebuild a squad and give themselves a chance of avoiding relegation. But all of that seems a long, long way off.

The handicapping of Hearts – although deserved and unavoidable – also amounts to a handicapping of the new SPFL. Its top flight is not likely to be competitive at the top or the bottom next season. That's good news for Celtic, certain champions, and for Partick Thistle, the newly-promoted club who are entitled to interpret Hearts' punishment as encouraging for themselves.

Thistle were the bookmakers' favourites for relegation until this weeks' grave developments. It was to his credit that there was no callousness or schadenfreude from David Beattie, the Thistle chairman, yesterday. "The whole last three or four years of football in this country have saddened me," he said. "I've seen Dundee go down, and Rangers, Dunfermline, now potentially Hearts. We need to wake up. You need to run a club as a business first and foremost, you can't be chasing the dream all the time because if you try to do that reality will eventually kick in. A football club has to be a sustainable business. We need to learn lessons from all of this.

"Hearts are a great institution, a fantastic institution. They have great, great history. I'm sure they will come back from this, as I hope Dunfermline do as well. If it's to be a 15-point deduction for them I think they will be able to cope with that, depending on what structure their new business has. But are they going to have the same amount of players, the same amount of wages? Will it be an entirely different business model?"

The 15-point deduction would not definitely condemn Hearts to relegation. One precedent offers them hope of finishing 11th (and going into the new play-offs) or perhaps even higher. In November, 2010, the Scottish Football League hit Dundee with a 25-point deduction for going into administration and that plunged them from fourth in the Irn-Bru First Division to bottom, 20 points adrift of all the others with 25 games remaining. Their response was to go on a club record 23-game unbeaten league run, eventually finishing sixth (24 points clear of bottom club Stirling Albion). It was an astonishing achievement from the then manager, Barry Smith, and his players.

But although Dundee also had a signing embargo at the time, their squad was not stripped bare as the Tynecastle one is likely to be in the weeks to come. Leigh Griffiths continued to play for them, for example, as did Gary Harkins.

Hearts face not just a double whammy but a triple blow: 15 points taken off, the serious deterioration of their playing squad, and then the unfortunate timing of their probable drop into the SPFL's second tier. They face being in that division – which will possibly be called The Championship – in the very season that Rangers will probably ascend to it by winning the coming season's third tier. The Ibrox club would be favourites to win the automatic promotion place, leaving Hearts only the potential escape route of the play-offs.

That is two years away and there are a lot of ifs and buts to address before then. All that is clear is this: there is no end in sight to Hearts' problems.

Taken from the Herald