By Andrew Warshaw
May 21 – As Scottish football prepares to discuss ground-breaking plans to preserve its very future, crisis-torn Edinburgh club Hearts have avoided immediate relegation after the Scottish Premier League decided the club’s financial problems had not breached its rules before the end of the season.
The club’s Lithuanian-based parent company, UBIG, requested to be declared insolvent in a Lithuanian court, leading to fears that an 18-point penalty would be imposed and that Hearts could go the same way as Rangers whose financial meltdown led to its new owners being denied entry to the SPL and the club restarting life in the lowest tier of the league structure.
But the SPL board concluded that it could not say whether insolvency had occurred as defined by its rules. Following talks between the six board members, a statement read: “The SPL board met today to consider reports from Lithuania in respect of Ukio Banko Investicine Grupe (UBIG).
“This is the SPL’s rules with regarding insolvency – rules that were put in last summer and rules that moved from insolvency events effecting just the league member club but also the parent of that member club”
“The board are not satisfied on the basis of information currently available to it that an insolvency event as defined by SPL rules occurred in respect of UBIG during 2012-13.”
The Hearts debacle underlines the growing financial problems enveloping the Scottish game. Dunfermline Athletic were deducted 15 points by the Scottish Football League – and relegated from Division One on Sunday – after going into administration.
Ahead of the Hearts decision, Scottish FA chief executive Stewart Regan said club’s problems spelled more bad news for the nation’s football. “It is damaging because Hearts are a big club,” he said. “It’s another example where finance is getting in the way of the game making progress. And, again, the people you feel sorry for are the fans at the end of the line who are desperate just to watch their team and watch good football.”
Hearts could still end up starting next season with a hefty points deduction, however, and former assistant manager Billy Brown laid the blame for their predicament squarely at the door of Vladimir Romanov, who has owned the club nicknamed the “Jam Tarts” since 2005.
“It’s a terrible situation and a situation that was always going to develop, the way the club was being run,” Brown told BBC radio. “But surely today the SPL board can’t relegate Hearts. We’ve already had one of the biggest teams in the world [Rangers] relegated to the lowest division and now we’re going to potentially relegate one of the biggest teams in Scotland as well.
“It’s crazy. We’ve got to keep the top teams in the top league or else there’ll be no competition at all. The way the owner of the club was spending money and paying money to players, that really wasn’t sustainable. It was a crazy situation for the size of club we are, but Hearts can run perfectly well on their own and surely they can’t put them down, they are too big a club. We need all the big clubs in the top league in Scotland as far as I am concerned.”
Meanwhile, Scottish Football League clubs meet on Thursday to discuss revised reconstruction plans put together by the SPL amid continuing doubt over whether a new 42-club structure can be put in place in time for the start of next season.
No date for a formal vote on the merger proposal, agreed in principle by the 12 top-flight clubs, has yet been fixed. The package of measures, which replaces the 12-12-18 proposal that was vetoed by two of the top-flight teams and was therefore thrown out, retains the current 12-10-10-10 divisional set-up but, crucially, includes an improved financial distribution model plus playoffs in each division.
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