Everything Hearts fans questioned board on at AGM including Tony Bloom negotiations, Shankland contract & more

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Here is everything the Hearts board of directors were asked at the AGM and what they answered from the Q&A portion of the meeting.

Heart of Midlothian Football Club held their 118th Annual General Meeting at Tynecastle today (Wednesday, December 4) with Chairwoman Anne Budge and Chief Executive Officer Andrew McKinlay fielding questions from supporters who hold shares in the club.

Following one from presentations from Budge, McKinlay and outgoing Financial Director Jacqui Duncan, as well as the ratifying of official matters, the floor was opened up for a Q&A session which lasted a little over 30 minuted. Among the topics that the shareholding supporters wanted answers on were the negotiations with potential investor Tony Bloom, the status of club captain Lawrence Shankland’s contract and the budget for the January transfer window.

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Here is every question that was asked and the answers given:

Who is ultimately responsible for the organisation of pre-season?

AB: The suggestion is that it has not been done very well as evidenced by the fact that the pre-season has been split up, and that probably contributes to a more unique position. Well, all I would say to that one is, clearly the diversity manager, in conjunction now with Ray, will be organising all of these things.

AM: You are right, obviously the first team manager, in conjunction with the sporting director, will look at what an appropriate pre-season is. The fitness point, obviously, is a bigger point. It may come up later in questions, and the one thing I would just say on that is, the style of play that Neil is bringing in demands greater fitness from the players in different ways. The high press that he is looking to do and that is something that you can't change overnight but I think we are starting to see it get better and better, players lasting longer and longer. I think the other thing you will see is, many teams now, with the five substitutes, they effectively have players that can only play for a certain period of time and then bring on other players to finish the game for them. That is a thing, if you are a Celtic, where the players you are bringing off are probably as good as the ones you are taking on. I think that is something that we will obviously keep having to work towards.

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Now that we have a waiting list of 7,000 (for season tickets) is it now time to think about stopping selling tickets to away for league matches?

AM: I understand that from some of the Celtic supporters. Personally, I think we have it just about right at the moment. I think what we've got to do is to take all the teams other than Hibs to 630. It feels about right. I would love some away support not to be here but I do think that it's actually quite sad that there are certain other clubs that can't manage to accommodate away support as part of football. What I would also say, and I think it's really important, and I touched upon it in my talk is it's important that we sell out our end of the ground so that we can then open our ticket exchange because there are thousands on waiting lists and I'm sure they look around the stadium each week and think there's loads of seats that are emptying and there are. That is the prerogative of a season ticket holder, to come when they wish, and I get that but if we could sell out, then we'd get onto the ticket exchange and that would allow other fans to come and enjoy the experience. As with all clubs, when we publish the attendance at games it's based on ticket sales numbers and not the actual number that come into the stadium. Obviously, for safety reasons and other reasons, we know exactly how many are in the stadium and, without giving the exact numbers, when we played Celtic, we were about 5,000 down on the number that we announced. When we played Aberdeen last weekend, we were about 3,000 down. So there are plenty of seats in the stadium. It's just how we manage to get to a stage where we can sell them and the way we do that is to sell out the rest of the seats, so we can then go to ticket exchange.

Hearts women are doing exceptionally well again in this season. Every year they improve on the previous year. However, crowds stay very low in Scotland, including ourselves, particularly compared with the English. Why have the crowds not improved? Could the women play at Tynecastle more often?

AB: The only thing I'll say is that the women would like to play more often than they do but there are good reasons why the groundsmen, for example, feel that's not possible.

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AM: I think before we'd be playing a Tynecastle more often what we should do and what we have been doing and what we've been close to doing at the end of last season is moving our home games away from Oriam, where we can only get a few hundred. I'm going to continue to explore that. One of the challenges around that, and it's a specific challenge with Tynecastle as well, is that Ava's style of play is very much focused on the full UEFA-sized pitch, the 105 by 168. I think it is well-documented that Tynecastle is small and I'm not sure actually Tynecastle suits our women quite often when they play here, as has been shown, but I have said to them if there's other times they'd like to play here then I'm happy to look at whether we can do that but, as I say, I think the first stage to increase the attendance is for us to look somewhere else as we did with the B-team, to play our fixtures, and that's an ongoing priority for me.

While our annual target is to finish third or above it seems that all clubs outside the Old Firm seem unable to cope with two games a week, plus all the travel. Is the answer a larger playing squad, which of course is very costly and difficult to manage, or have you looked at the situation to see how we can manage it better?

AM: I'd probably say that the only ones in Scotland that seem to cope with it well are Celtic. Even if you look at Rangers, after they come back from European games, they have been winning, but not all of them. They've not been looking particularly strong. This is a really difficult one. At Aberdeen, it's also interesting to see, and again it might just be coincidence, that they've had a couple of midweek games over the last few weeks and that seems to have affected their performance a little bit. So maybe that does answer that question. You're right, what you need to do then is to build up your squad but the issue is having a squad all of the same quality, and that's very difficult. One of the reasons it's very difficult is it leads to other issue and the particularly hard issue, I think from my time looking at how managers have coped with this or not, is trying to keep everyone happy. When you've got a squad of 26 or whatever, you have to leave players not just out of of the starting XI or on the bench but we've got some big players who aren't even making the bench at the moment. Now, others might have different views on this but arguably this last issue around managers dealing with size of squad and how to keep everyone happy may have been a factor in issues that our last two head coaches had. I think it's been interesting to see how Neil has been dealing with that since he's come in, and certainly from my perspective I see a much clearer maybe first 18, first 20, than we maybe had before. It's a conundrum that we all struggle with and I still just don’t see a club other than Celtic in Scotland who seem to actually manage to find the answer.

I'd like to ask why the manager didn’t come along today so that we can ask questions about why the team's not performing very well.

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AM: As I said last year, when this point was raised, the manager is busy preparing for the weekend and I think I would argue that's his most important job at the moment, to make sure that we win at the weekend and turn things round. The manager's new in the job, and he would be happy to answer questions, and there will be various forums that he will attend where he will answer questions. It's just that, as it was last year, as it is today, he is busy preparing the team for the game on Saturday.

Given the club’s current league position, will the budget for the January transfer window be increased and what will the first team coach have to work with?

AM: What we will do, this is more from the finance perspective, is we will, at the end of the second round of fixtures, which is January the 3rd, we'll do a reassessment of where we are then and we'll look at the budgets but we're already, and I think Neil has been out publicly and said that we're already working hard to bring in someone in the position that he will be talking about. I've already prepared a paper for the board. This has been to the board and funding has been approved. Others, we will look at all positions as we always do and we'll see what's available in January. There's some in the team that we would maybe like to move out in January as well. It's always a moving feast and I think the other thing always to remember, and I'm sure you're sick of hearing it from people, but the January window is traditionally a difficult window because people are not looking to get rid of their best players in January. I think we're all watching the same football, we're all well aware of where our big issues are and we need to make changes in January where we can. I think the other thing to point out, and it's not specific to your question, but I'm sure many have picked up in that we have quite a number of players out of contract at the end of the season, which gives us an opportunity to do a bit of rejigging, but we need to focus on this season first, which I totally understand.

The Chief Executive seemed to be very proud of the fact that last season we actually introduced two from the Youth Academy and this season two from the Youth Academy. Under previous head coaches there's been virtually no people coming through from the academy. Is this because of the managers that you have appointed are being excessively cautious? Or is it because the managers think that the quality of people (coming through from the academy are not good enough to be considered?

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AB: Well, I'll say first of all, and then pass back to Andrew again, we are very, very impressed with the quality of youngsters we have in the academy. I'm being told at the moment that there are a number of stars at various age groups and so it's not about quality of the players, it's probably about the coaches.

AM: I think let's be positive and look at what we are seeing now as opposed to maybe look back but some of the reasons for that potentially, and one of the big ones, is the introduction of a B team. It's well known that the transition from academy to first team has been a huge problem in Scotland and many other countries, and actually in Scotland, I found it quite depressing with my SFA hat on, where we looked at trying to do more for the B teams and yet it was voted down overwhelmingly by the lower league clubs who just didn't want it. Without those B teams, in my view, we're not going to see players coming through, working hard in the B team, maybe then going out on loan to a premiership team and getting game time at an appropriate level to then bring them through to the first team. So that's one big change in the last two or three years. The other one, and you shouldn't ever lose sight of this, is that some of our best talent is taken from us. It always has been the case and arguably we do the same by taking maybe some of the best talent of teams smaller than us but some of our best talent is taken both across the M8, but also much more commonly now, teams from England are all over our best talent because to them, they could pay a very small sum of money to get our talent and that's something that we're again working on at central level to see if there's ways we can protect that. I think it was well documented when James Wilson signed his contract 18 months ago that we had to fight off some significant approaches from down south and one of the big things for us is to be able to sell to people like James that they will get an opportunity in the first team and that's what we can give them as opposed to the immediate riches that they might get down south. The dream is they do well for us, we get a few seasons in, then we maybe sell them on, and everyone's happy and they go on to make their riches down south, but we also do well out there. That is the cycle that we are certainly working hard on. We're seeing improvement, but it's an ongoing process, and with Graeme coming in and with Shelley coming in that's definitely an area where I know we'll be looking at that whole transition piece and just making sure that we're giving ourselves the best opportunities to make that work in the future.

Have the board been encouraged with Tony Bloom so far? Do they feel that that tie-in would be something that would allow the club to finally maybe start fulfilling the potential the club has, particularly on the pitch?

AB: We have to be clear, there are two different contracts, basically. We already have taken the step of signing a contract with Jamestown, as Andrew said, and that we see as a potential game-changer. Tony Bloom is a very experienced individual who is passionate about football, passionate about helping clubs to achieve the best they can. We have all been quite encouraged with all the discussions that we've had so far in terms of what we could benefit from if it happens to happen but I can't really say very much more, I'm sorry.

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What impact, if any, has Lawrence Shankland's contract had on the current budgeting? I know it's been mentioned by Andrew, it's off the table at the moment, Has that gone? Is that what will be spent?

AM: It's a very fair question. When we made the offer to Lawrence last January we obviously made sure that we had the money to be able to honour that contract. It was made clear to us by his representatives that contract was nowhere near what they were looking for. This idea of contracts off table, contracts on table, sadly, because I'm a lawyer, I know that as soon as someone rejects a contract, that's the end of that, that's it. You've made an offer, they've said no, so that is, it comes off the table. There is no live contract. I'll be honest, we've had no approach from his representatives at all since then so I don't see any sign. I think I've said many times publicly that my gut tells me that he will choose to run down his contract, as is his right. I think it's a shame because I think he's done very well here and I think he's been happy here and I think we could still make him a good home for the future but it's very much the balls in their park. To your question, do we still have the money? We will be happy to have a discussion with Lawrence and his representatives if they want to come and speak to us.

Should the club not have tried to sign another striker in the summer?

AM: I've read a lot about this point about we should have gone out in the summer and signed other strikers and I kind of disagree with that. I guess what I would say is, signing decisions are very much down to the head coach. The head coach decides which positions they want to sign. They then work with the recruitment team, the sporting director, to go out and get players that the head coach asks for. From a forward position the player that was signed, and maybe we're only now starting to see some visibility, was Moussa Drama. I think more fundamentally, I don't think any of us could have foreseen the drop-off in form and goal scoring from Lawrence, also from Kenneth, also from Liam. I don't disagree that, I wish we had gone out in the summer and signed another top-level striker, but as I say, it's not myself who tells, we all know, we all have our own views of the type of players we need, but it's very much the job of the head coach to decide what he wants. The other thing I would say is that, in my time at the club, I have never been asked for anything by a head coach that I haven't been able to give them. So anything, any position, any player that they've wanted, I can assure you all, the board have delivered on that.

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How are shares going to be made available to allow Mr Bloom to become a minority shareholder? Will it have to come from the board or from the Foundation of Hearts?

AB: We are exploring these options It is very much a question for Foundation of Hearts. They are the majority shareholder, nobody else could make these shares available. Gerry, I don’t know if you wanted to say anything on that matter?

Gerry Mallon (Foundation of Hearts Chairman): We’re still awaiting the conclusion of the decision with Tony Bloom. For a start there is no certainty that we have got a deal so let’s see what the deal is and what the options are and then there will be an opportunity for the Foundation of Hearts ledgers to consider what the range of options are and whatever the recommended option of the board of the club is and the board of the foundation. The options that you outlined are the range of possibilities but it’s not yet decided if we got a deal which option would be chosen.

Given that the stand is now complete are there any proposals for naming the stand?

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AM: No is the short answer. I don’t know if this is coming from a commercial standpoint or and individual naming stand point, obviously there are two possibilities there. We have looked at commercial opportunities in the past but it’s not something that has come to fruition. We’re always open to ideas either commercial or otherwise on that one.

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