Hearts explain Tony Bloom's role in their search for a new manager as part of £10m deal

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Hearts have commented for the first time on talks with Tony Bloom’s analytics firms and explained how those will influence their search for a new manager after sacking Steven Naismith. Chief executive Andrew McKinlay discussed the proposed investment deal with Bloom, which is worth up to £10m and gives Hearts access to top-level recruitment technology developed by Starlizard and Jamestown Analytics.

The Edinburgh club sacked Naismith on Sunday along with his assistants Frankie McAvoy and Gordon Forrest following a run of eight successive defeats which left them bottom of the Scottish Premiership. Hearts B team coach Liam Fox has been named interim manager whilst a new permanent incumbent is sought using the same recruitment technology as Brighton and Hove Albion, where Bloom is chairman.

The English entrepreneur holds a key role in how his firms’ software is executed to identify players and coaches. His secret working methods are such that only he knows how all the technology combines and how the algorithms work. It is Bloom who pulls the strings which ultimately produce the data for new recruits.

Speaking to Hearts TV, McKinlay said a list of some potential new managers has already been drawn up by officials at Tynecastle Park. He explained that Bloom’s companies are currently involved in the ongoing search, although he was reluctant to name any of them just yet. “The timeline is a difficult one because I’d love to be able to bring in a manager tomorrow or as soon as possible,” said McKinlay.

“I’ll be very up front and say that as a club, and as long as I’m here, I would never speak to anyone else about the manager’s job until such time that there is no manager in place. You see many examples of other clubs who appear as if their process is 24-hours and suddenly a new manager appears. That’s not the way we work. 

“Having said that, and I’ve said this previously, we do always have lists of people that we’re looking at, that we update and refresh on a two or three-monthly basis, and we’ve been doing that recently, as you’d expect us to. Where we are now is that we’ve had our own lists and we’re also working with an analytics company. I can’t really say too much about who that company is, there has been a lot of press reporting recently but for commercial confidentiality reasons I can’t go into too much detail, but we are working with an analytics company.

“Now, what does that mean? Does it just mean that they will tell us who we should have as the manager? No, it doesn’t mean that. What it means is that they will be part of the process and they will have some views on some individuals and we will also feed them any individuals we think might be right and any applications we might have, and we’ve had a significant amount in the last 48 hours. In fact, we’ve had a significant amount in the weeks previous to that, such is the nature of football. They’ll all be fed into that analytics and that will give us an idea of a ranking of managers.

“But that ranking is just based on analytics, you then have to take that and look at those individuals; are they within our ability to get them, are they in current roles or not, there are various factors – will they fit into our culture, what style of football will they play, you can go on and on, and the analytics won’t give you all those answers. You have to do a lot of your own work and that’s the same as when it comes to recruiting players through analytics as well. The analytics will be a very important part of the process.”

In a separate Sky Sports interview, McKinlay admitted that the deal Hearts are negotiating is “exciting”. “I can't really say much about it due to commercial confidentiality but I'm sure people will put two and two together. I am not in a position to confirm who we are using or speaking to,” he stated. “There has been a lot reported on it, but in the here and now I'm not in a position to say we have a deal with any individual. However, the things that have been written are very interesting and exciting.

"I hope we can do something over the next six months, but we'll just see how things develop. Often we are approached by people who want to invest in the club, and have been over the last few years, and we always treat them seriously and speak to them and that's an ongoing process. At the end of the day, the owners of the club are the Foundation of Hearts and they would be an integral part of any deal that was done with any individual. No deal would be or could be done without them being happy with it.

"If I was out there in the stands, I would be excited about what's coming. I think hugely exciting, I think it's a different way to look at things. It's a way that's been proven to be successful in other countries and I would love to be able to bring some of the success from those other countries to Hearts. We will have no link with any other football club in relation to any investment we do. A fundamental for us is that we will not become a feeder club for any other club."

McKinlay was keen to underline on the Hearts website that any Hearts deal with Bloom would simply be an agreement to use the businessman’s companies and their software. Hearts will not become part of any multi-club operation. Talks with Bloom have included him possibly gaining a minority shareholding in the Tynecastle club within the next two years. Should he aim to purchase any of Foundation of Hearts’ 75.1 per cent holding, a vote of FoH members would be required to approve the share transfer.

McKinlay was careful not to name Bloom due to commercial sensitivity. “This is quite a difficult one for me to say too much,” he said. “I will always be as open and as transparent as I can be but there are certain things that obviously come with commercial confidence. Until such a time we have a deal with anyone, I can’t actually talk about who it’s with or what it would look like. That would be entirely wrong and I would also be heavily criticised, and rightly so, were I to say anything that jeopardised any potential deal we’re looking at.

“Having said that, I think you’ve also got to remember in the context, in particular, of investment that the owner of the club and the 75 per cent shareholder is the Foundation of Hearts. They have to be taken on any journey around investment, and not just taken on any journey, they have a key part of any decision-making in relation to any deal we subsequently do. Recently, the chairman of the FoH, Gerry Mallon, has been very clear on a number of things that are fundamental to the Foundation and any deal that they would approve.

“The one thing that I would like to be very, very clear on, because it’s not just a Foundation point, it’s a point for the club and the club strategy and I’ve made comments in the past about my views on multi-club ownership, and not being hugely supportive of them; I want to be clear that when I was talking about that, I was talking in the context of feeder clubs. I do not want Scotland to become a feeder league. I and the board and FoH’s firm position is that we will not become a feeder club for any club elsewhere. We will not have a formal link with any other football club.

“Anything that we do would be done on the basis of there may be an individual involved, or they may not be, that has involvement with other football clubs but there will be no links between those clubs. A thing we’re very conscious of is that if you do have links with other clubs then that could prejudice your ability to play European football and we will never put that in jeopardy. That would just be a ludicrous thing for us to do and we will not do it.”

Fox’s role is to be short-term and McKinlay outlined what it will involve. “I spoke to Liam on Sunday afternoon and, first and foremost, I’m thankful to Liam and his guys for stepping in at this difficult time,” said the chief executive. “I think that he was the right person to bring forward, given the work he’s done with the B team but also he has his European Pro Licence, he has experience managing a team at Premiership level so I think he’s the right person for this interim period.

“I have spoken to him, not so much about targets, but he understands that this is an interim period and that he’ll give it his best shot. He knows that we need to start winning games. He is also aware that we are looking externally for the longer term and he fully understands that and appreciates the reasons why we’re doing that. I have the utmost respect for Liam, I think he’s a very good football coach and I think he’ll do well for us for as long as he’s in this role.”

Recruitment was discussed at length by McKinlay as he went into detail about sporting director Joe Savage’s departure and his imminent replacement, Graeme Jones. “Recruitment is a very subjective thing and people have personal views, and every fan will have a view on certain players. There are a few strands to this and I’ll try and cover each of them,” stated McKinlay.

“A few things have been said about the recruitment over the summer. Firstly, there has been this noise made about why did we let the sporting director leave. I just want to clarify that we didn’t let anyone leave. Joe Savage came to me and asked if he could go because he wanted some time away from the game, which I totally understood and respected. Having said that, he had put in place, with his team, a lot of the work around either the recruits that we had already signed or subsequently signed.

“Also, the whole recruitment is not just about the sporting director, there is a whole team who work in there and ultimately the manager makes the final decision on which players they want to bring in, they make the decision on which positions they want to bring in, because that’s another thing that’s been levelled at us in that the board has been remiss in not signing a striker.

“I have never, and will never and the board will never, tell a manager who they should sign, what position they should sign. If we did, we would rightly be vilified and criticised. So, the very suggestion that we have been culpable, I find a little bit strange. No one is to blame. We put together a budget for the recruitment team and the manager, they understood that and there has been a lot of turnover in the summer, there was plenty of money to work with as has been seen by the numbers of players which were brought in.

“I would also say that we’re very quick to judge new players, and I get that. Especially given the current circumstances, I get why we’re judging the new players. But a number of them have come from overseas so let’s give them a little bit of time before we rush to judgment. I wouldn’t be writing off any of the signings.

“Others, certainly over the summer, particularly the pre-contracts but even subsequent to that, I don’t recall seeing a lot of negative noise or feedback. I think everyone was actually very happy with the work we had done over the summer. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. I look around Scotland and I don’t know a club that gets all of its signings right. Even Celtic and Rangers, I could list loads of players at both of those clubs over the past couple of years who haven’t worked, and that includes Celtic who are highly successful.

“So, we won’t get them all right but we obviously need to get more right than wrong. I think we have done pretty well over the past few years but in the here and now, rightly so, people are criticising the players on the pitch. I spoke to the players on Monday and they know that they have not performed and they’ve let people down, and I am expecting a reaction from them.

“There is a lot of misapprehensions around what does a sporting director do. Again, I’ve heard people saying: ‘He doesn’t know anything about recruitment, it’s a joke, they don’t know what they’re doing.’ When I knew Joe was going I had some names of people in my mind and Graeme wasn’t actually on that list, Graeme was put to me by somebody else. At first, I thought that Graeme didn’t have the breadth that I was looking for, but, having had a lot of conversations with him since then, I became very aware that I was wrong, and that I think he will be transformative for us up at Oriam. That’s not to say that he’ll be better or worse than Joe. They’re different. It’s the same role but it will be done in a different way.

“What do I mean by that? When we brought Joe in, he had a recruitment background and we knew that and we wanted his focus to be on recruitment and his focus had been on recruitment so that’s not a criticism of him because, like I said, recruitment has been largely very good.

“Having said that, when he left we took a step back and thought let’s take a look at this a bit wider and let’s think what we really want our sporting director to really be. We want them to be up at Oriam and look after everything that goes on at Oriam. They’ll have oversight of all the teams, as well as the recruitment department, which is a department, we also have a performance department and we have an academy. These are huge departments in their own right and are very important to the future of the club.

“What we’ve got in Graeme is someone who brings huge experience from working with Steve Clarke, who I know is not happy to be losing Graeme but is happy for him, because he’s an integral part of how things work at Scotland, and he will become an integral part of our performance and I meant that in the widest sense of how everything performs up at Oriam.

“I am really looking forward to him coming in. Although he is still with the SFA, they have been very generous and they know that in the intervening period between him coming in that it would be helpful for him to be involved in some of the things we’re doing, and I’ve reached an agreement with them that that can happen, so I’m grateful to them for that. I think it’s very important that Graeme is part of the process that we’re currently undergoing.

“It’s also important to note that we knew, when we were recruiting for a new sporting director, that we were in the throes of doing recruitment in a slightly different way with the whole analytics piece and therefore we factored that in very much to how we recruited a sporting director, and with any conversations we had with prospective sporting directors we talked about analytics and made sure that they understood what they were coming into. That will also be a key discussion with any future manager, which will also be around analytics.”

On the decision to change the management team, McKinlay gave an insight into the thought process of the Hearts board. “These times are never pleasant and it has been difficult,” he conceded. “I think we know that the football over the last few weeks has been difficult. We had been hoping – the fanbase, all of us – that we could turn this around but it became evident to me, and to others, at the weekend that we just weren’t seeing signs of it turning around.

“I went into these two fixtures, St Mirren and Ross County, feeling that we needed, at the very least, four points and hopefully six. Having said that, if we lost 2-1 at the weekend but had a second-half performance that was unlucky or really spirited or we just didn’t get the rub of the green then that might’ve made me think slightly differently, but we didn’t. We had a very average second-half performance and that, unfortunately, left me in no doubt that we had to look at making a change.”

The sackings drew criticism in part because Hearts announced new contracts for all of their management team just last month. “Things can change quickly in football,” remarked McKinlay. “People are now looking at that and saying it was ridiculous and made us look foolish. It’s probably helpful if I can clarify a little bit about those new deals.

“The deals that we had with Steven and his assistants were two-year deals with an option. Steven and I had conversations over the summer around the fact – particularly around his assistants more so than him - that they would be going into the final year of their deals if we didn’t exercise the option, and they would start looking for other jobs. I get that. Any one of us, if we think our job is going to finish at a finite time, would do that.

“He was keen that we didn’t have that instability amongst the coaching team. I looked at the options, we had a discussion as a board and we agreed to exercise the option to give them the stability that they had asked for. I think it’s important, because the inference from many people is that it was such a stupid decision and cost us a lot of money, that without going into absolute detail I can say that the way we structure our contracts, compensation that gets paid either way didn’t change and doesn’t change. What we’ve ended up having to do here is no different than if we had exercised that option or not.”

Finally, the chief executive offered a message to disgruntled Hearts fans who are eager to see their team improve - starting this weekend against Ross County at Tynecastle. “My main message is that I know it’s been difficult, I know it’s been hard but we are one family, we are one Hearts family, and families go through ups and downs at difficult times, and we’re going through a difficult time at the moment,” admitted McKinlay.

“The only way we’re going to come out of this difficult time is if we all come together. Incredibly, and I can’t thank the fans enough, we sold out our away end at St Mirren, we will be sold out again this weekend and that’s phenomenal given the run that we’re going through.

“I would just ask, please get behind the team and please give them your full backing. I said to them when I spoke to them that, yes, they might’ve let people down but I believed in them and believe that they are a good football team and they showed that last year. If we can get together as one we can turn the corner and we will hopefully just look back on this period as a blip.”