How Hearts are making Blooming waves as Old Firm flounder | OneFootball

At a time when echoes of past football are heard once again in the resurgence of the long ball, long throws and the decoupling of teams from the always ridiculous default possession-based game (what must all those Messi Barcelona shirt wearers from 2010 think?), there’s one thing that is modern and progressive in its outlook: data.

You know what was the biggest result of the weekend? Forget any of those massive clubs that lumber through the Premier League like cash-hungry dinosaurs, frittering money away on players and managers, just because they can, in the knowledge the league will reward their profligacy with at least £150million more to waste on some idiotic choices. No, the biggest result of the weekend was that Hearts beat Celtic 3-1 – dominating with 34% possession – to go eight points ahead of Celtic at the top of the league.

The whisky-fuelled boardrooms of Scotland which, in some quarters, remain home to unreconstructed old boys that are PFMs in tooth, claw and repressed emotion, are being forced to face the fact that a computer and a database might be more useful than someone’s ‘gut feeling’ about a player or manager.

Tony Bloom’s summer investment in Hearts was about £10m for 29% worth of non-voting shares. In return, Hearts has the exclusive Scottish use of Jamestown Analytics, the infamous data tool, which might not be owned by Bloom, but is an offshoot of his Starlizard (what is a star lizard?) business. Although Bloom’s ally, James Franks, sits on the board, control remains in the hands of the Foundation of Hearts supporter movement.

This combination of grassroots control married with the influence of Jamestown Analytics and of course a cash injection from Bloom and philanthropist James Anderson, has already pushed Hearts to the top of the league and they look like the best team right now. With Bloom’s ambition of being champions within a decade and with the ever-tanned Derek McInnes as manager, they appear well ahead of schedule.

Now, let me tell you, this is nothing short of an earthquake. The two Glasgow teams’ stranglehold on Scottish football has been long and persistent. And their increasing financial dominance has, in the past, guaranteed that’s how it will remain. Celtic’s squad worth is valued at 132.5 million Euro by Transfermarkt, Hearts at 18 million. Hearts’ highest-valued player in the squad is 2.5 million Euro, yet Celtic’s have 18 equal to or greater than that. So you can see the radical financial difference Hearts have to overcome. It’s a huge task to achieve anything with such a disparity of resources.

But Hearts are counteracting that with the use of data to get over their relative poverty compared to Celtic and Rangers (valued at 104.5 million Euro), whose recent recruitment mistakes have been infuriating their fans. Money only gets you a seat at the table; you don’t automatically get to carve the beef if others are using intelligence and information.

All of these elements together are creating a sustainable and successful era at Hearts. Remarkably, they seem alone in so successfully harnessing data in Scottish football, which has been buying cheap, often mediocre players for years. In an impoverished league, it makes perfect sense to try and unearth quality but undervalued players. Indeed, mirroring the success of Brighton who, let’s not forget were in the third tier in just 2010 (and Bloom has only been there since 2009), Hearts are similarly ahead of the curve in riding the data wave, compared to the rest of Scottish football.

Union Saint-Gilloise offer a great example. They were in the fourth tier but, following a takeover by Tony Bloom in 2021, they returned to the Belgian Pro League after 48 years and finished top of the regular-season table in their first campaign back – a first for a newly promoted side. Though they narrowly missed out on the championship in 2022, 2023 and 2024, Union clinched their 12th league title in 2025, ending a 90-year championship drought – one of the longest in European football. Sound familiar? It does at Tynecastle. If it can work in Belgium, why not in Scotland?

There will still be bumps in the road, failures and defeats but Hearts are trying to overturn a 40-year hegemony at a time when Rangers and Celtic are in various stages of disarray, with fools in the boardroom who have been guided, as is still all too typical, less by intelligence and detail and more simply by money. More broadly, intelligent use of data is superseding the sheer volume of spend available.

With enough diversity to scare a hateful, bigoted, racist Reform politician, 11 players have arrived at Hearts from Brazil, Norway, Slovakia, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Greece, Burkina Faso, Iceland, Oxford and Walsall. No big names, obviously, but they have created a high energy team, have scored 22 goals, the highest in the league and let in just seven, the lowest in the league. They are yet to lose. The future looks bright; the data says so.