For 40 years Glasgow has held the power in Scottish football. Since Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen won the league in 1985, Celtic have won 22 titles and Rangers 18. No other team has had a sniff. But this year, Edinburgh’s Hearts are the best team in the league. With 16 games to go, they have a six-point lead over the Old Firm giants. This unlikely story is a combination of a smaller team using its resources efficiently and two large clubs struggling with structural changes that are eroding their dominant position.

If there has been a modish trend in British football in the past two decades, then Hearts have tried it. There has been a… unique foreign owner that spent lavishly before bringing the club to the edge of ruin (in their case, a Russian-Lithuanian businessman called Vladimir Romanov), a pivot to fan ownership and, most recently, a commitment to data analytics.

It is a mix of the latter two trends that have transformed Hearts into league leaders. Four years of fan ownership have seen the club promoted back to Scottish Premiership, followed by jaunts in the Conference and Europa Leagues. In June, the club’s foundation accepted an offer of just under £10 million from a British businessman, Tony Bloom, in exchange for 29 per cent of the club. This formalised an agreement struck a year before........

© The Spectator