Hearts chief executive Andrew McKinlay discussed an array of subjects in an in-depth interview with club media.
Here are the key things he said…
On sacking Steven Naismith and his backroom team:
“The football over the last few weeks has been difficult. We had been hoping – the fanbase, all of us – we could turn this around but it became evident at the weekend that we just weren’t seeing signs of it turning around.
“If we lost 2-1, 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.”
On recently awarding the past management team new contracts:
“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, particularly around his assistants more so than him, that they would be going into the final year of their deals, and if we didn’t exercise the option 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 among the coaching team.”
On the new manager search and timeline:
“The timeline is a difficult one because I’d love to be able to bring in a manager tomorrow or as soon as possible. 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.
“We do, though, 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.
“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.”
On the role of the analytics company:
“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. “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.
“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.”
On the interim management team:
“I’m thankful to Liam and his guys for stepping in at this difficult time, I think that he was the right person to bring forward.
“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.”
On possible outside investment:
“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.
“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 Foundation of Hearts’ 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.”