Sacking Naismith, Brighton owner talks & Shankland future – Hearts CEO exclusive

Hearts CEO Andrew McKinlay has revealed the club will use an analytics company to find a new head coach.

It comes a week after Sky Sports confirmed the Tynecastle Park club were in talks with Brighton owner Tony Bloom over a £10m investment deal that centred around the use of his analytics company.

In an exclusive interview with Sky Sports News, McKinlay refused to confirm it was the Premier League club owner that Hearts were in talks with, but said reports about Bloom were “exciting” and that fans would “put two and two together”.

During a wide-ranging interview, he also revealed why the Scottish Premiership’s bottom club decided to sack head coach Steven Naismith – weeks after announcing he had signed a new deal, and what the future holds for captain Lawrence Shankland as he enters the final season of his contract.

Click below to hear our exclusive interview with McKinlay in full, where he also confirms interim boss Liam Fox is not in the running for the job, discusses reports linking him with the vacant CEO role at Rangers and much more…

How will Hearts find a new manager?

“We’ve been inundated with people who are interested in the job, which says a lot about this club, and it’s a fantastic job for anyone.

“I’ll be honest with you, and this is the nature and the ruthlessness of this business, I was being sent applications several weeks ago for this role.

“I’ve said in the past we always have a list. We always have an active list of people that we might be interested in. In this particular scenario, we are working with an analytics company.

“What that doesn’t mean is they’re not just going to suddenly say to us, ‘here’s your manager, go and get him’. It’s much more complicated than that, and that’s part of the process. Anyone approaches us, anyone that we’ve already identified, or anyone that the company might have identified – we will put into the mix, we will look at them and get a view from an analytics perspective as to whether they might be right for us.

“I can’t really say much about it [the analytics company Hearts are working with] due to commercial confidentiality but I’m sure people will put two and two together, but I am not in a position to confirm who we are using or speaking to.”

Will there be someone in for the Edinburgh derby?

“I would hope so. I don’t want to put a day on it because if we don’t have someone, everyone will say ‘you said that date’. There might be a reason, and it would be a good reason as to why that didn’t that didn’t happen.

“I’d have a new manager tomorrow, but it’s not realistic. There are clubs that, amazingly, do have a manager who comes in one day after the other manager leaves, and they must have a very slick process. I have a personal view that it’s wrong to speak to anyone when someone’s in a job. It would show a real lack of integrity on my part, and it would be demeaning towards the current staff.

“The timescale will be what the timescale will be. We need to get the right person and we are working on it. We’ve been working on it tirelessly since the weekend. There’s a lot of work already going on. A lot of names have come in and we’ve already looked at a lot of those names from an analytics perspective.”

Will interim boss Fox be considered if he impresses?

“I’ve asked Liam to focus on the here and now. We are looking primarily externally for a candidate, so I’ve asked him to very much focus on the job. I expect he’ll do a good job in the interim period, I’ve not given him any set time or anything like that and he will take that role for as long as we require him to.

“I appreciate him and his assistants stepping up to do that role and I have every faith that they’ll do as good a job as possible.”

Have there been talks with Brighton owner Bloom?

“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.”

Why was now the time to sack Naismith?

“There was a general view that we had to do something now, and we had to make a change. I feel really sorry for Steven and his guys, it’s never a nice situation, but they’re very pragmatic and understand that things haven’t been good enough.

“Ultimately, I think it was the right decision. The stats are there – when it’s one of the worst starts, if not the worst start in the club’s history, it left us with a decision that had to be made.”

When asked if the club should have taken the decision to sack Naismith during the previous international break following their winless run, he said: “I think that would have been very harsh. Yes, things weren’t looking good, but we’d only played three or four league games by that time.

“That would seem incredible at that point, but it wasn’t going well. You do hope it’s going to turn the corner, and unfortunately, it just didn’t.

“I don’t think that [last season’s achievements] should be forgotten but the stats had become very, very compelling.

“Unfortunately, we had to move on but I hope people don’t forget the record over the one full season that Steven had. It will always be there in history that he’s got us into European group-stage football. We’re in Europe for the third year in a row, for the first time in our history.”

Why did the management team get new contracts?

“It’s an interesting one. We had an option for a third year, so this was Steven and his assistant’s second year of effectively a two-year plus one-year option, and it was entirely our option to extend that contract.

“Steven approached me, saying his assistants were concerned going into effectively the last year of their contract. He said that’ll be a distraction to the team and I looked at it and said we can exercise the option now, because financially, it makes no difference to the club.

“The way that our compensation clauses work is there is a set amount that’s paid – either if someone moves on, or if we go through what we’ve gone through this week.

“There’s been a lot of talk about this, saying it was financially stupid, or why did they do it? We did it for those reasons, to give a bit of stability, and we did it after the Rangers game. We’d been talking about it through the summer, that was just when we firmed it up.

“I don’t look back at it as the wrong decision at that particular time.”

What does the future hold for Shankland?

“The last offer we made was rejected, so there’s no offer that sits there at the moment. Obviously, if his advisors wanted to speak to us, or he wanted to speak to us, then we’d have a conversation.

“There’s nothing at the moment and we didn’t receive any offers [in the summer], which surprised me given Lawrence’s performances last season. It certainly didn’t disappoint me because I’m delighted to keep Lawrence for this year, and I hope for longer.

“I don’t see there being a decision to make in January, it looks like Lawrence will see out the last year of his contract, but I’d be delighted to have a conversation if there’s one to be had to see if there’s a way that we could persuade him to stay here longer.”

Did Rangers approach you over their CEO vacancy?

“I can put on record very clearly that I’ve had no conversations with Rangers, and Rangers have had no conversations with me.

“There have been press reports, I have no idea where those press reports have come from. There have been press reports about other individuals who were about to become chief executive and it didn’t come to fruition.

“I have no idea what Rangers plans are for the future. I wish them all the best in their search, but I am absolutely focused on my job with Hearts and will give it my utmost going forward.”