VincentGuerin

It was magnificent at times when Hearts did it on the rare occasions that Souttar was fit. With a player like that available playing the back three transformed Hearts as a side and made much more of the other players in the team. If you don't have someone that good at carrying the ball and passing the ball at centre half it can end up just being a jumbled mess. Like anything to do with tactics and shape, it's a good idea with the right players.

Look, we get it. You lived in Edinburgh, some Hearts fans were nasty to you. Fine. But you honestly make every St Mirren - Hearts thread a total snoozefest. Nobody can be fucked arguing with you. Nobody is getting all worked up. You're just really, really boring. I won't be replying to you again on the topic. Hopefully we can salvage a match thread here.

Talking about 86 again will be really interesting and full of lots of new things to say. As someone who was approaching my second birthday at the time, it's very relevant to me.

What's not sustainable about it? I'm really not sure you're grasping that the aim here is to stop clubs spending beyond their means. Anderson's money is gifted to Hearts. It is literally within our means. If he'd been loaning it to us and wanted it paid back, I'd be extremely concerned. But he isn't. The money has helped us put infrastructure in place that will see the club in a good position for years to come.

f**k off / Hi, nice to see you.

Not spending all day going back over old ground, as this was extensively covered at the time. Hearts have been spending hugely on infrastructure over the last few years, and the Anderson money has been factored into our spending. Despite the Hibs.net view of this, it does not mean Hearts are reliant on Anderson to remain a going concern. He's helpful, of course. But he also exists and his input is planned for. It's like you building a nice house with your own money and then your old man giving you twenty grand to build an extension and people pointing out that you couldn't afford it without him. That's true, but you've got the money from him, so you can. And you paid for the nice house yourself. We've got full houses every week, we've got the FoH money, we've got rising commerical income. Anderson is nice, but we'd manage without him. And fortunately a lot of our recent spending (finishing the stand, building the hotel etc) is spend we won't have to make again.

Fair dos. I think you'd be well-suited to a job in Scottish football administration. Call the SFA.

You have if you implement it properly. Your argument seems to be that because it's not perfect and because it's done poorly elsewhere, it's a terrible idea. You're missing the big point. You're also competely failing to take into account context. English football has a massive disparity between its top flight and the others, creating an over-spending trap. We don't have that to the same extent. The EFL clubs could do themselves a huge favour by tightening their FFP rules, but the owners, who WANT to spend money, will not agree to that. The consequences are the financial bloodbath that you see. The average Championship club loses £470,000 per week. They're being stupid. It doesn't mean we have to be stupid too. We don't have the same spending trap to the same degree.

No, it's not. You've created a system that protects the clubs across the country from reckless ownership.

I've been to a lot of Hearts matches this season. I've spent a lot of time talking to other Hearts fans in the pub, at games, on trains, in WhatsApp groups etc etc. Nobody among them has expressed any opinion on whether they'd like St Mirren to make the top six or not. You can believe that it matters to us if it makes you feel important.

There is no serious doubt about Hearts' future as a going concern. It's a silly comparison. Livingston have existed for less than 30 years and are on course for a third administration while completely failing to interest the local area despite some on-field success. It's beyond question that Livi are not a sustainable football club at a high level.

You're basically insolvent. Of course it's not sustainable. That's an absolutely wild thing to say.

People were saying that twenty years ago. They're not. And they won't be.

You "achieved" all this with a completely unsustainable model and your town are still completely uninterested. You're on your way to the lower leagues, and then oblivion. That's failure.

A huge amount of "if everything goes better than it has so far" about that. I understand you need to be optimistic. But it's over.

I don't think we can replicate Germany, so it's not relevant to this discussion. What is a "thorough check of their financial history" if not FFP?

Essentially, the theft of Meadowbank has been a failure. The people of Livingston have rejected the club and it's all basically been a waste of time. The best outcome now is Livi going bust, shedding their shameful origins, and starting again from the bottom with some respectability and finding their own level. Although, I get the feeling that if they do go bust, there will be no significant phoenix club. The town isn't interested and has made that very clear.

You don't want it, I get it. But we see a lot of this "Oh, it can't be perfect". It's about protecting your club and mine from bad owners. A lot of people lose sight of that.

Couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but it was discussed when the accounts were released. Our wages to turnover needs to come down a bit, imo, but I can't remember the exact figures. We published accounts, so it's all available.

Christ. Bye Ric.

Fucking hell. You honestly believe that?

UEFA allow the club owner to top up the losses.

You're clearly referencing Anderson, so let's talk about him as an example. Firstly, he's not a threat to Hearts. He gives the club money and he wants nothing back. He's contributed to infrastructure projects, the women's team etc. I don't see how anyone can be against that kind of stuff. Were Anderson presenting this money as big loans that we'd need to give him back, it would be completely different. He's not a risk to the club, and FFP should be about avoiding clubs being at risk. I don't see the issue with a mechanism where you, or I, or anyone else can gift their club money. I see a clear problem with clubs being saddled with debt in a short-term rush for success. What part of that do you object to?

The Old Firm have better players, so, yes, they'd probably have better lawyers. But I don't see that as a reason to just scrap the whole thing? A lot of the time in Scottish football we see the perfect as the enemy of the good. Just because the OF will be better placed to deal with it, doesn't mean it's a bad idea for us to put a system in place to safeguard our clubs. And, like I mentioned before, just because things have been relatively stable for a while, that doesn't mean we should get complacent.

UEFA's FFP rules allow clubs to spend around £5m a year more than they bring in. I don't see how that is unreasonable in a Scottish context. On what planet is it not dangerous for clubs of our level to be spending more than that? That's not preventing growth, it's preventing madness and putting clubs at risk. Top flight sides should spend more. They have more money and they play against better sides. I don't really see the issue with that. FFP would mean the cubs at the bottom end of the top flight wouldn't be throwing money around like mad, so I don't really see what the problem with that is. I think parachute payments are something we should be very careful about. They distort the competition quite badly, and I think the sensible thing to do is to use prize money to soften the fall rather than parachute payments. Obviously, it's up to clubs to keep their own house in order with contract conditions as well. But that kind of thing would develop as time passed. As for challenging the Old Firm; Do we want Dundee to suddenly emerge as the biggest club in Scotland because someone has come in and chucked huge money at them overnight? As much as anything else, such a club would almost certainly fall foul of UEFA FFP rules, so it would be a somewhat phyrric victory.