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OFFICIAL HEARTS JUGGERNAUT THREAD 2020-


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2 hours ago, Eednud said:

Nathaniel Atkinson, Cameron Devlin, Garang Kuol and Kye Rowley all in the Australian squad for friendlies against Ecuador in Sydney on 24 March and Melbourne on 28 March.

2 weeks out, til the end of the season, so tired he will come on for last 10 and a knock & won't be risked against Killie.

IMO.

Edited by the jambo-rocker
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7 hours ago, Stylish Kid said:

So, out of the cup but still not clear in 3rd. Hopefully losing to Celtic doesn't demoralise the team too much and we can kick on and secure 3rd comfortablely

A point on Saturday will leave us looking good, but I can't say trust in Neilson for a game like this is high.

Hopefully Shankland and Snodgrass back.

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https://theathletic.com/4330943/2023/03/27/mowgli-tartan-shorts-and-a-nuclear-submarine-inside-vladimir-romanovs-hearts/

Spoiler

 Inside Vladimir Romanov’s Hearts – Mowgli, tartan shorts and a nuclear submarine

Phil Hay
Mar 27, 2023

31

  • This is part of a series of articles inspired by questions from our readers. So thank you Adam S for suggesting a piece on Vladimir Romanov’s remarkable stint as owner of Heart of Midlothian.

The last image anyone in Scotland has of Vladimir Romanov is from a grainy news item broadcast on Russian TV two years ago. Romanov is being interviewed with snow all around him, a huge black submarine wedged in a drift to his right. It can drop to -20C (-4F) here and a red mountaineering jacket is zipped up to his chin.

 

His location is given as Nikul’skaya, a village in north-west Russia and one so small you can count the individual houses on Google’s satellite imagery. Romanov is here because he is wanted in Lithuania on various criminal charges. The submarine is his and he explains he’s refurbished it to live in, at a cost of several thousand pounds. According to the interview, it is all he has left. “I lost everything,” he says.

Beneath his hat is the face Scottish football knows well: the broad jaw, the slightly swarthy skin, the alert eyes that always seemed to be calculating something. And this, if we’re honest, is how Scottish football thought it would end, with Romanov’s idiosyncrasies expelling him to the wilds.

“Mad Vlad” they called him and here is the caricature: frozen tundra, a marooned submarine, a 73-year-old evading the law.

But it is only half the story of Romanov and Heart of Midlothian. Beneath the black hat is the man who tried to disrupt Scottish football like no one before him or since, the little-known Eastern bloc businessman who sought to break the duopoly of the Old Firm and, in the close season of 2005, gave the game the best chance in a generation of the title heading somewhere other than Rangers or Celtic.

For an instant he had it cracked. And then, like most of the things in his world, it was gone.


Edinburgh is Scotland’s capital city, but the power in Scottish football lies in Glasgow.

Hearts are one of the country’s most recognised clubs but there are few leagues anywhere in the world with more unbroken dominance than the west coast maintains. Celtic and Rangers have 107 titles between them. The Edinburgh clubs, Hearts and Hibernian, have eight, the last of them coming to Tynecastle Park in 1960. No team outside the Old Firm has raised the league flag since 1985.

Which is to say that beyond the country’s borders, Hearts’ profile has its limits. But in the autumn of 2005, Charlie Mann, Romanov’s spokesperson for several years at Tynecastle, was watching the weekly National Lottery draw on a Saturday night. Before the draw was made, the show killed a bit of airtime by staging a short quiz.

“One of the questions was, ‘Vladimir Romanov owns which club?'” Mann recalls. “The options were Hearts, Chelsea and another club I forget. This woman from Berkshire knew the answer right away. She knew it was Hearts. I’ve never forgotten my surprise — that’s the level of impact Romanov was making. He put Hearts on the map in a way they hadn’t been for a very long time.”

By then, Romanov had been in control of Hearts for less than a year. Short at 5ft 7in (170cm) with wispy hair that he liked to comb back tidily over his head, he was a scaled-down version of Roman Abramovich: enigmatic, appearing from nowhere with a background that required some digging. Put simply, very few people knew anything about him.

He spoke little English but understood enough and, according to the stories he told, his father had been in the Russian military and served during the taking of Berlin in 1945. Romanov joined the navy and then, seduced by fashion labels he saw on his travels, set up a clothing company in Lithuania.

Mann’s understanding is that, with very little warning, the business was taken from him by the KGB. “It was thriving in Kaunas (Lithuania’s second-largest city) and his branded clothing was doing a storm,” Mann says. “Then the KGB took it and there was nothing he could do, absolutely nothing. That’s the thing you have to realise about Vlad. Where he grew up, you had to know who your friends were. Otherwise, you could be in big trouble.

“It influenced him and the way he thought.”

Romanov was born in Soviet Russia and the reason he relocated to Lithuania was John Le Carre-esque. Paul Kiddie, who worked in Hearts’ PR department for most of Romanov’s time as owner, met him for the first time while he was working as a football writer for Edinburgh’s Evening News. “The way he put it, he had upset a few people in Russia,” Kiddie says. “He was made aware that he was on a list — I hesitate to say hit list but, whatever it was, his name was on it. So he hot-footed it to Lithuania.”

In 2005, Romanov was in control of a Lithuanian bank called Ukio Bankas, established in the post-Cold War gold rush. He ran sports clubs in his homeland, including FBK Kaunas. Whatever else attracted him unannounced to Scotland, and to Hearts in particular, he had an eye on the financial markets of western Europe and plans to establish Ukio Bankas there.

“That was absolutely clear from day one,” Mann says. “His thought process was to come in, build up Hearts, have success with the club and, on the back of that, start getting his bank into Europe. He was very open about it. You had five major financial centres: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid and Edinburgh. Guess which one was the cheapest?”

And Hearts? Hearts were an opportunity because Hearts were in an existential crisis.

To cut a long story short, their Scottish Cup win in 1998 — their first for 42 years — tempted the board to throw money at the squad in the hope of more honours, but several years on, the club were heavily in debt. A deal had been negotiated to sell their Tynecastle home to property developers and the plan was to rent Murrayfield, a rugby stadium nearby. Opposition to the idea was ferocious and Romanov offered a solution.

If he bought Hearts, he would activate a clause to terminate the stadium sale, a promise he rapidly delivered on. In the eyes of many supporters, the unknown was worth a go because the known looked terminal.

David Southern, who would later become Hearts’ managing director, was the club’s head of communications when Romanov assumed control. There and then, everyone would have settled for a few years of stable living but, as he prepared for his first full season, Romanov pulled out the big guns.

“The ultimate aim was to take on the Old Firm and break the duopoly,” Southern says. “Ninety per cent of Scottish football accepts its place in the food chain, but he wasn’t having that. The thing about Scottish football, though, is that navigating through it is like playing a game of chess.

“He was trying to play chess with boxing gloves on.”


The “Mad Vlad” tag amused Southern because, in Romanov, he never saw a lunatic. He saw a single-minded and often stubborn businessman shaped by the world he had grown up in, but not a certified madman.

“I can’t claim to know Vladimir from the couple of dozen times I met him,” Southern says. “And trust me, I’m no apologist for him. I did the hard yards at Hearts, I saw the best of times and the worst of times. He had what seemed like conspiracy theories in his head, no doubt, but honestly, he was extremely amiable; gracious, polite and respectful.

“The caricature created of him… look, he gave plenty of ammunition to the media. He was painted as the James Bond baddie. But scratch the surface and he was anything but mad. He had a plan and he was dead set on realising it. Was it misguided? People up here are still arguing about that.”

Kiddie says Romanov “had a swagger about him” but considered it to be the egotistical air wealthy men sometimes give off. Mann, who worked for PR firm Weber Shandwick, spoke on Romanov’s behalf from the outset and watched as he stepped into unfamiliar climes and struggled to comprehend some of what he found. “There’s no getting away from it, quite a few of the decisions he made were bizarre,” Mann says. “In the end, when I stopped working for him, it seemed to me he’d entrenched into a deep position of suspicion where he wouldn’t speak to anybody. I didn’t want us to take money from someone we couldn’t communicate for.

“What you had was a definite culture clash. He fell into certain traps. Take the media. Where he came from, papers like The Sun just didn’t exist. In his world, you weren’t getting mocked up as a joke figure on the sports pages. I had to tell him that this is how it is, it’s not personal, it’s the way it works here. But I don’t think he could ever get his head around things like that.”

The summer and early autumn of 2005, up to the point where Romanov lit a fire under his own work, saw the best of him and his tenure. Hearts set up the ‘Magnificent Seven’ scheme which aimed to bring every child aged seven from Edinburgh and the surrounding Lothian area to Tynecastle, many for the first time. Thousands came through the gates on non-matchdays, met the squad, sat in the stands and received free tickets and free shirts. There was a cost involved but Romanov was happy with it.

“The whole point of it, and this worked well, was that we wanted to own Edinburgh, to take total ownership of the city in a football sense,” Southern says. “Romanov was big on it, but one of the papers went with the headline, ‘Mad Vlad welcomes kids to Tynecastle’. There were times when the image portrayed of him was a bit lazy. He caused some of that, but still, it was great tabloid fodder.

“Romanov left a legacy good and bad but I always say this — when Hearts won the Scottish Cup in 2012, the seven-year-olds who had come to Tynecastle for the first time on those dark nights in 2005 would have been teenagers by then, some of them in the stands at Hampden. Some of that stuff was under-appreciated, although I get why.”

What nobody could ignore or fail to appreciate was the explosive change on the footballing front at Tynecastle.

With the 2005-06 term ahead of him, so much of what Romanov sanctioned made sense. George Burley was appointed manager, as credible a choice as a club of Hearts’ size could hope for. Phil Anderton joined as chief executive, a well-regarded figure who had been working in Scottish rugby and wasted no time tapping into the feel-good factor.

On the transfer front, the signings were impressive; not household names as such, but a string of players of extremely high quality by SPL standards. Takis Fyssas had won Euro 2004 with Greece. Edgaras Jankauskas was a Champions League winner with Porto. Roman Bednar, Rudi Skacel, Julien Brellier, and Michal Pospisil added to Scottish talismen like Steven Pressley, Paul Hartley and Craig Gordon. The club looked armed to the teeth.

Pressley, known to everyone as ‘Elvis’, was a fiercely competitive, cards-on-the-table centre-back and the club’s captain.

“George sat us down at the start and asked us where we thought we could finish,” Pressley says. “I said ‘first’ and I meant it. But the way I see it is that we had title potential — just not necessarily in one season. Maybe we would have needed the know-how of going close first. But, if we’d stayed together as we were at the beginning, anything was possible.

“We’d started going to Celtic and Rangers believing we could win; that was the difference. George’s football was aggressive and he had this great way of being very dismissive of other teams. He’d tell you that you were great, the other teams were nothing special, and confidence came from that. I really liked him.”

In a positive sense, the effect was like applying a spark to tinder. Hearts started the season with eight straight wins, routing Hibs and beating Rangers. They pushed Celtic hard in a 1-1 draw at Parkhead and, after 10 matches, they were three points clear at the top of the league, unbeaten with a goal difference of +17. “You’d be in Tynecastle listening to the crowd singing ‘we are unbeatable’,” Mann says. “You couldn’t believe what was going on.”

Southern, a Hearts fan all his life, was equally staggered. “We were so good that teams were having to put up the shutters at half-time, already resigned to defeat.”

But like a hand grenade came the night of Friday, October 21. The date sticks in Southern’s mind so vividly that he recants it without missing a beat. It was 10.30pm and Southern was at home in Edinburgh when his phone rang. Anderton was on the other end of the line.

“David, you better prepare yourself for tomorrow…”


The confusing aspect of George Burley’s sacking is that, even now, it is hard to get a clear answer about why it happened. Most people aren’t sure and neither Burley nor Romanov ever explained themselves. There were rumours, there was innuendo, but no proper clarity.

As it unfolded, Southern’s attempt to persuade Romanov to issue a public statement was met with resistance and indifference. “His view was, ‘Why do we need to say anything?’,” Southern says. “There was no willingness to take control of the narrative. In the end, I managed to persuade them to put out a statement saying we’d be putting out a statement. That’s how basic the response was.”

Burley departed Hearts on the morning of Saturday, October 22, shortly before a 2-0 win over Dunfermline and what would have been his 11th league game in charge. The waves made during his short time as manager were dramatic. Prior to his dismissal, the Romanov revolution featured as a lead item on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock news. “We were getting coverage in Italian newspapers and German magazines,” Southern says. “We had press cuttings from all over Europe and the compatriots of players who had joined us were starting to read about Hearts challenging the Old Firm. From a PR perspective, it was make hay while the sun shines.”

Anderton and Mann got wind of trouble brewing 24 hours before Burley’s dismissal. Friction between Romanov and Burley was evident, even if the reasons for it were opaque. But after a meeting at Tynecastle at which Romanov was present, Mann believed Burley would be given until at least the end of the year.

The following lunchtime, Mann was travelling to St Mirren in his other guise as a BBC commentator. “I was driving over the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow when my phone went,” he says. “It was Sky telling me George had gone. I was halfway to Paisley, which tells you how confident I was that George was safe. All I could do was turn around, go home, get a suit on and head for Tynecastle.”

Southern knew the game was up when Anderton came into the office and “gave me one of those looks with a barely discernible shake of the head”. Anderton, clearly baffled by events, would himself be sacked before long. Hearts’ chairman, the MP George Foulkes, later resigned in protest at the developing farce but, on that Saturday evening, it was Foulkes who emerged from the tunnel at Tynecastle, camera flashes bouncing off his face, to face questions from the media.

Though Mann was as close to Romanov as anyone, he was not given the precise reasons for Burley’s dismissal. “Something happened,” he says. “I don’t know what but it seemed like there had been a clash of personalities.”

Southern, who rated Burley as “first-class” in the short time their paths crossed, wonders whether deep down, Romanov resented him getting the credit for Heart’s white-hot form; resented Burley getting credit for a project built on his cash. A bewildered Pressley was also in the dark. “I’d gone into an office at the training ground to be told the news,” Pressley says. “As I listened, I sat there looking up at two manager-of-the-month awards on a shelf, which says it all.

“George never really spoke about any of the difficulties around him. He kept that away from us. There had been murmurs of things not being right. I’d heard Vlad wasn’t happy with the 1-1 draw we got at Celtic (Burley’s last game in charge). He didn’t like the subs or something; thought it was a game we should have won. Whatever it was, it escalated. But George had been a top English manager. He wasn’t going to be pushed around.

“Later, we were in the changing room and Fyssas, like a Greek philosopher, said to me that everything was going to end in tears. He wasn’t far wrong.”

It was, as Southern puts it, Romanov’s first “seismic” decision. The first of many.

Burley’s replacement was Graham Rix, the former Chelsea coach who had been convicted of sexual offences and jailed in 1999. Rix’s involvement invited unflattering headlines and he lasted for four months, sacked with Hearts 17 points adrift of Celtic.

But even so, the 2005-06 season would encapsulate the contradiction of Romanov; his knack of giving Hearts memories to treasure while simultaneously taking them to the brink of collapse.

That year, they won the Scottish Cup with Valdas Ivanauskas, a capable and mean-looking Lithuanian, in the dugout. Romanov took part in the open-top bus parade through Edinburgh. They finished second in the table and made the qualifying stages of the Champions League, Zadok the Priest blaring around Tynecastle after the decisive fixture.

Putting Burley aside, it was almost possible to think the era’s potential was not blown. “Those early days, they were sensational,” Mann says. “Think about it. When Romanov came in, Tynecastle was getting sold for flats. The club was in a parlous state. And then what came next? It was a major, major opportunity, which is sad to say.

“In one of the conversations I had with George (Burley), he admitted he wasn’t sure if he had quite enough to win the title that year. The spine of the team, yes, but if they had to go to Celtic and win on a Wednesday night, would they have enough in the squad? Maybe second was the best they were going to get.

“But really, who’s to say?”

Moments of success were a shield for Romanov but as the mistakes, incendiary belligerence and weirdness outweighed them, patience wore thin.

The Hearts supporters increasingly struggled to see where the club was going. There was friction over the arrival of players and coaches from FBK Kaunas, Romanov’s club in Lithuania. One of those who briefly managed the squad, Eduard Malofeev, spoke no English at all. Monthly salary payments arrived late. At its height, the wage bill grew to 132 per cent of turnover, an unsustainable situation unless Romanov’s funding was endless. And as time went on, it was obvious the funding was not.

Time after time, staff at Tynecastle witnessed Romanov’s maverick, single-minded tendencies. Early in his reign, he explored the idea of swimming across Loch Ness and was videoed in the water, although it is not thought he actually attempted to cross the breadth of it. Why did he want to do that? “Because he’s Vladimir Romanov,” Southern says.

Kiddie thinks there may have been a documentary in the pipeline, one which failed to see the light of day. Southern also heard discussions about changing the club’s name to Dynamo Hearts or Sparta Hearts. “Vlad and the people around him didn’t think Heart of Midlothian was a known name in Europe,” he says. “So I said to them, ‘The way to be noticed in Europe is to qualify for Europe’. To be fair, that discussion was very short-lived.”

Far more serious was Romanov’s insistence in the 2005-06 season that Hearts change the colour of their shirt from maroon to yellow and green, the colours of Kaunas and the Lithuanian flag. One Saturday evening after a match at Tynecastle, Southern was walking past the desk of Ali Russell, Hearts’ then-commercial director.

“Ali held up a photo of Kaunas celebrating a league title or a cup, the usual thing with ticker tape and beaming smiles,” Southern says. “He said, ‘How do you like our new kit?’ Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had been a long day. ‘No, seriously. Romanov wants to change the colour of the shirt. I’m going to speak to him now’.”

Russell asked Southern to attend the meeting with him, along with Sergejus Fedotovas, a Lithuanian director who had joined the board after Romanov’s takeover.

“A real hospital pass,” Southern jokes. “But this is probably the best example of the clash of cultures and the way in which you had to try to make Romanov understand a different point of view.

“I said ‘maroon is our colour, it’s always been our colour’. ‘Doesn’t matter’ was the reply. So I said ‘green is the colour of our biggest rivals’, meaning Hibs. Vladimir gave me this dismissive flick of the hand as if to say Hibs aren’t our rivals. He never thought they were. He thought we were challenging Rangers and Celtic. But that gave me my in. Thinking on my feet, I said, ‘No, I mean Celtic. They use green and yellow’. And when that got translated, I could see his eyes narrowing and him starting to think.

“But beyond that, I told them they could put a zero in the sales column. Produce a shirt with green on it and not a single fan will buy it. That really helped the penny to drop. Ali and I weren’t being presumptuous but, as we got up to leave the meeting, we were thinking ‘mission accomplished’.

“Then Sergejus points to a magazine on the table. There’s a picture of Stephane Adam scoring that iconic goal (when Hearts beat Rangers in the Scottish Cup final in 1998) and a tube of glue. A tartan shortbread wrapper had been cut out and stuck over Adam’s shorts. Sergejus says ‘What about this then?’ I was tired and the only answer I could find was, ‘Sergejus… tartan is for the tourists’. Again, Romanov understood what I meant. That was that.”

To Southern, Fedotovas was a competent operator who he liked. “But I used to laugh when I saw him described as Vlad’s right-hand man,” he says. “Vlad didn’t have a right-hand man. He was his own man.”

Other individuals came and went, too. Kiddie and Southern remember one character who appeared at Tynecastle without warning and went by the name of Igor. It was all they knew about him, not even his surname. “He was tall and bald and we used to joke about whether he was there to tell Vlad when it might be time to get out of Dodge,” Kiddie says.

Anderton’s sacking and Foulkes’ resignation prompted the appointment of Romanov’s son, Roman, as chairman and interim chief executive, though not for long. In oversized suits, Roman looked like a boy in a man’s job but Southern found him to be intelligent and articulate, U.S.-educated and more in touch with western life. “I never got the sense Roman was comfortable at Hearts,” Southern says. “I got the impression he didn’t really agree with some of his father’s decisions.”

It was Roman who had flown in with a Lithuanian lawyer on the day Anderton was sacked. The pair went around senior Hearts officials, Southern included, effectively asking whose side they were on. “I told him, ‘Roman, with the greatest of respect to you and your father, I’m on the side of Heart of Midlothian’,” Southern says. “He looked at the lawyer, nodded and left without saying a word.”

Anderton’s meeting went differently and after exiting the building, he was not seen at Tynecastle again.


As seasons went by, persistent allegations emerged about team selection being influenced from above. “What form that took, I don’t know,” Mann says. There were fights with the Scottish Football Association, searing criticism of refereeing standards and incredible statements from Romanov which Hearts were obliged to publish on their website.

One contained the line: “I beg you Mowgli, take the monkeys back to the safari park!” — a dig at unnamed people in the game. These are the conspiracy theories Mann and Southern talk about, the paranoia they remember.

“Those statements would land with a thud,” Kiddie says. “We had no idea what some of them meant and I couldn’t rewrite them. I’d say to the press boys, ‘Write what you like. I can’t give you any guidance because I don’t know a thing. I don’t know who Mowgli is’. Was Romanov talking about the SFA? Was he talking about David Murray at Rangers or someone at Celtic? I honestly can’t say.

“After one of his ‘monkeys’ statements, I went on to Gorgie Road and bought some bananas and nuts for the next press conference. Not all the journalists took it in the spirit it was intended.”

In the dressing room, bemusement reigned. The most serious flare-up came in October 2006, an incident still referred to as the ‘Riccarton Three’. Ivanauskas was absent from Hearts, said to be unwell rumoured to be at a health spa at Romanov’s insistence. Malofeev had taken the role of caretaker coach and was supposed to hold his first press conference the day before a game against Dunfermline. Reporters at Hearts’ Riccarton training ground were waiting for Malofeev when, to their surprise, Pressley strode in with two team-mates, Hartley and Gordon.

“Are we ready?” Pressley asked, then he cut loose.

The machinations of Hearts under Romanov had begun to frustrate him immensely. Two weeks earlier, Southern suggested to the centre-back that he fly to Lithuania and air his grievances with Romanov face-to-face. Pressley’s view was that Romanov knew well enough how the squad were feeling and, in that press conference, he spoke about values and discipline, about what he called “significant unrest in the dressing room”.

“It was just everything,” he says. “There wasn’t a degree of trust in the club. Some of the methods of certain coaches, like Malofeev for example, I felt were backwards. People weren’t getting paid on time. Players trying to negotiate to leave weren’t getting sensible answers. Person after person was coming to me with this stuff. It was relentless so I said what I said. I’d had enough.

“There was no trust in the dressing room either. At one point, there were so many players that the squad had to be split in two for training. They extended the benches into the showers so everyone had a seat. I felt it had become an absolute shambles with no real strategy.”

Though Southern and Mann insist Romanov was not particularly angered by the Riccarton Three, Pressley was stripped of the captaincy soon after. Romanov did not confront him directly but Pressley feels the events must have been “100 per cent connected”. Two months later, he left for Celtic, but even his final day was a shambles.

In a meeting at the training ground, Ivanauskas offered Pressley the assistant manager’s job. Then Pressley travelled to Tynecastle, where he was told by two Lithuanian officials that he had no future at the club. Confused by the contradiction, he took the move to Celtic Park.

“Nothing was aligned,” Pressley says. “But in fairness to Vlad, sometimes I’m not sure he was getting the true story of what was going on. Sometimes I didn’t think the reality was being fed back to him.

“How do I reflect on him? I think he had good intentions, but I also feel he was badly advised or didn’t listen to advice and took bad business decisions. That’s the way I’d put it.”


The last time Southern saw Romanov and the last time he thinks Romanov was in Scotland was at the 2013 League Cup final, which Hearts lost to St Mirren.

Romanov had been at Hampden 12 months earlier for a 5-1 demolition of Hibs in the Scottish Cup final, the club’s greatest result in living memory. But on that occasion, he did not take part in the open-top bus celebrations. Hearts were financially stricken and his ability or willingness to support them was waning. For him, it was different to the cup win of 2006.

“At the end of the 2006 final, the press lads asked me to get some quotes from him,” Mann says. “I went down and what he said was, ‘The fans are worth more to me than all the oil and gas in Russia’. Those were the good times, a communications dream.”

In 2013, Hearts hit the wall. In debt and insolvent, the club entered administration.

The Romanov era was over.

Hearts teetered badly but a rescue package was found. Ann Budge, a local businesswoman, bought the club out of administration with a view to Foundation of Hearts (FOH), a fans’ group, acquiring it from her at a later date. FOH had been set up in 2010 and supporters began piling in donations to protect Hearts from liquidation. It was an unintended legacy of Romanov’s ownership, but Hearts would become the biggest fan-owned club in the United Kingdom.

FOH’s takeover went through in 2021 and, as of this month, the total raised from fan pledges was £15million ($18.5m) and counting.


In 2013, Ukio Bankas collapsed, debt-ridden and removed from the Lithuanian Stock Exchange.

In the years that followed, Romanov and others involved with the bank were charged with offences relating to alleged misappropriation of funds, charges Romanov strenuously denied. He fled to Russia, where newspaper reports claimed he had been granted asylum, denying Lithuania the power to extradite him.

Lithuania’s Criminal Police Bureau was asked by The Athletic about Romanov’s whereabouts and the current status of criminal charges against him. It directed questions to the General Prosecutor’s Office which, at the point of publication, had not responded. It is not clear if Romanov, now in his mid-70s, is still in Nikul’skaya or living in his submarine. Questions put to a government agency in nearby Vozhega also went unanswered.

There has been little or no media coverage of him since 2021.

The submarine he owns is not just any submarine. Bought in 2006, it is the famous K19, completed in 1960 and one of the first nuclear subs to be built by Russia. Romanov claimed to have served as a cook on it.

Owing to a nuclear accident the following year, it earned the nickname ‘Hiroshima’ and, in that, there is some poetic resonance. 

 

 

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51 minutes ago, Merkland Red said:

https://theathletic.com/4330943/2023/03/27/mowgli-tartan-shorts-and-a-nuclear-submarine-inside-vladimir-romanovs-hearts/

  Reveal hidden contents

 Inside Vladimir Romanov’s Hearts – Mowgli, tartan shorts and a nuclear submarine

Phil Hay
Mar 27, 2023

31

 
  • This is part of a series of articles inspired by questions from our readers. So thank you Adam S for suggesting a piece on Vladimir Romanov’s remarkable stint as owner of Heart of Midlothian.

The last image anyone in Scotland has of Vladimir Romanov is from a grainy news item broadcast on Russian TV two years ago. Romanov is being interviewed with snow all around him, a huge black submarine wedged in a drift to his right. It can drop to -20C (-4F) here and a red mountaineering jacket is zipped up to his chin.

 

His location is given as Nikul’skaya, a village in north-west Russia and one so small you can count the individual houses on Google’s satellite imagery. Romanov is here because he is wanted in Lithuania on various criminal charges. The submarine is his and he explains he’s refurbished it to live in, at a cost of several thousand pounds. According to the interview, it is all he has left. “I lost everything,” he says.

Beneath his hat is the face Scottish football knows well: the broad jaw, the slightly swarthy skin, the alert eyes that always seemed to be calculating something. And this, if we’re honest, is how Scottish football thought it would end, with Romanov’s idiosyncrasies expelling him to the wilds.

“Mad Vlad” they called him and here is the caricature: frozen tundra, a marooned submarine, a 73-year-old evading the law.

But it is only half the story of Romanov and Heart of Midlothian. Beneath the black hat is the man who tried to disrupt Scottish football like no one before him or since, the little-known Eastern bloc businessman who sought to break the duopoly of the Old Firm and, in the close season of 2005, gave the game the best chance in a generation of the title heading somewhere other than Rangers or Celtic.

For an instant he had it cracked. And then, like most of the things in his world, it was gone.


Edinburgh is Scotland’s capital city, but the power in Scottish football lies in Glasgow.

Hearts are one of the country’s most recognised clubs but there are few leagues anywhere in the world with more unbroken dominance than the west coast maintains. Celtic and Rangers have 107 titles between them. The Edinburgh clubs, Hearts and Hibernian, have eight, the last of them coming to Tynecastle Park in 1960. No team outside the Old Firm has raised the league flag since 1985.

Which is to say that beyond the country’s borders, Hearts’ profile has its limits. But in the autumn of 2005, Charlie Mann, Romanov’s spokesperson for several years at Tynecastle, was watching the weekly National Lottery draw on a Saturday night. Before the draw was made, the show killed a bit of airtime by staging a short quiz.

“One of the questions was, ‘Vladimir Romanov owns which club?'” Mann recalls. “The options were Hearts, Chelsea and another club I forget. This woman from Berkshire knew the answer right away. She knew it was Hearts. I’ve never forgotten my surprise — that’s the level of impact Romanov was making. He put Hearts on the map in a way they hadn’t been for a very long time.”

By then, Romanov had been in control of Hearts for less than a year. Short at 5ft 7in (170cm) with wispy hair that he liked to comb back tidily over his head, he was a scaled-down version of Roman Abramovich: enigmatic, appearing from nowhere with a background that required some digging. Put simply, very few people knew anything about him.

He spoke little English but understood enough and, according to the stories he told, his father had been in the Russian military and served during the taking of Berlin in 1945. Romanov joined the navy and then, seduced by fashion labels he saw on his travels, set up a clothing company in Lithuania.

Mann’s understanding is that, with very little warning, the business was taken from him by the KGB. “It was thriving in Kaunas (Lithuania’s second-largest city) and his branded clothing was doing a storm,” Mann says. “Then the KGB took it and there was nothing he could do, absolutely nothing. That’s the thing you have to realise about Vlad. Where he grew up, you had to know who your friends were. Otherwise, you could be in big trouble.

“It influenced him and the way he thought.”

Romanov was born in Soviet Russia and the reason he relocated to Lithuania was John Le Carre-esque. Paul Kiddie, who worked in Hearts’ PR department for most of Romanov’s time as owner, met him for the first time while he was working as a football writer for Edinburgh’s Evening News. “The way he put it, he had upset a few people in Russia,” Kiddie says. “He was made aware that he was on a list — I hesitate to say hit list but, whatever it was, his name was on it. So he hot-footed it to Lithuania.”

In 2005, Romanov was in control of a Lithuanian bank called Ukio Bankas, established in the post-Cold War gold rush. He ran sports clubs in his homeland, including FBK Kaunas. Whatever else attracted him unannounced to Scotland, and to Hearts in particular, he had an eye on the financial markets of western Europe and plans to establish Ukio Bankas there.

“That was absolutely clear from day one,” Mann says. “His thought process was to come in, build up Hearts, have success with the club and, on the back of that, start getting his bank into Europe. He was very open about it. You had five major financial centres: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid and Edinburgh. Guess which one was the cheapest?”

And Hearts? Hearts were an opportunity because Hearts were in an existential crisis.

To cut a long story short, their Scottish Cup win in 1998 — their first for 42 years — tempted the board to throw money at the squad in the hope of more honours, but several years on, the club were heavily in debt. A deal had been negotiated to sell their Tynecastle home to property developers and the plan was to rent Murrayfield, a rugby stadium nearby. Opposition to the idea was ferocious and Romanov offered a solution.

If he bought Hearts, he would activate a clause to terminate the stadium sale, a promise he rapidly delivered on. In the eyes of many supporters, the unknown was worth a go because the known looked terminal.

David Southern, who would later become Hearts’ managing director, was the club’s head of communications when Romanov assumed control. There and then, everyone would have settled for a few years of stable living but, as he prepared for his first full season, Romanov pulled out the big guns.

“The ultimate aim was to take on the Old Firm and break the duopoly,” Southern says. “Ninety per cent of Scottish football accepts its place in the food chain, but he wasn’t having that. The thing about Scottish football, though, is that navigating through it is like playing a game of chess.

“He was trying to play chess with boxing gloves on.”


The “Mad Vlad” tag amused Southern because, in Romanov, he never saw a lunatic. He saw a single-minded and often stubborn businessman shaped by the world he had grown up in, but not a certified madman.

“I can’t claim to know Vladimir from the couple of dozen times I met him,” Southern says. “And trust me, I’m no apologist for him. I did the hard yards at Hearts, I saw the best of times and the worst of times. He had what seemed like conspiracy theories in his head, no doubt, but honestly, he was extremely amiable; gracious, polite and respectful.

“The caricature created of him… look, he gave plenty of ammunition to the media. He was painted as the James Bond baddie. But scratch the surface and he was anything but mad. He had a plan and he was dead set on realising it. Was it misguided? People up here are still arguing about that.”

Kiddie says Romanov “had a swagger about him” but considered it to be the egotistical air wealthy men sometimes give off. Mann, who worked for PR firm Weber Shandwick, spoke on Romanov’s behalf from the outset and watched as he stepped into unfamiliar climes and struggled to comprehend some of what he found. “There’s no getting away from it, quite a few of the decisions he made were bizarre,” Mann says. “In the end, when I stopped working for him, it seemed to me he’d entrenched into a deep position of suspicion where he wouldn’t speak to anybody. I didn’t want us to take money from someone we couldn’t communicate for.

“What you had was a definite culture clash. He fell into certain traps. Take the media. Where he came from, papers like The Sun just didn’t exist. In his world, you weren’t getting mocked up as a joke figure on the sports pages. I had to tell him that this is how it is, it’s not personal, it’s the way it works here. But I don’t think he could ever get his head around things like that.”

The summer and early autumn of 2005, up to the point where Romanov lit a fire under his own work, saw the best of him and his tenure. Hearts set up the ‘Magnificent Seven’ scheme which aimed to bring every child aged seven from Edinburgh and the surrounding Lothian area to Tynecastle, many for the first time. Thousands came through the gates on non-matchdays, met the squad, sat in the stands and received free tickets and free shirts. There was a cost involved but Romanov was happy with it.

“The whole point of it, and this worked well, was that we wanted to own Edinburgh, to take total ownership of the city in a football sense,” Southern says. “Romanov was big on it, but one of the papers went with the headline, ‘Mad Vlad welcomes kids to Tynecastle’. There were times when the image portrayed of him was a bit lazy. He caused some of that, but still, it was great tabloid fodder.

“Romanov left a legacy good and bad but I always say this — when Hearts won the Scottish Cup in 2012, the seven-year-olds who had come to Tynecastle for the first time on those dark nights in 2005 would have been teenagers by then, some of them in the stands at Hampden. Some of that stuff was under-appreciated, although I get why.”

What nobody could ignore or fail to appreciate was the explosive change on the footballing front at Tynecastle.

With the 2005-06 term ahead of him, so much of what Romanov sanctioned made sense. George Burley was appointed manager, as credible a choice as a club of Hearts’ size could hope for. Phil Anderton joined as chief executive, a well-regarded figure who had been working in Scottish rugby and wasted no time tapping into the feel-good factor.

On the transfer front, the signings were impressive; not household names as such, but a string of players of extremely high quality by SPL standards. Takis Fyssas had won Euro 2004 with Greece. Edgaras Jankauskas was a Champions League winner with Porto. Roman Bednar, Rudi Skacel, Julien Brellier, and Michal Pospisil added to Scottish talismen like Steven Pressley, Paul Hartley and Craig Gordon. The club looked armed to the teeth.

Pressley, known to everyone as ‘Elvis’, was a fiercely competitive, cards-on-the-table centre-back and the club’s captain.

“George sat us down at the start and asked us where we thought we could finish,” Pressley says. “I said ‘first’ and I meant it. But the way I see it is that we had title potential — just not necessarily in one season. Maybe we would have needed the know-how of going close first. But, if we’d stayed together as we were at the beginning, anything was possible.

“We’d started going to Celtic and Rangers believing we could win; that was the difference. George’s football was aggressive and he had this great way of being very dismissive of other teams. He’d tell you that you were great, the other teams were nothing special, and confidence came from that. I really liked him.”

In a positive sense, the effect was like applying a spark to tinder. Hearts started the season with eight straight wins, routing Hibs and beating Rangers. They pushed Celtic hard in a 1-1 draw at Parkhead and, after 10 matches, they were three points clear at the top of the league, unbeaten with a goal difference of +17. “You’d be in Tynecastle listening to the crowd singing ‘we are unbeatable’,” Mann says. “You couldn’t believe what was going on.”

Southern, a Hearts fan all his life, was equally staggered. “We were so good that teams were having to put up the shutters at half-time, already resigned to defeat.”

But like a hand grenade came the night of Friday, October 21. The date sticks in Southern’s mind so vividly that he recants it without missing a beat. It was 10.30pm and Southern was at home in Edinburgh when his phone rang. Anderton was on the other end of the line.

“David, you better prepare yourself for tomorrow…”


The confusing aspect of George Burley’s sacking is that, even now, it is hard to get a clear answer about why it happened. Most people aren’t sure and neither Burley nor Romanov ever explained themselves. There were rumours, there was innuendo, but no proper clarity.

As it unfolded, Southern’s attempt to persuade Romanov to issue a public statement was met with resistance and indifference. “His view was, ‘Why do we need to say anything?’,” Southern says. “There was no willingness to take control of the narrative. In the end, I managed to persuade them to put out a statement saying we’d be putting out a statement. That’s how basic the response was.”

Burley departed Hearts on the morning of Saturday, October 22, shortly before a 2-0 win over Dunfermline and what would have been his 11th league game in charge. The waves made during his short time as manager were dramatic. Prior to his dismissal, the Romanov revolution featured as a lead item on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock news. “We were getting coverage in Italian newspapers and German magazines,” Southern says. “We had press cuttings from all over Europe and the compatriots of players who had joined us were starting to read about Hearts challenging the Old Firm. From a PR perspective, it was make hay while the sun shines.”

Anderton and Mann got wind of trouble brewing 24 hours before Burley’s dismissal. Friction between Romanov and Burley was evident, even if the reasons for it were opaque. But after a meeting at Tynecastle at which Romanov was present, Mann believed Burley would be given until at least the end of the year.

The following lunchtime, Mann was travelling to St Mirren in his other guise as a BBC commentator. “I was driving over the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow when my phone went,” he says. “It was Sky telling me George had gone. I was halfway to Paisley, which tells you how confident I was that George was safe. All I could do was turn around, go home, get a suit on and head for Tynecastle.”

Southern knew the game was up when Anderton came into the office and “gave me one of those looks with a barely discernible shake of the head”. Anderton, clearly baffled by events, would himself be sacked before long. Hearts’ chairman, the MP George Foulkes, later resigned in protest at the developing farce but, on that Saturday evening, it was Foulkes who emerged from the tunnel at Tynecastle, camera flashes bouncing off his face, to face questions from the media.

Though Mann was as close to Romanov as anyone, he was not given the precise reasons for Burley’s dismissal. “Something happened,” he says. “I don’t know what but it seemed like there had been a clash of personalities.”

Southern, who rated Burley as “first-class” in the short time their paths crossed, wonders whether deep down, Romanov resented him getting the credit for Heart’s white-hot form; resented Burley getting credit for a project built on his cash. A bewildered Pressley was also in the dark. “I’d gone into an office at the training ground to be told the news,” Pressley says. “As I listened, I sat there looking up at two manager-of-the-month awards on a shelf, which says it all.

“George never really spoke about any of the difficulties around him. He kept that away from us. There had been murmurs of things not being right. I’d heard Vlad wasn’t happy with the 1-1 draw we got at Celtic (Burley’s last game in charge). He didn’t like the subs or something; thought it was a game we should have won. Whatever it was, it escalated. But George had been a top English manager. He wasn’t going to be pushed around.

“Later, we were in the changing room and Fyssas, like a Greek philosopher, said to me that everything was going to end in tears. He wasn’t far wrong.”

It was, as Southern puts it, Romanov’s first “seismic” decision. The first of many.

Burley’s replacement was Graham Rix, the former Chelsea coach who had been convicted of sexual offences and jailed in 1999. Rix’s involvement invited unflattering headlines and he lasted for four months, sacked with Hearts 17 points adrift of Celtic.

But even so, the 2005-06 season would encapsulate the contradiction of Romanov; his knack of giving Hearts memories to treasure while simultaneously taking them to the brink of collapse.

That year, they won the Scottish Cup with Valdas Ivanauskas, a capable and mean-looking Lithuanian, in the dugout. Romanov took part in the open-top bus parade through Edinburgh. They finished second in the table and made the qualifying stages of the Champions League, Zadok the Priest blaring around Tynecastle after the decisive fixture.

Putting Burley aside, it was almost possible to think the era’s potential was not blown. “Those early days, they were sensational,” Mann says. “Think about it. When Romanov came in, Tynecastle was getting sold for flats. The club was in a parlous state. And then what came next? It was a major, major opportunity, which is sad to say.

“In one of the conversations I had with George (Burley), he admitted he wasn’t sure if he had quite enough to win the title that year. The spine of the team, yes, but if they had to go to Celtic and win on a Wednesday night, would they have enough in the squad? Maybe second was the best they were going to get.

“But really, who’s to say?”

Moments of success were a shield for Romanov but as the mistakes, incendiary belligerence and weirdness outweighed them, patience wore thin.

The Hearts supporters increasingly struggled to see where the club was going. There was friction over the arrival of players and coaches from FBK Kaunas, Romanov’s club in Lithuania. One of those who briefly managed the squad, Eduard Malofeev, spoke no English at all. Monthly salary payments arrived late. At its height, the wage bill grew to 132 per cent of turnover, an unsustainable situation unless Romanov’s funding was endless. And as time went on, it was obvious the funding was not.

Time after time, staff at Tynecastle witnessed Romanov’s maverick, single-minded tendencies. Early in his reign, he explored the idea of swimming across Loch Ness and was videoed in the water, although it is not thought he actually attempted to cross the breadth of it. Why did he want to do that? “Because he’s Vladimir Romanov,” Southern says.

Kiddie thinks there may have been a documentary in the pipeline, one which failed to see the light of day. Southern also heard discussions about changing the club’s name to Dynamo Hearts or Sparta Hearts. “Vlad and the people around him didn’t think Heart of Midlothian was a known name in Europe,” he says. “So I said to them, ‘The way to be noticed in Europe is to qualify for Europe’. To be fair, that discussion was very short-lived.”

Far more serious was Romanov’s insistence in the 2005-06 season that Hearts change the colour of their shirt from maroon to yellow and green, the colours of Kaunas and the Lithuanian flag. One Saturday evening after a match at Tynecastle, Southern was walking past the desk of Ali Russell, Hearts’ then-commercial director.

“Ali held up a photo of Kaunas celebrating a league title or a cup, the usual thing with ticker tape and beaming smiles,” Southern says. “He said, ‘How do you like our new kit?’ Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had been a long day. ‘No, seriously. Romanov wants to change the colour of the shirt. I’m going to speak to him now’.”

Russell asked Southern to attend the meeting with him, along with Sergejus Fedotovas, a Lithuanian director who had joined the board after Romanov’s takeover.

“A real hospital pass,” Southern jokes. “But this is probably the best example of the clash of cultures and the way in which you had to try to make Romanov understand a different point of view.

“I said ‘maroon is our colour, it’s always been our colour’. ‘Doesn’t matter’ was the reply. So I said ‘green is the colour of our biggest rivals’, meaning Hibs. Vladimir gave me this dismissive flick of the hand as if to say Hibs aren’t our rivals. He never thought they were. He thought we were challenging Rangers and Celtic. But that gave me my in. Thinking on my feet, I said, ‘No, I mean Celtic. They use green and yellow’. And when that got translated, I could see his eyes narrowing and him starting to think.

“But beyond that, I told them they could put a zero in the sales column. Produce a shirt with green on it and not a single fan will buy it. That really helped the penny to drop. Ali and I weren’t being presumptuous but, as we got up to leave the meeting, we were thinking ‘mission accomplished’.

“Then Sergejus points to a magazine on the table. There’s a picture of Stephane Adam scoring that iconic goal (when Hearts beat Rangers in the Scottish Cup final in 1998) and a tube of glue. A tartan shortbread wrapper had been cut out and stuck over Adam’s shorts. Sergejus says ‘What about this then?’ I was tired and the only answer I could find was, ‘Sergejus… tartan is for the tourists’. Again, Romanov understood what I meant. That was that.”

To Southern, Fedotovas was a competent operator who he liked. “But I used to laugh when I saw him described as Vlad’s right-hand man,” he says. “Vlad didn’t have a right-hand man. He was his own man.”

Other individuals came and went, too. Kiddie and Southern remember one character who appeared at Tynecastle without warning and went by the name of Igor. It was all they knew about him, not even his surname. “He was tall and bald and we used to joke about whether he was there to tell Vlad when it might be time to get out of Dodge,” Kiddie says.

Anderton’s sacking and Foulkes’ resignation prompted the appointment of Romanov’s son, Roman, as chairman and interim chief executive, though not for long. In oversized suits, Roman looked like a boy in a man’s job but Southern found him to be intelligent and articulate, U.S.-educated and more in touch with western life. “I never got the sense Roman was comfortable at Hearts,” Southern says. “I got the impression he didn’t really agree with some of his father’s decisions.”

It was Roman who had flown in with a Lithuanian lawyer on the day Anderton was sacked. The pair went around senior Hearts officials, Southern included, effectively asking whose side they were on. “I told him, ‘Roman, with the greatest of respect to you and your father, I’m on the side of Heart of Midlothian’,” Southern says. “He looked at the lawyer, nodded and left without saying a word.”

Anderton’s meeting went differently and after exiting the building, he was not seen at Tynecastle again.


As seasons went by, persistent allegations emerged about team selection being influenced from above. “What form that took, I don’t know,” Mann says. There were fights with the Scottish Football Association, searing criticism of refereeing standards and incredible statements from Romanov which Hearts were obliged to publish on their website.

One contained the line: “I beg you Mowgli, take the monkeys back to the safari park!” — a dig at unnamed people in the game. These are the conspiracy theories Mann and Southern talk about, the paranoia they remember.

“Those statements would land with a thud,” Kiddie says. “We had no idea what some of them meant and I couldn’t rewrite them. I’d say to the press boys, ‘Write what you like. I can’t give you any guidance because I don’t know a thing. I don’t know who Mowgli is’. Was Romanov talking about the SFA? Was he talking about David Murray at Rangers or someone at Celtic? I honestly can’t say.

“After one of his ‘monkeys’ statements, I went on to Gorgie Road and bought some bananas and nuts for the next press conference. Not all the journalists took it in the spirit it was intended.”

In the dressing room, bemusement reigned. The most serious flare-up came in October 2006, an incident still referred to as the ‘Riccarton Three’. Ivanauskas was absent from Hearts, said to be unwell rumoured to be at a health spa at Romanov’s insistence. Malofeev had taken the role of caretaker coach and was supposed to hold his first press conference the day before a game against Dunfermline. Reporters at Hearts’ Riccarton training ground were waiting for Malofeev when, to their surprise, Pressley strode in with two team-mates, Hartley and Gordon.

“Are we ready?” Pressley asked, then he cut loose.

The machinations of Hearts under Romanov had begun to frustrate him immensely. Two weeks earlier, Southern suggested to the centre-back that he fly to Lithuania and air his grievances with Romanov face-to-face. Pressley’s view was that Romanov knew well enough how the squad were feeling and, in that press conference, he spoke about values and discipline, about what he called “significant unrest in the dressing room”.

“It was just everything,” he says. “There wasn’t a degree of trust in the club. Some of the methods of certain coaches, like Malofeev for example, I felt were backwards. People weren’t getting paid on time. Players trying to negotiate to leave weren’t getting sensible answers. Person after person was coming to me with this stuff. It was relentless so I said what I said. I’d had enough.

“There was no trust in the dressing room either. At one point, there were so many players that the squad had to be split in two for training. They extended the benches into the showers so everyone had a seat. I felt it had become an absolute shambles with no real strategy.”

Though Southern and Mann insist Romanov was not particularly angered by the Riccarton Three, Pressley was stripped of the captaincy soon after. Romanov did not confront him directly but Pressley feels the events must have been “100 per cent connected”. Two months later, he left for Celtic, but even his final day was a shambles.

In a meeting at the training ground, Ivanauskas offered Pressley the assistant manager’s job. Then Pressley travelled to Tynecastle, where he was told by two Lithuanian officials that he had no future at the club. Confused by the contradiction, he took the move to Celtic Park.

“Nothing was aligned,” Pressley says. “But in fairness to Vlad, sometimes I’m not sure he was getting the true story of what was going on. Sometimes I didn’t think the reality was being fed back to him.

“How do I reflect on him? I think he had good intentions, but I also feel he was badly advised or didn’t listen to advice and took bad business decisions. That’s the way I’d put it.”


The last time Southern saw Romanov and the last time he thinks Romanov was in Scotland was at the 2013 League Cup final, which Hearts lost to St Mirren.

Romanov had been at Hampden 12 months earlier for a 5-1 demolition of Hibs in the Scottish Cup final, the club’s greatest result in living memory. But on that occasion, he did not take part in the open-top bus celebrations. Hearts were financially stricken and his ability or willingness to support them was waning. For him, it was different to the cup win of 2006.

“At the end of the 2006 final, the press lads asked me to get some quotes from him,” Mann says. “I went down and what he said was, ‘The fans are worth more to me than all the oil and gas in Russia’. Those were the good times, a communications dream.”

In 2013, Hearts hit the wall. In debt and insolvent, the club entered administration.

The Romanov era was over.

Hearts teetered badly but a rescue package was found. Ann Budge, a local businesswoman, bought the club out of administration with a view to Foundation of Hearts (FOH), a fans’ group, acquiring it from her at a later date. FOH had been set up in 2010 and supporters began piling in donations to protect Hearts from liquidation. It was an unintended legacy of Romanov’s ownership, but Hearts would become the biggest fan-owned club in the United Kingdom.

FOH’s takeover went through in 2021 and, as of this month, the total raised from fan pledges was £15million ($18.5m) and counting.


In 2013, Ukio Bankas collapsed, debt-ridden and removed from the Lithuanian Stock Exchange.

In the years that followed, Romanov and others involved with the bank were charged with offences relating to alleged misappropriation of funds, charges Romanov strenuously denied. He fled to Russia, where newspaper reports claimed he had been granted asylum, denying Lithuania the power to extradite him.

Lithuania’s Criminal Police Bureau was asked by The Athletic about Romanov’s whereabouts and the current status of criminal charges against him. It directed questions to the General Prosecutor’s Office which, at the point of publication, had not responded. It is not clear if Romanov, now in his mid-70s, is still in Nikul’skaya or living in his submarine. Questions put to a government agency in nearby Vozhega also went unanswered.

There has been little or no media coverage of him since 2021.

The submarine he owns is not just any submarine. Bought in 2006, it is the famous K19, completed in 1960 and one of the first nuclear subs to be built by Russia. Romanov claimed to have served as a cook on it.

Owing to a nuclear accident the following year, it earned the nickname ‘Hiroshima’ and, in that, there is some poetic resonance. 

 

 

What a man.

A good mate of mine worked at Hearts before and during the Vlad era. Proper ITK, always had the early scoop on signings, managerial appointments, internal gossip about fall-outs etc. Always happy to share.

The one thing he's never had a story on is the Burley departure. His line has never changed. 'Anyone who says they know what happened apart from Burley and the Lithuanians is at it'. Proper mystery.

Don't think we'd have won the league that season anyway. The first eleven was excellent, but the squad was thin and quite a lot of the players had lacked a full pre-season, so we were always going to hit a wall. Not to mention Celtic just being very consistent themselves after a shaky start. But we should have been a good deal closer to them, and with stability would have had a decent hit at it in 2006/07.

Still. Unbelievable times. And, whatever revisionism we hear these days, Vlad ultimately saved the club. We were absolutely fucked till he came forward. So, whatever else, Hearts fans should all be glad he showed up.

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2 minutes ago, VincentGuerin said:

What a man.

A good mate of mine worked at Hearts before and during the Vlad era. Proper ITK, always had the early scoop on signings, managerial appointments, internal gossip about fall-outs etc. Always happy to share.

The one thing he's never had a story on is the Burley departure. His line has never changed. 'Anyone who says they know what happened apart from Burley and the Lithuanians is at it'. Proper mystery.

Don't think we'd have won the league that season anyway. The first eleven was excellent, but the squad was thin and quite a lot of the players had lacked a full pre-season, so we were always going to hit a wall. Not to mention Celtic just being very consistent themselves after a shaky start. But we should have been a good deal closer to them, and with stability would have had a decent hit at it in 2006/07.

Still. Unbelievable times. And, whatever revisionism we hear these days, Vlad ultimately saved the club. We were absolutely fucked till he came forward. So, whatever else, Hearts fans should all be glad he showed up.

It's one of those strange ones. Hearts fans were happy the stadium was saved and you signed some great players but it always felt like the other clubs were just waiting for the wheels to fall off. 

That season possibly came too soon but if you'd kept Burley and the bulk of the squad then it's anyone's guess as to how you'd have fared the following season. Might have brought the Rangers implosion on even sooner than it happened.

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1 minute ago, Merkland Red said:

It's one of those strange ones. Hearts fans were happy the stadium was saved and you signed some great players but it always felt like the other clubs were just waiting for the wheels to fall off. 

That season possibly came too soon but if you'd kept Burley and the bulk of the squad then it's anyone's guess as to how you'd have fared the following season. Might have brought the Rangers implosion on even sooner than it happened.

I can see it from the outside point of view, and Hearts aren't the most popular club at the best of times, so it never really bothered me.

From knowing someone on the inside you got the good news and the bad. It's true there was excess and some dreadful decision-making, but a lot of the go-to rumours at the time about wages and packages for certain players etc were wildly exaggerated. The view of those on the inside at the time that I knew was that Hearts could really do something under Vlad if they had a strong decision maker who knew the game and could win Vlad's trust. But Vlad never trusted anyone.

Ultimately, without Vlad Hearts were heading off to Murrayfield to dwindling crowds, no asset to borrow against, no home stadium, no real prospect of getting one, and the real prospect of a rapid decline. We had a right laugh, won a couple of cups, and bought time to get the circumstances right (luckily) to ultimately end up in the best shape we've been in off the pitch in the lifetime of most Hearts fans.

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