FROM Kaunas, the second city in Lithuania, comes news of a seismic shift in the power base of European football. It concerns Heart of Midlothian — yes, Hearts — and it is this: that they are soon to win the Champions League.
Yes indeed: European champions elect. Step aside Chelsea. And if we were not hearing it from the Abramovich of the Baltics, then we would not bother printing it.
This is the future, according to Scotland’s Abramovich clone: “Our goal has to be champions of Europe. I want us to be at the stage where to do anything else, to come back without the trophy, would be shameful. I’d like to do it quicker but I think we’re looking at three years. Nobody believes us. That’s fine. Three years should suffice.”
Vladimir Romanov — he of the Eastern European mega millions — is sitting in his office, which, quite naturally, is in a bank. His own bank. And he is totally serious. He has got a Hearts tie on and he has got tonnes of cash, too. He even assembled the security staff so he could show us the bank vault.
But let’s put the “replica Abramovich” line to bed, for no other reason than that it irks him. Wealth-wise, Romanov is but a chip where Abramovich is the whole block. Romanov’s empire encompasses such a myriad of ownerships — bought up when the eastern bloc was being privatised and no one else knew the value of a “share” — that evaluation is impossible
What we can say for sure is that three companies in which he has had stakeholdings have been investigated by police, and that, based mainly on shares in banking and metalworks, the official line is that he is worth upwards of £500 million, which means he barely comes up to Abramovich’s knees.
But do not suggest that he is following Abramovich’s lead. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I was involved in football a lot earlier than he was.” Which is true, because for a decade now he has had money in FBK Kaunas and, more recently, MTZ-Ripo Minsk, the Belarussian club. And certainly do not hint at the idea that he cannot match Abramovich’s £290 million shopping spree. “I could spend £500 million and beat Chelsea, but any fool could win by spending that,” he replied. “But by spending a tenth of that amount? Then you’ve got something to talk about.”
Their style of leadership is different, too. You would not catch Abramovich going to an away fixture on the supporters’ bus or sitting with them. Neither would he recite poetry he has written down the phone to the media. And you would never catch Abramovich telling José Mourinho where to go in the transfer market. Romanov, however, has such confidence in his “own intelligence network reviewing the ability of players from as wide afield as Chile to Japan” that he dictates who George Burley, his manager, will buy.
Four of Burley’s summer signings were thus thrust upon him. “Not ideal” was how Burley described this unique working relationship, but Romanov is not for the turning. “The final decision,” he said, “lies with me.” And these decisions don’t seem to have gone too badly.
At the start of this, his first full season, scepticism in Edinburgh was rife; Romanov said that Hearts would win the Scottish Premierleague within three years and no one believed him. But then his team started winning. Then they beat Rangers. And today, when they play Celtic, they are unbeaten in the SPL, top of the table and suggesting that, for the first time since 1985, the Rangers-Celtic duopoly could be smashed.
So Tynecastle is now swimming with goodwill. Last season’s gates averaged 12,000; this season all 18,000 seats have been filled for every game, many of them with fans singing the name of their new owner.
Burley, you imagine, will have been feeling good about life, too, until this morning, when he reads that his three-year goal has stretched from conquering Scotland to conquering the entire Continent.
TO FIND Romanov, the drive to Kaunas is 85 minutes on the dual carriageway east of Vilnius. There is barely a landmark en route bar an impressive roadside church, a building that was delapidated until our man decided to fund its complete refurbishment. He clearly has the populist touch: Lithuanian television has bought into his dream and purchased rights to 15 Hearts games this season. On the streets, a Hearts shirt is now a fashion item.
But the Ukio Bankas headquarters, his base, is a surprise. Neither tall nor modern nor situated in one of the (rare) smart corners of town, it is all marble colonnades and faded grandeur. Incongruous, yet its owner has pledged his future to his home town. He grew up on its streets — “We didn’t have a proper football, we used to play with a basketball, or old tin cans” — and he started in business here, selling Beatles and Elvis records from the back of a car.
He has gone absent only twice, when he was doing national service as a submariner — “When Yellow Submarine came out, we were going: ‘Wow, they’re singing about us!’ That song has a big resonance for me” — and also when his growing wealth aroused such KGB interest that he and his family had to go underground.
The post-Soviet free market was his salvation. The question, which Abramovich himself posed on the single occasion that they met, is: why Scotland? It was certainly no whim; he only arrived at Hearts after hovering, wallet at the ready, over Dunfermline Athletic, Dundee and Dundee United.
The answer is twofold. First, his stated vision for a sustainable European football giant: “I look at Edinburgh and I see one of the world’s leading financial and cultural centres, a city that has the capacity for a fan base of at least 100,000 and I’m not talking fair-weather fans here. If I can convince the local authorities that I’m right, my vision is that Edinburgh should have a stadium of 70-90,000, a stadium that could accomm odate both the city’s clubs, that could stage fantastic derbies. I am convinced it would be full.”
Yet, for all his wealth, and even if he could scoop up that army of new fans, he is surely a decimal point or two away from fulfilment. Which brings us to the second answer: “The country’s developing, the economy’s developing.” Which sounds like an oblique reference to his ambitions to have his businesses, particularly the bank, established there as well as his football team. “It’s interesting,” he said. “This may bring promising opportunities that are worth considering.”
Such answers are only likely to fuel the natural paranoia that the good times — which amount to two and a bit months so far — will not last. The evidence in his favour lies in his clubs in Kaunas and Minsk, neither of which have been plundered for ulterior gain, and in his love for the game, which does feel fervently genuine.
He understands about romance and football and this is why his wife, Szvetlana, has so far been banned from watching his new team play. “It’s a bit too early,” he explained. “Hearts aren’t playing quite the way I want them to be playing when she first sees them.” He wants beauty in his football, and Hearts fans want to believe he means it.
LEAGUE FORM
CELTIC
4 v 4 Motherwell
2 v 0 Dundee Utd
3 v 1 Falkirk
1 v 3 Rangers
4 v 0 Dunfermline
2 v 0 Aberdeen
1 v 0 Hibernian
2 v 1 Inverness CT
5 v 0 Livingston
HEARTS
4 v 2 Kilmarnock
4 v 0 Hibernian
3 v 0 Dundee Utd
2 v 0 Aberdeen
2 v 1 Motherwell
4 v 1 Livingston
1 v 0 Inverness CT
1 v 0 Rangers
2 v 2 Falkirk
