Interview: Ann Budge

12 years later, Heart of Midlothian Football Club is still here, and unrecognisable as a club and business from those darkest days. Today, we raise a glass to Ann Budge - and the huge role she played in ensuring our club's survival.

Working with the Foundation of Hearts, and with the backing and commitment of the fans, Ann played a vital role in rescuing the club, enabling it to exit from administration in 2014. Since then, she has spent more than a decade driving Hearts forward and has been a pivotal figure in the club’s resurgence.

Under her leadership, and with the financial backing of fans, sponsors and benefactors -  once again proud to be associated with Hearts - the club has reestablished itself both on and off the pitch.

We have seen the delivery of a number of major infrastructure projects, including the Museum, the Memorial Garden, a new state-of-the-art pitch, and, of course, the magnificent new Main Stand incorporating the Tynecastle Park Hotel. Investment in infrastructure has not stopped at Tynecastle, with substantial investment in facilities for our players, at all levels, up at Oriam.

There will always be a Heart of Midlothian, and this evening we celebrate her achievements and standing in the tapestry of Hearts' grand history.

Ann spoke to Hearts TV as her reign at Tynecastle Park comes to the final chapter, the full video is available to watch below or by clicking here. 

Q: Ann, it's the end of an era, after 11 years you are stepping away from the club in an official capacity. Can you sum up your emotions following more than a decade at Hearts?

A: "It's quite difficult to do so actually, but I suppose they're very mixed. Football has been the centre of my life for the last decade and it's connected with my family, my social life, everything. So I'm a bit worried that I'm going to be lost because I always said I didn't ever want to retire. Having said that, I think the time is right.

"I'm beginning to feel that I've done everything I can do for the club and it's now time to move into a different kind of business and have different people leading it. I'm sad, I'll miss an awful lot of people, but equally I think it's the right thing to do."

Q:  It's certainly been a journey, so let's go back to the beginning as you alluded to family connections there. You were a supporter, attending games with your daughter when things started to look quite really bleak for the club around 2013. What are your memories of that time? 

A: "I was a season ticket holder for many years, but it was not the centre of my world. I would go to games, enjoy them, not enjoy them or whatever, and forget about it. My daughter, as I've said before, is the opposite; she lives for football. So while I wasn't paying an awful lot of attention to these things, she was, so she would bend my ear every time I saw her.

"I had already been working with FOH at this time, for about a year, initially in an advisory capacity. At one point, prior to entering administration, there had been an approach made by others to Mr Romanov to say: 'What can we do, what would you need for us to buy the club?'

"It was just laughable, 50 million pounds or something was quoted. I remember saying to them: 'Look, the only way we'll be able to do anything is if the club goes into administration and then we can deal with it in a professional manner.'

Q:  What were the biggest challenges that you faced in trying to save the club from extinction?

A: "We had a bit of money because of the FOH. I had put some money in as working capital so financially we knew how little we had and it was very little. So there were a lot of financial issues, not least because when you come out of administration, certainly for a football club, you don't lose your football debts. So we still owed a lot of money to players, to some football clubs where we'd done deals and we hadn't yet paid them everything we owed them.

"So one of the early things was reaching out to all the people we owed money to and saying, can we come to an arrangement? And sometimes that was easy. Some of the players, again, I think I've said before, I remember Marius Zaliukas, when he was contacted, he came back and said, 'Hearts have been so good for me, I really don't need to be repaid.'

 

"We also were heavily reliant on the academy players and young players. So we had different football challenges, we had different financial challenges. My first thought when I came in was we've got some really good people here, they're clearly totally committed to the club, but I need a management layer in here because we've got nobody who's guiding them. My partner, Eric, came in and worked for nothing as Chief Operating Officer. 

"I had asked Ann Park, who was my sales director in a previous life, and she jumped at the chance, even though she wasn't getting paid very much. So we had the beginnings of a board, beginnings of a management team.

"And then in the first few months, it was a matter of looking at what else do we need? And what can we afford? So I brought in, within two or three months of taking over, Jacqui Duncan, who I also knew previously, and asked her to come in as Finance Director. So we knew whar we're going to do about finances, what we're going to do about football, and what we're going to do about people. And we hit the ground running, thankfully."

Q: We certainly did. Perhaps an achievement in itself to get the club back to that position, exiting administration in 2014, but there was certainly no letting up, no foot off the gas. What, on a personal level, what drove you to really keep driving the club forward?

A: "I got involved with Foundation of Hearts, and stayed involved, because of the people. I hadn't really appreciated, I thought my daughter was the exception, that football meant so much to so many people. That's got me hooked to FOH.

"There were people who'd given so much and were optimistic that we could actually make things work.I saw really for the first time just how bad other things were. For example, our groundsman, he couldn't even buy a bag of sand for the grass. Things were in such a bad way. I kind of felt I can fix this, or I can fix that. 

"There were problems at every level. I was kind of driven by, let's fix the easy ones and then we'll worry about what comes next."

Q:  Fan ownership was one of the ultimate goals when we came in. And of course, that's been delivered. Probably a lot of naysayers back in the day, doubting that such a model could be achieved, but we proved them wrong, didn't we?

A: "I'll tell you a story, I'm not sure if I've said this publicly before. I think it was the first year I was in place. I was asked to take part in a debate at Heriot-Watt University. And the debate topic was: 'Could fan ownership ever work?'

"I won't name names, but a chairman of another football club had been invited to talk against it. I was invited to talk for it. His expression was that fan ownership could never work. What football clubs need is a benevolent dictator. Despite all the negativity in the early days, I think it's a fantastic model. I think one of the things that makes it special is that not everybody can afford to join FOH and buy a season ticket, for example. It doesn't matter. They're all supporting the club in whichever way they can.

"People who can afford to do it have done it fantastically well. If circumstances change, and we've said that from the beginning, if your circumstances change and you have to stop, don't worry about it. Just stop. Direct debit, that's all. Just stop paying it. It's just incredible to me, the level of contribution that we've had from the fans.

"We've still got a way to go, of course, because one of the things I've also said from earliest times was fan ownership, not fan management. So I think as long as we stick to the rules, if you like, that a business has got to be run by a board of directors and an executive management team who know what's happening day in, day out.

"I think we've proved it can work."