Doubts grow over sale prospects as Hearts valued at £50m by Romanov

The Lithuanian businessman, who has announced that he wants to get out of football, also emphasised the extent to which he has lost interest in the Edinburgh club by adding that he did not know when the team’s most recent match had been.

“A lot more has been spent, of course,” Romanov told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti when declaring his valuation of Hearts. “The land is worth £25m, plus the players, the club with a project, are also worth £25m. That’s about £50m. It’s not the money I spent, but now that’s what it’s worth.”

Romanov, who once paid to ensure he could watch Hearts matches live on Lithuanian TV when he was unable to come to Scotland for their games, went on to say he no longer even looked out for their results. “I don’t even travel and I don’t know when they last played, whether it was yesterday or Saturday,” he said. “And I don’t know how they played. It is the same for my other sports clubs. Every time they just ask for money, and every time I promise not to give more, then they promise to make it themselves.”

Romanov did not specify what project he had in mind when claiming that, together with the players, it amounted to £25m, but there is nothing connected to Hearts which could conceivably take the value of a club to anything close to the total of £50m at which he arrived.

Tynecastle was valued well below £25m when the property boom was at its height, and more recent estimates of its worth have been closer to £15m. Even that sum would depend on what kind of planning permission were given for a redevelopment of the site.

Hearts lease their training facility at Riccarton from Heriot- Watt University and have no other fixed assets of any substantial value. They have made a lot in transfer fees during the Romanov era, notably the fee of up to £9m which Sunderland agreed to pay for goalkeeper Craig Gordon.

The present squad, however, contains no-one who is valued anything like as highly. Whatever Romanov deems Hearts to be worth, property is a buyer’s market just now, as are football players. Having failed for the second month running to pay their senior players on time, Hearts have declared their intention to get a lot of them off the wage bill when the transfer window opens in January.

The club’s avowed need to cut costs and generate cash is another reason why any would-be purchaser will not feel obliged to come close to Romanov’s estimate of its worth. Hearts’ debt of around £30m is another complicating factor, one not mentioned by Romanov yesterday. A payment of £50m would allow him to clear that debt – which is owed to his own bank, Ukio – and recoup some of the other funds he has put into Hearts, but there is no other logic to his settling on such a sum.

The other football clubs owned by Romanov are Lithuanian team FBK Kaunas and MTZ Ripo of Belarus. These two, like Hearts, are also supposedly up for sale as the businessman pursues his new principal sporting interest, basketball. He has owned Zalgiris Kaunas basketball club since May 2009.

Meanwhile, SFA president Campbell Ogilvie, a former managing director of Hearts, said the governing body would not at present intervene in an attempt to help the club’s senior players get paid. “We are not involved directly and I wouldn’t discuss any specific member club,” he said. “Obviously the SFA monitor the situation throughout football in general, take a watching brief, but we are not involved directly at all. If something was brought to our attention officially, we would have to investigate.

“To date that has not been the case, so we’ll take a watching brief on the situation.

“We will address it at a later date if necessity deems that we have to get involved. As a matter of course, in football in general, we would like to see everyone have their contracts honoured, be it players or suppliers of other clubs. We monitor the situation, but it is not at this stage a direct area for SFA intervention.”