AS a boy growing up in Belfast, Gerry Mallon always resisted the lure of the Old Firm clubs despite the passion which so many of his compatriots had for them and his love of football.
“My view was that we had enough Irish sectarianism without needing to import the Scottish variety,” he said.
These days, though, Mallon devotes a great deal of his time and energy to helping Hearts draw nearer to Celtic and Rangers.
The Tesco Bank chief executive took over as the Foundation of Hearts (FoH) chairman last summer and has thrown himself wholeheartedly into the role. He has high hopes for the future.
The FoH have well over 8,000 members who collectively contribute in the region of £143,00 every month and the Tynecastle club is the largest to be fan-owned in the entire United Kingdom as a result.
In the coming months, the total amount that Hearts supporters have pledged since a company limited by guarantee was set up by concerned Jambos during the catastrophic Vladimir Romanov era back in 2010 will pass the £15m mark.
It has been an improbable, uplifting, unprecedented success story.
But Mallon, who is also one of two FoH representatives on the Hearts board, is eager to see the third-placed outfit in the cinch Premiership build on what has been achieved to date and narrow the gap on the top two teams in the country even further.
That is a tall order give the respective size of their fan bases. However, he is confident that with the ongoing backing of the FoH members and wealthy benefactors James Anderson and Ann Budge, involvement in the Conference League group stages this season and player sales, even better times lie ahead on and off the park.
“Success in football is highly correlated with income,” he said. “There are some exceptions to that, but, in the long-term, the more money you have the more successful you will be.
“The club is really prudent about the stewardship of its resources. It will never spend more money than it has. It will cut its cloth to suit its income. The money from the foundation and the money from benefactors is not absolutely necessary for the club to survive. We are more than capable of functioning with a healthy surplus without them.
“What it does do is provide a real boost which allows us to invest in the physical infrastructure and the team on the pitch. No other club has the sort of income that we have from the foundation. Everything else being equal, we have a head start on every other team.
“Game changers in terms of income for any club will be money which comes from Europe and money which they can make on player trading over the longer term. Both in terms of the players you bring through the development pathway and those you buy and develop.
“Being in the group stages of a European competition has been very significant (Hearts banked £5m from their involvement in the Conference League, £3m of which was profit). Joe Savage has also done a phenomenal job as sporting director in terms of identifying talent and bringing it to the team for the benefit of the team and with resale potential.
“Those are two areas where we haven’t been incredibly strong in the past. But we can see right now we have developed a capability which puts us in a very strong place. If we do it right, we should have a clear path to continuing to improve and continuing to close the gap on the big two.”
Mallon, who has a first class degree in economics from Cambridge University and has previously held senior management roles at Northern Bank, Danske Bank and Ulster Bank, is the latest highly-qualified executive to join the FoH board.
Their collective professional expertise – a chartered account, corporate lawyer, technology specialist, sales director, chartered taxation adviser and business adviser work alongside him for no return – is a major reason why the fan group has flourished.
Other supporters’ organisations hoping to emulate their success would be well advised to take note. Enthusiastic amateurs, no matter how well-meaning their intentions, cannot offer the security and transparency which the paying public need to see when they are parting with millions of pounds, tens of millions of pounds even, of their hard-earned cash.
“Having a capable board definitely gives a sense of trust in the pledgers,” said Mallon. “There is no financial return on their investment. There is no way of them getting their money back. It is a donation to the foundation which then goes to the club.
“Where they get their money back is seeing the future of the club guaranteed and the success of the club enhanced. There is a personal pride in feeling that you are part of the club that you love.
“We as a board feel an enormous sense of responsibility. We have to demonstrate we are being responsible in how we are managing the funds that are pledged to us. We have to be responsible stewards and illustrate we aren’t wasting money on anything.”
He added: “The really important mantra of our model is that the club is fan owned but not fan run. There is real separation between the foundation board as the largest shareholder with 75.1 per cent of the shares and the board of the club.
“In order to run a professional football club, you need professional people making the right long-term decisions. Sometimes as a fan it is really difficult to separate your passion from the more dispassionate view that you need to take as a professional running the football club as a business.
“That space is there deliberately. We have a couple of seats on the board so we can understand what is going on and have an opinion and input into what is going on. But we don’t have control of the board.
“We are not in the majority. We want to believe we have the right talent and ability and strategy and the board is running the club in the right way to ensure stability and success.”
That Hearts is run by professional business people who hold firm in adversity, not hysterical fans who overreact to a dip in form or bad result, was underlined back in 2021 when they were beaten in the second round of the Scottish Cup by Highland League rivals Brora.
The Gorgie club were on top of the Championship at the time and set to win promotion back to the top flight. However, furious supporters protested, called for manager Robbie Neilson to be sacked from his job and directed much of their wrath at the FoH directors.
Mallon, a former chairman of the Irish Football Association who had enjoyed a “whirlwind romance” with Hearts after moving to Edinburgh to take up his job with Tesco Bank two years earlier, sympathised and got in touch with then FoH chairman Stuart Wallace to offer his support.
“Fans were really upset,” he said. “It got really nasty online. Social media wasn’t pleasant. The foundation board members were getting quite a lot of grief. They were coming under pressure.
“We had been through our own Brora moment when Northern Ireland lost to Luxembourg in 2013. People were calling for Michael O’Neill to be fired. But the board could see what Michael was doing, stayed true to their long-term vision and stuck by him. He ended up taking Northern Ireland to the Euros in 2016 and being the best manager we had had in 30 years.
“You have seperate the emotion of the short-term with your long-term vision and maintain your belief and trust in individuals. We all personally struggle to do it. Football is a game of opinions and some of those opinions are very strongly-held and forcibly expressed.
“I reached out to the chairman Stuart Wallace on LinkedIn and offered him a message of solidarity. I said: ‘Look the board has to have the courage of their convictions, the ill-feeling will subside when everything starts to go well’. I offered support and we maintained dialogue over a period of time.”
The Hearts board’s faith in Neilson has certainly proved justified; the capital club are sitting third in the Premiership for the second season running and are through the quarter-finals of the Scottish Cup.
When Wallace stood down, he thought that Mallon would, with his track record in both business and football, be the ideal man to step into his shoes.
The Northern Irishman knows that he is late to the party. But his dedication to the Hearts cause and desire to see them do well is just as great as any of the Jambos he sits alongside on match days in Gorgie. He is devoted to delivering more great results in the future.
“The pledges into the foundation have been incredibly resilient and stable,” he said. “Despite the cost-of-living crisis, despite the energy crisis, despite the high cost of travel to Europe – and, believe me, the beer isn’t cheap in Zurich – we have still seen people continuing to donate.
“I think this season the connection between the fans and the team has really developed to another level following the European campaign. Florence felt like a real turning point. The atmosphere was superb even though we got beat. The celebration was the fact we were there and were playing Fiorentina. It was amazing. It was a massive party.
“There is an enormous sense of pride among Hearts supporters that they saved the club. The club would not exist if it had not been for the supporters, the foundation and Ann all working together over a long period of time. There is no way you can’t feel even more emotionally connected to the success of the team as a consequence of it. Everybody is much more invested.
“The feedback we get from people is that when they look at all the direct debits coming out of their bank accounts every month, The Foundation of Hearts one is the only one that puts a smile on their faces.”
