Edinburgh, a festival city, is preparing for a different kind of carnival this weekend. Roads will be closed, buses rerouted and trams will stop running down Princes Street. Civic leaders are preparing a reception at the city chambers.
It all depends on the result of a football match in Glasgow on Saturday.
One of Edinburgh’s biggest teams, Heart of Midlothian, are on the brink of a historic moment in European football, if only they can avoid defeat at Celtic, the biggest team in the Scottish game.
Celtic have largely dominated Scottish football’s top tier for 40 years. Hearts have not won it since 1960, and the decider will take place in the cauldron of Celtic Park in Glasgow, home to 60,000 partisan Celtic supporters. Hearts just need a draw to take the title. Second-placed Celtic must win to prevent them.
If Hearts are crowned champions, central Edinburgh will host their raucous victory parade on Sunday. It seems that millions of neutrals in Scotland and worldwide will be celebrating with them. Even fans of Hearts’ bitterest local rivals Hibernian, such as Andy Murray and Irvine Welsh, reluctantly agree.
Josh Mill, a 24-year-old Hearts season ticket holder, encountered the electricity the title race has generated while living and working in Sydney, Australia. As Hearts’ push for the title became real, he began wearing the team’s jersey in public. English people came up to him on the street to urge them on.
Like many others living overseas, Mill has flown home for the game. He encountered another five Hearts fans on the same flight from Australia; they congregated in their lay-over in Doha.
Unable to get a ticket – he has heard Hearts fans have only 752 seats at the match – Mill will watch it in Edinburgh with his family. “There was no doubt in my mind. I’m not going to miss this,” he said. This is a “once in lifetime thing”.
Despite being an administrator of the largest Hearts fan forum, Jambos Kickback, Dave McLaren was also unable to get a ticket. He is clinging to the team’s main motto this season, the word “believe”, which has featured in tifos (visual displays made by fans in the stands) and signs at the ground. He saw Hearts just fail to win the title in 1965, and again in 1986.
“To me, this is almost like last chance,” he said. It would be “mayhem” in the city if Hearts won, he added.
For many Scottish football fans, there is a wider resentment about Celtic and Rangers’ dominance. Not only does the Old Firm’s financial power significantly influence the league’s policies and politics, they feel referees are intimidated by their power, subconsciously awarding marginal decisions to the Glasgow giants.
Hearts fans are adamant that happened in Celtic’s penultimate game at Motherwell on Wednesday night, when Celtic saved their title hopes by winning with a controversial penalty in extra time. “It’s why victory [for Hearts] would be a much bigger achievement as well,” McLaren said.
Ian Murray, the Labour MP for Edinburgh South, who helped save Hearts from financial collapse when he chaired a buyout by its fans in 2013, said there would be “tears from everyone” if Hearts won on Saturday.
Celtic and Rangers have won 110 Scottish titles between them since the league was formed, he said. Hearts have won it just four times, and Aberdeen another four. “It will be fantastic. The raw emotion will be off the scale.”
Gerry Hassan, an academic who has watched games at 122 different grounds in the junior and senior Scottish leagues, said that in 1985, when Aberdeen became the last team other than Celtic or Rangers to become champions, the Scottish league was known as the most competitive in Europe.
Now it is Europe’s joint-least competitive, alongside Ukraine’s, Hassan said. He believes their dominance has been “suffocating”.
A lifelong Dundee United fan, Hassan says he is now a Jambo (in a Scottish version of rhyming slang, the club’s maroon jerseys have earned Hearts the nickname the Jam Tarts, or ‘Jambos’). Like many other neutrals, Hassan is urging Hearts to victory “as a tactical fan for the greater good”.
“Hearts have shown another Scotland is possible; they have shown physical and mental resilience and endurance,” he said. “Even if they come second, they’ve lifted us and shown hope and belief.”
Val McDermid, the celebrated crime writer who once sponsored her local team, Raith Rovers (the Fife club named a stand after her), says she is also a temporary Jambo. “It would be healthy for Scottish football if that duopoly was broken up,” she said.
Their dominance distorts the game’s economics, she said, making it far harder for smaller clubs to prosper and compete. She is tired of watching people in Kirkcaldy queueing for coaches to watch Old Firm games in Glasgow instead of supporting their local team.
Even some Celtic and Hibernian fans accept that argument. David Low, a Glaswegian businessman who helped save Celtic from bankruptcy in 1994, remembers when the Scottish game was better because it was much more competitive.
“I don’t like the idea of Celtic dominating. I love what’s going on this season, but I still want Celtic to win the league,” he said. “Competition is a good thing, not a bad thing. That’s not a paradox.”
Ben Macpherson, the Scottish National party MSP for the Edinburgh constituency which is home to Hibernian, and a former Celtic fan, believes Hearts’ winning would be “good for Scottish football”.
“I feel conflicting emotions as their fans would never stop going on about it for a while, but then maybe it would also help to unlock a more competitive league, with Hibs in the mix in the future too? It’s hard not to want the underdog to prevail in this instance.”
