For 40 years Glasgow has held the power in Scottish football. Since Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen won the league in 1985, Celtic have won 22 titles and Rangers 18. No other team has had a sniff. But this year, Edinburgh’s Hearts are the best team in the league. With 16 games to go, they have a six-point lead over the Old Firm giants. This unlikely story is a combination of a smaller team using its resources efficiently and two large clubs struggling with structural changes that are eroding their dominant position.

If there has been a modish trend in British football in the past two decades, then Hearts have tried it. There has been a… unique foreign owner that spent lavishly before bringing the club to the edge of ruin (in their case, a Russian-Lithuanian businessman called Vladimir Romanov), a pivot to fan ownership and, most recently, a commitment to data analytics.

It is a mix of the latter two trends that have transformed Hearts into league leaders. Four years of fan ownership have seen the club promoted back to Scottish Premiership, followed by jaunts in the Conference and Europa Leagues. In June, the club’s foundation accepted an offer of just under £10 million from a British businessman, Tony Bloom, in exchange for 29 per cent of the club. This formalised an agreement struck a year before when Bloom sold Hearts the rights to use data and expertise from his world-leading Jamestown Analytics firm.

Bloom had previously licenced the data to Brighton in the Premier League (a club he owns out-right), Union Saint Gilloise in Belgium and Como in Italy. Brighton have become one of the best identifiers of talent in world football, Union SG won the Belgian league for the first time in 90 years last season, and Como are on track for their best-ever league finish in Serie A after years on the lower rungs of the Italian pyramid.

The Jamestown blueprint is evident in Hearts’s recent improvement. Among their best players this season is a Portuguese striker, Claudio Braga, who Hearts plucked from the second division in Norway, and Alexandros Kyziridis, a Greek winger who previously played in Slovakia. Other players arrived from undistinguished clubs in Iceland, Finland and Kazakhstan.

But however cleverly Hearts recruit, they should not be outperforming the Old Firm. Celtic and Rangers continue to have a financial advantage that ought to be insurmountable. In 2024/25, Celtic generated revenue of £144 million, Rangers £94 million and Hearts £24 million.

Celtic and Rangers are having unusually bad seasons. Celtic lost to Kairat of Kazakhstan in their qualifying match for the Champions League. Celtic’s manager, Brendan Rodgers, resigned in October and was described as ‘divisive, misleading and self-serving’ by the club’s majority shareholder, Dermot Desmond. Rodgers’s successor, Wilfried Nancy, a French coach, lasted just eight matches before he was sacked, along with the head of football operations who recruited him. The club is drifting and is lacking a sense of its own identity. Meanwhile, Rangers hired a new coach in the summer, Russell Martin. It appeared a brave appointment. Martin had previously been sacked by Southampton after refusing to compromise on his possession-heavy approach. At Rangers, Martin was out before the clocks went back. Fans were so angered by the team’s performances that he required a police escort from the ground after his final match in charge.

Identifying suitable coaches is one of the most difficult decisions in football. But one of the reasons why it is particularly hard to be successful in Glasgow is because the clubs themselves are sinking. Structural changes in football are pushing Celtic and Rangers into long-term decline. In the early 2000s there was serious debate about admitting the Old Firm into the Premier League. Most analytics speculated that they would be strong enough to compete for the title. Celtic knocked Liverpool out of the UEFA Cup in 2003; both teams were among the 20 highest-earning teams in Europe by revenue in 2004.

In the early 2000s there was serious debate about admitting the Old Firm into the Premier League

But in the past two decades, Scotland has missed out on the television rights bonanza that has driven revenue growth among Europe’s biggest clubs. Consequently, they have become less and less competitive. Celtic, in particular, have known for years that they cannot attract elite players to Parkhead. They pivoted to exploring lesser-known markets for players, such as Japan, and had some success. But the widespread adoption of advanced data analytics – including by much smaller teams, like Hearts – has eroded this advantage too. Elo ratings, a widely respected gauge of a team’s relative strength, suggest that the Old Firm would have easily been in the top half of the Premier League in 2000. But in 2025, their levels are comparable to the play-off places in the Championship.

The short- and long-term factors pulling down the Old Firm should do nothing to detract from events at Tynecastle. There are few 40-year-old records left in football, and if a small, fan-owned team can outmanoeuvre their deeper-pocketed rivals through cannier use of their resources, then Hearts’ story will be one of the cheerier of 2026.