Hearts could open an eight-point gap at the top of the Scottish Premiership this weekend when they face reigning champions Celtic. Backed by Tony Bloom’s analytics and clever player recruitment, could the Edinburgh club change the landscape of Scottish football?
Considering Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland, it’s a city that has been starved of footballing success for quite some time.
The last major honour won by one of its clubs came with Hibernian’s Scottish Cup glory in 2015-16, while the city’s other major side, Heart of Midlothian, haven’t won a single major trophy in 13 years since winning the same competition as their rivals four years earlier in 2012.
Domestic cup competitions have offered a chance for teams outside the Old Firm to win silverware in recent years – take Aberdeen in the Scottish Cup last season, for example – but top-flight league football has been a very different proposition.
There’s been a duopoly in Scotland for some time now, with none of the last 40 top-flight league seasons being won by a team other than Celtic or Rangers. The last side outside of the Old Firm to win the top-flight title were Aberdeen in 1985, when the Dons became a dominant force under Alex Ferguson before his eventual move to Manchester United.
Hearts haven’t won the Scottish top-flight league title since 1959-60, but that could all be about to change.
Eight games into 2025-26, Hearts lead the Scottish Premiership by five points after a sensational unbeaten start. A meeting with second-place Celtic on Sunday offers the opportunity to open an eight-point gap at the top of the league, too, giving them an excellent base to build upon and a real chance of unlikely success.
In the 27 years since the inaugural Scottish Premier League season in 1998-99, there has only been one day on which a team other than Rangers or Celtic have held an eight-point lead at the top of the table.
Back on 17 September 2005, George Burley’s Hearts side ended the day eight points clear of Celtic having played a game more than the Glasgow club. That gap was reduced to five points a day later following the Bhoys’ 1-0 victory over Hibernian.
Back in 2005-06, Hearts made an even more impressive start under Burley than they have this season, winning their first eight league games and remaining unbeaten through their first 12 (W10 D2).
However, a huge turning point in their season came when, despite such a sensational start, Burley was sacked on 22 October, even though Hearts topped the table with 10 games played. That sacking (or “mutual agreement” as it was termed) came as a big shock, but the warning signs had been there following various disagreements with then-owner Vladimir Romanov.
Much has already been written about Romanov’s time at Hearts, but the focus on this analysis is the current state of the Edinburgh club.
This start feels like it’s built on much more solid foundations, with the backing of new investor Tony Bloom signalling a new dawn at Tynecastle.
Bloom is renowned for his strong belief in data analytics and has been majority owner at Brighton and Hove Albion since 2009. We all know the Brighton story, with the Seagulls now an established Premier League club enjoying their ninth successive season of top-flight football. When Bloom took over the south-coast side they were a mid-table League One team, but two promotions in the space of six years saw them take their place in the top division in England for the first time in 34 years in 2017.
Much of Brighton’s success has been because of their exceptional player recruitment, openly powered by data analytics. Success stories in recent years include Moisés Caicedo, Marc Cucurella, Ben White, João Pedro, Alexis Mac Allister, Yves Bissouma and Leandro Trossard – all of whom were sold on for a massive profit.
Bloom went on to complete a takeover of Belgian side Union Saint-Gilloise in 2018 and has had similar success there with his data-powered blueprint. Promoted back to the Belgian top-flight for the first time in 48 years in 2021, USG won their first Belgian Pro League title since 1935 last season and are playing their maiden UEFA Champions League campaign in 2025-26. Admittedly, not all of that success can be linked to Bloom, with the Englishman reducing his stake at the club before their title-winning season so not to risk breaching UEFA’s ownership rules and potentially ruin a chance in Europe for both Brighton and USG.
Hopes in the maroon half of Edinburgh are that similar success can be brought to Hearts in the near future. With Rangers and Celtic showing a lack of progress, admittedly with little competition to test them, it feels like an opportune time for another club to steal in and provide a much-needed shock to Scottish football.
Hearts are that club this season, but others have looked like offering a challenge to the established strength of the Old Firm duo before now. We only need to hark back to Aberdeen last season for what looked like a genuine challenge early in the campaign before a dramatic collapse. After opening the Scottish Premiership season with 31 points from a possible 33 (W10 D1), Aberdeen won just 22 points in their remaining 27 games to finish fifth – 39 points off champions Celtic.
But this Hearts challenge feels different. Of course, that’s helped by both Rangers – who have made their worst start to a Scottish Premiership season since it rebranded in 1998 – and Celtic – who have five points fewer than this stage last season – performing relatively poorly. But Bloom’s previous successful application of his methods in both England and Belgium give sufficient evidence that this might be the start of a shift in power in Scottish club football.
His own sports analytics firm, Jamestown Analytics, is providing bespoke data analysis to assist their player recruitment – something that fellow Bloom-owned clubs Brighton and USG also benefit exclusive use from in their respective countries. Their data-led scouting has helped them recruit players from across Europe this summer, with permanent arrivals coming from leagues in Norway, Slovakia, Italy, Iceland, Estonia, Portugal and Germany.
In a recent episode of the Open Goal podcast, Hearts boss Derek McInnes revealed that players are highlighted to him by Jamestown Analytics using a unique, in-depth statistical scoring system across all major men’s senior leagues in the world, and that is one aspect that has enabled them to gain an advantage on their rivals in the transfer market.
One of those recruited this summer was Portuguese forward Cláudio Braga from Aalesund after a decent start to 2025, with eight appearances and three goals in the Norwegian First Division.
Braga arrived in Scotland after three full, fairly unremarkable seasons in the second and third tiers in Norway, but the underlying data gave indications that his signing could be an astute one for Hearts. Fast-forward two months and Braga has started the season on fire, with eight goals in all competitions and a joint-league high five in the Premiership, including a brace in the most recent win over Kilmarnock.
Alexandros Kyziridis is – so far, at least – another example of their impressive recruitment this summer. The Greek winger was plucked from mid-table obscurity in Slovakia this pre-season and has two goals and a league-high four assists in the Premiership, with only five players creating more chances for their teammates (14). This comes after he scored 15 goals from 78 shots (19.2% conversion rate) in 26 games for Zemplin Michalovce in the Slovakian top flight last term.
Adding talents like these to existing attacking quality has made Hearts a force to be reckoned with. The experienced Lawrence Shankland had a quiet season by his standards in 2024-25 after back-to-back campaigns of scoring 24 league goals. Three goals in his last four league appearances mean that his tally in the Premiership since joining Hearts in 2022-23 stands at 60 goals in 114 games – nine more than any other player in the division across that time.
Using data has the potential to provide other advantages outside of recruitment too, such as making marginal gains across the pitch from set-piece situations. It is Hearts who lead the Premiership rankings for goals from set-pieces this season (eight, excluding penalties), with five of those coming from corners.
But simply looking at goals from corners would be understating the threat they’ve posed from them under McInnes this season. Of their 50 corners taken in the Premiership in 2025-26, 21 have seen the first involvement being a shot at goal – no other side have had more than 11. Overall, those 50 corners have produced 31 shots, nine more than any other team in the division.
Harry Milne’s delivery has been the most effective in the league this season, assisting more goals from corners (3) than any other player, while his 31 corners have seen a league-high 12 produce a shot as the first involvement – no other player has more than seven.
Stuart Findlay – a player McInnes worked with at Kilmarnock and was another good pickup in the summer, on loan from Oxford United – has been the biggest threat on the end of these corners. He’s scored twice from five attempts at goal via first contacts following a corner, while defender Craig Halkett has two goals from four shots in these scenarios.
Their strength at corners extends to the other end of the pitch too, where Hearts have conceded just once from such situations in 2025-26, while no team have allowed their opponents fewer shots following a corner than Hearts (10) in the Premiership this season.
One of Hearts’ five corner goals this season in the Premiership came via Findlay’s added-time winner at Dundee United in August, which saw the Jam Tarts come from 2-1 down to secure all three points with a 3-2 victory at Tannadice Park.
Overall, Hearts have won a league-high seven points from losing positions in the Premiership this season, more than any other team, and their ability to take the game to opponents in the final stages of matches has proved the difference on a number of occasions already inside eight matchdays of 2025-26.
Hearts have scored five goals in the final 15 minutes of league games this season, more than any other team, with four of those changing the outcome of the match – three winners versus Dundee United, Livingston and rivals Hibs, as well as an equaliser at home to Motherwell. They have had 10 more shots than their opponents in games after the 75th minute (26-16), while no team have had a higher non-penalty xG difference than their opposition in this stage of the game than McInnes’ side (+2.8).
The positivity in games is shown further by the fact that when Hearts have been level in games this season (341 minutes, 18 seconds – 43.5% of match time overall), they have tried to take the game to their opponents to secure victory rather than settle for a point. Their goal difference at a drawing game state is +5 (8 goals for, 3 against) while they have attempted 26 shots more than their opponents and posted a higher xG difference (+3.7) across the time games have been level – only Celtic (52 shots, +6.8 xG) have attempted more in this situation.
In general, though, Hearts are showing more attacking potency than we’ve seen in a long time. They have averaged 15.5 shots per game this campaign, more than in any of the previous 18 Scottish Premiership seasons on record, while their xG per game average of 1.72 is well above the previous four league seasons.
Of course, goals are what matter most, and Hearts’ average of 2.38 per game this season is their highest in the top flight since 1964-65 (2.65), when they finished second in the old Scottish Division One. Astonishingly, no team other than Celtic or Rangers have averaged more than two goals per game in any Scottish Premiership campaign since the rebrand in 1998-99, with Aberdeen’s 1.95 per game in 2016-17 the closest any side has come.
A meeting with Celtic this weekend offers by far their stiffest test yet, but Brendan Rodgers’ team head to Tynecastle having collected just four points in their last three league matches. They lost unexpectedly at Dundee on Sunday and only defeated Motherwell with an injury-time winner after coming from behind in their previous Premiership game.
Sunday’s match looks like being a clash where the effectiveness of the press against the opposition in the final third could prove decisive, with both Celtic (67) and Hearts (61) leading the Premiership rankings for high turnovers. Of the nine goals scored following a high turnover this season in the league, Hearts have been responsible for a third of them (3), while only McInnes’ side (45.6m) have started their open-play possession sequences higher up the pitch than Celtic have on average (45.2m) this season.
Celtic will undoubtedly have more of the ball this weekend – their average possession figure of 72.7% is a league-high, while Hearts only average 53.8% – but this could play into the latter’s’ hands. As the stats above show, Hearts will be comfortable with Celtic passing it inside their own half and looking to pounce at the most suitable opportunity.
Having already won the Premiership Manager of the Month award for both August and September, a victory over Celtic could help McInnes secure a third accolade in a row to start 2025-26. No boss has won three in succession in the Scottish top flight since 2022, when Ange Postecoglou did so at Celtic en route to winning the title.
Of course, results have been the main factor in McInnes picking up these awards, and while performances have been impressive, there is still a lingering feeling that fortune has played some part in Hearts’ early success in 2025-26.
Opta’s xG-powered expected points table – which uses xG data at both ends of the pitch to assess how each game ‘should’ have finished based on the quality of chances each team created – shows they’ve overperformed by nearly six points, and that based on the underlying data, they should potentially be below Celtic.
But there will have to be some luck involved if Hearts are to win the league against the comparative financial clout of Celtic and Rangers. It can happen, and it has happened elsewhere in Europe already this year.
Look at Mjällby’s incredible success in Sweden this season, where they secured the league title this week against all the odds versus teams with much bigger budgets and pulling power than them. The Allsvenskan expected points table sees them sit in fourth place and hugely overachieving based on the underlying data, but it’s proof that miracles do happen.
Celtic may have won all three meetings with Hearts last season by a combined scoreline of 9-1, while that winning run extends to four games when including the 3-0 Premiership win in May 2024. But this is arguably the strongest Hearts team they have faced in two decades, and it feels like an opportune time for McInnes for take advantage of a wounded Celtic and Rangers.
Should Hearts secure the three points this weekend, it could begin a new dawn for Scottish club football – one powered by clever recruitment, intelligent use of data and not entirely dominated by the Old Firm.
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After 40 years of Old Firm Dominance, Could Tony Bloom’s Analytical Revolution at Hearts Smash Scotland’s Duopoly? Opta Analyst.
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