Hearts fans have been urged to buy 3,000 season tickets in the next 14 days to keep the club afloat after administrators began a round of redundancies which is expected to see four players lose their jobs.
Administrators BDO began their first full day in charge at Tynecastle by making 14 office staff redundant, nine of them full-time, while two unnamed senior players and two youth players are “likely” to depart.
That will leave Hearts with a 22-man squad but they may not even start their season at St Johnstone on August 3 if fans cannot plug an immediate funding gap estimated to be between £500,000 and £750,000.
Hearts were forced to call in joint-administrators Bryan Jackson and Trevor Birch after running out of money to pay players and tax bills and the pair admit the situation with no money in the bank and no guaranteed income is as “desperate” as they have seen.
But they believe a sustainable business can emerge from the cashflow crisis and, by raising season ticket holders to last season’s level of 10,000 thus generating up to £800,000 potential owners will be able formulate takeover bids.
Jackson said: “If we can achieve that, we will be in a position where we can fund the club going forward.
“It does indicate it would give us four months which, although a short timescale for trying to put everything into operation for a CVA (Company Voluntary Arrangement), it makes it possible to keep the doors open and to honour those season tickets.
“It should also mean we will be able to keep the rest of the squad together.”
Jackson stressed BDO would take no fee until a sale is secured in a bid to encourage a set of supporters who put more than £1million into their club last December to avert an HMRC winding-up order by purchasing shares which are now effectively worthless, and were even then.
“I know it always seems to come down on the fans, but to a great extent it is,” Jackson said.
“If season ticket money comes in, and we will be also looking for the usual donations, it puts us in a situation where we won’t be forced to fire-sale players, which means we retain value on the field and hopefully make the club more attractive for a new owner.”