Hearts are two games from bringing the Scottish title back to Edinburgh after staying top of the Premiership all season, a run that has turned a quiet autumn prediction into a genuine championship chase. The club won eight of their opening nine league fixtures and never surrendered first place.
The scale of the climb is stark. Hearts last won the Scottish title 66 years ago, and if they finish the job they would become the first non-Old Firm team to lift it since Sir Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen did so in 1985. For a club that had not even finished in the top half the season before Tony Bloom made his first public forecast, the turnaround has been swift and direct.
Bloom, the minority owner who has helped reshape the club’s thinking, said in his first television interview in the role that Hearts could challenge for the Scottish title this season. That sounded ambitious at the time. It no longer does. Hearts have used Jamestown Analytics to change their recruitment model, bringing in first-team players from the Norwegian second tier and the Slovakian top division, and the results have pushed them into a position few in Scottish football expected them to reach so quickly.
The timing matters because the league now enters its split. The 12-team division breaks into two groups of six for the final five matches, with each side playing everyone else in its group once after the split. That format has often not produced much title suspense, largely because Celtic or Rangers had already moved clear by that stage. This year is different. Hearts have kept their grip on top, and the gap between possibility and history is now only two games.
The backdrop to that run has been turbulent for the club most used to ruling the Scottish game. Celtic began the 2025-26 campaign with Brendan Rodgers in charge, only for majority shareholder Dermot Desmond to sack him and describe him as “divisive, misleading, and self-serving.” Celtic have won the Scottish Premiership in 12 of the last 13 seasons, with the lone exception coming during the global pandemic, and that dominance is the reason Hearts’ position feels so unusual.
Hearts are being guided by Derek McInnes, the 54-year-old former Aberdeen, Kilmarnock and St Johnstone manager, and his side have kept pace with the scale of the moment. The next five matches after the split will decide whether that early-season burst becomes a title procession or a near miss. For now, the city has something it has not had for generations: a realistic shot at ending a 66-year wait.
