Ken Early: Martin O’Neill’s Celtic salvation act was a victory for the romantics

I never picked up the Celtic bug as a kid. But over the last few weeks, I somehow found myself becoming weirdly invested in Celtic beating Hearts to the Scottish league title and thus crushing football’s underdog story of the year.

What is wrong with me?

Hearts’ title challenge obviously had the ingredients of legend. They were taking on a sporting supremacy unmatched anywhere in the world. For 40 years, no other club has been able to stop one of Celtic or Rangers winning the title.

This oppressive dominance has obviously been bad for Scottish football and bad even for the two clubs themselves. Rangers became so obsessed with beating Celtic by any means necessary that they became a bandit club that was ultimately liquidated by the authorities. Since Rangers collapsed, Celtic have become so dominant that winning has become boring. The emotional vacuum has had to be filled with malicious delight in the failures of others.

What fair-minded person could hope for anything other than the downfall of these gloating ogres?

The first glimmer of a new challenge came in November 2024, when Hearts announced that they had entered a partnership with Tony Bloom’s firm, Jamestown Analytics.

Bloom, the legendary pro-gambler and entrepreneur, owns Brighton & Hove Albion and has stakes in Union Saint-Gilloise, Melbourne Victory and, since the summer of 2025, Hearts. His analytics company Jamestown works with selected partner clubs across a number of leagues, including Como in Italy and, since last year, Shelbourne.

According to then-Hearts boss Neil Critchley, the Edinburgh club were fortunate to have been picked out as the local vessel of the wider Jamestown project. “…If you like, they’ve chosen Hearts," he said. “I think that’s a big thing for the football club. I think that’s something we should be very proud of as a club.”

Fifteen years ago, in the days when Brad Pitt was playing Billy Beane in Moneyball, the link-up might have been a feel-good story. Early-2000s Beane seemed a prophet of enlightenment and emancipation. Here was a way to use science to sweep away the cobwebs of ignorance and prejudice that held us all back. And here was a way for the little guy to win.

We know now that the widespread adoption of Moneyball methods took only a few years to ruin baseball. “It turns out that the smart way to play baseball is boring,” Moneyball author Michael Lewis told the SF Chronicle in 2024. “It’s much less fun having geeks from MIT running the baseball team than it was having colourful, tobacco-chewing former players who you knew. It’s much less fun when the manager is clearly less important, more like a middle manager.”

The effect has since spread to all professional sports. NBA fans complain that half of the charm of basketball has been optimised out of existence. The widespread annoyance with the English Premier League this season is rooted partly in the sense that football is going the same way.

The conquest of sport by rich and secretive data guys is one small dimension of what feels like an all-pervasive process working through all aspects of life. What a journey we’ve been on together over the last 15 years, as the innocent dream of “Bicycles for the Mind” has given way to the Age of Enshittification.

The tech that once seemed liberatory now exudes a dark aura of menace. More and more it feels as though the very stuff of our daily experience – the things we see and feel and react to – is conditioned by proprietary algorithms owned by insane billionaires.

Clearly, Tony Bloom is no Musk, Thiel or Alex Karp. Yet the scouting services Jamestown can provide to its lucky clients are reminiscent of the Tolkien talisman that Thiel and Karp’s Palantir is named after. “Gaze into our seeing stone and behold the next Scottish Player of the Year, plugging away in the obscurity of Norway’s Second Division...”

Bloom’s role in Hearts’ title charge drew the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which profiled the club last week. “Even the club’s most devoted supporters can’t quite grasp the sorcery of their recruitment policy,” wrote sports editor Joshua Robinson. He quoted Foundation of Hearts chairman Gerry Mallon, who said: “It’s a black box to us. It feels like we’ve got the cheat codes to football.”

Most of the players involved in this heroic Hearts campaign were there before Jamestown got involved. But can you be a true underdog when you have Tony Bloom in your corner giving you the cheat codes?

Their rivals for the title was a club apparently bent on wasting every one of their many advantages in the most incompetent way possible. It’s hard to believe how much chaos Celtic managed to cram into one season. A spectacular falling-out with Brendan Rodgers was followed by a spectacular falling-out between the board and the fans. The Green Brigade ultras were banned for five months. The board hired Wilfried Nancy as manager, watched him lose six matches out of eight and sacked him a month later.

You then had the unimaginably corny twist of the legend coming out of retirement to save the season – twice. Martin O’Neill, who famously scoffs at the very concept of expected goals, happens to be the perfect antagonist to the football data revolution represented by Bloom. By some mysterious process, the story of the lurching giants began to feel more compelling than that of the focused, intelligently-maximising challengers.

O’Neill’s success in instantly transforming the losing sides of Rodgers and Nancy into winning sides is one of the most interesting things to happen in football this year. It suggests that even as the game becomes ever more complex and choreographed, the key skill of a coach is still the ability to get the players into the right frame of mind to play.

In the end, it comes down to making your players believe what Celtic’s Canadian right-back Alistair Johnston told the Sky cameras on Saturday: “We just felt we were gonna f***in’ find a way.”

They didn’t play that way in the first half. They were nervous and tentative and it became the kind of match Hearts were hoping for. The challengers took the lead with the archetypal goal of season 2025-26: a well-worked inswinging corner. But Celtic’s penalty equaliser a few minutes later rattled Hearts, who played hardly any football in the second half.

Celtic played hardly any football themselves until desperation kicked in with about 15 minutes to go and they started to flood forward in numbers. After Daizen Maeda’s goal, 10 minutes of utter frenzy. Any semblance of tactics, of patience, of organisation – of reason itself – was hurled aside as both teams slashed wildly at the ball and crashed into each other at 100mph. This was a magnificent spectacle of pure, uncut, military-grade Scottish football.

It finished with Celtic running the ball all the way up the field into the unguarded Hearts net amid wild celebrations that culminated in the pitch invasion people will probably still be complaining about in 50 years.

Was the crowd’s behaviour a sign of civilisational decay, or the natural irrepressible response to such an incredible ending to an extraordinary season?

The most famous line of football commentary in the English language includes the information that a pitch invasion is taking place. Sometimes people just can’t help themselves – and making them feel that way is what this game is all about.

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