Ian Bell, columnist of the year

The veterans of Gretna's adventure can speak for journeymen down the ages. The knowledge is old, sure and certain. When the wages don't turn up, think hard. Think again. Then worry.

There is no cause for concern, obviously, where Heart of Midlothian FC are concerned. Everyone has been paid in full. It is a fine thing, meanwhile, to have a very large squad of very expensive players. All debts can be managed by businesslike folk.

Besides, who would not want to be mired in debt and wholly dependent on a minor European bank with a colourful major shareholder in this day and age?

Just kidding, of course. The little problem at Tynecastle recently was a mere "technical hitch". The folk memories of those old Scottish pros who might invoke Gretna, or Hibs, or Dundee in the matter of late pay slips are neither here nor there.

Hearts are solid. People who work for Mr Romanov have said so. Hearts are also going pretty well. There is no cash-flow problem and someone called Sergejus Fedotovas, a Gorgie native if ever there was, can explain everything.

Fedotovas is an executive, these days, with Ukio Bankas Investment Group (UBIG), a Lithuania-based enterprise that has Heart of Mid-lothian as an outpost. Fedotovas is also a Tynecastle director. If we believe all we read, wages and their eventual payment are his department. "An inquiry" is promised.

Who could argue with that? Small problem with the payroll software; a bit of a fuss - I'm guessing here - and the usual Scottish media conspiracy over the efforts of the noble Vlad and his trusted, unimpeachable co- workers: no story.

All of which is true, to my know-ledge. Public relations are never at their best when you fail to pay the staff promptly, but these things happen. We must on no account read anything into the fact that the players' money was late in turning up.

The fact remains that the money was late in turning up.

You can put two and two together and get 102. A small difficulty at Hearts does not provide a useful metaphor for the issues of football finance. To ask about Mr Romanov's bank, Hearts debts, and global financial conditions would be like asking whether fit and proper persons have owned Manchester City recently, or whether Sunderland have found a benefactor in the shape of an equity fund mogul.

Where Gorgie is concerned, nevertheless, there is something of a consensus. The current financial management may not care for such talk, but it persists. Pound for pound, Hearts are one of the most indebted clubs around. The international market for debt has just collapsed. Is all of this sustainable?

Scousers and Geordies, with their own problems, ask the same questions.

Suddenly, every prat in a replica shirt is a stock market guru. Suddenly, yesterday's big financial beasts, "the saviours", are just like the rest of us: strapped and hoping for a leg up. Is Liverpool for sale? Is Newcastle on the block? Of course. Are Hearts immune? If they say so.

The issue for football, as ever, is that money attracts money. Some of the cash is good, some less so. But as Wall Street has been busy demonstrating, the punter can never know for sure.

Hearts attracted attention less through a late payroll run - we have all seen those - than because promises of immediate action seemed to be a little tardy in being brought to reality. "Spokespersons" deny that the fact has any significance. They would. And the man who does not trust a spokesperson with his life is merely churlish.

The irony is that the team, and Csaba Laszlo, seem truly just to want to live out the cliché and get on with the job. Why not? Under the latest Tynecastle coaching regime the squad seems likely to become, once again, the genuine third force in Scottish football. If Mr Romanov could live the dream as well as he talks it, Hearts might do better even than that.

Sometimes, the money goes funny. Last week, Laszlo and a few of his more experienced players were recalling their bad paydays elsewhere in Europe. The club in Gorgie are not Lehman Brothers. Still you wonder about the waves of new money that have inundated the British game, about the sources of that money, and about its import.

I wrote that, you'll notice, without mentioning Chelsea once. I wrote it without doubting a single spokes-person. I wrote it without drawing too many conclusions about the actual condition of Hearts FC. Clear?

You could wonder idly, though, about what the only game might be were it freed of hyper-inflation. By that I mean the conviction that success only comes when you double any number you thought of, when you convince yourself, for example, that a stop-gap named Berbatov is worth upwards of £30 million.

What would the sport resemble if the nonsense was stripped away? I don't know the actual financial situation of Hearts, or of Mr Romanov. I know there is a debt bigger - much bigger - than is usual in Scottish football. I know there is a big squad, a few chunky wages, some recent whittling of the bill. Perhaps the club is in very fine shape.

But does it have to be this way? Must overweening ambition and financial sector types forever combine? The point is less moral than aesthetic: I find it dull. I miss the days of the small, honest, strapped club selling pies and doing its best.

Football might care to remember, in any case, that such a world is the one we are all about to inhabit. Any number of wages, everywhere, are about to go unpaid. The game is in no sense immune.

And a spokesperson for Ukio Bankas Investment Group didn't ask me to say so.

History says that this greatest of ball games had its finest moments when the big money collapsed, all around the world, in the 1930s.

Contrary to what they tell you, history does repeat itself.