Sergejus Fedotovas, the Hearts director, last night revealed the club has a shortlist for the vacant manager's position and hope to have a successor to Paulo Sergio in place before pre-season training starts on July 2.
That gives Vladimir Romanov, the owner of Hearts, just over three weeks to find his seventh permanent manager in as many years.
Sergio, who replaced Jim Jefferies last August, said he could not accept a "huge cut" in his salary to remain at the club and his exit was announced on Thursday.
Falkirk's Steven Pressley, Cowdenbeath's Colin Cameron, and Paul Hartley, the manager of Alloa Athletic, have been linked with the post and all played for the club, but Romanov's appointments have often come out of left field. Portuguese coach Jose Couceiro, who has managed FBK Kaunas and the Lithuanian national team, and is known to Romanov and his advisors.
"It's a must that we have someone in before pre-season," said Fedotovas. "We have a preliminary short list. We have not spoken to anyone as we had hoped that things could have been sorted positively with Paulo Sergio. Now the process will start. It is a very attractive job with the added incentive of European football again. We are expecting lots of candidates.
"We are open-minded when it comes to . . . a new manager, we are not bothered about their nationality. It's about a person that brings true professionalism to the club and someone that can match the ambitions and goals we're looking to achieve."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article