analysis There is still no explanation over unpaid wages at troubled Tynecastle club, writes Graeme Macpherson

As if. Life is rarely dull down Tynecastle way but a week like this takes some beating.

Firstly, there are the on-field difficulties. Hearts had a player sent off, Ian Black, who has since been given a three-game ban, in their defeat to Kilmarnock.

Another player, Danny Grainger, has received a two-match suspension for stamping on an opponent.

Manager Paulo Sergio was sent to the stand, apparently for hitting the dugout, and giving the fourth official a mouthful on the way.

He is due at Hampden today to answer a previous misconduct charge and will be back again in a fortnight to respond to this latest one.

All that seems fairly inconsequential, however, in comparison to their problems off the field. There seems no end in sight to the saga of first-team players not being paid. Their wages were due on October 16 and there has been no reason given for the delay, and no guarantee that the matter will be resolved any time soon.

There is a suggestion the Scottish Premier League may be in a position to intervene -- redirecting sums due to the club to the players -- but can only act upon receiving a formal complaint. That official letter is in the process of being formulated and should be with the governing body by Monday at the latest, whether the players have been paid by then or not.

PFA Scotland have written to Hearts looking for an explanation as to why wages have not been paid but no answer has been forthcoming. The players’ union have also made an approach to FIFA to investigate whether the players could invoke Article 14 of the Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players and terminate their contracts, although there is little precedent to follow on that front.

The prospect of the Hearts squad withdrawing their labour -- and either not training or refusing to play in matches -- has been ruled out. The players would then be in breach of contract and are not thought to be keen to go down that road in any case.

With the next salary run due on November 16, it remains to be seen whether the Hearts players will even have received October’s money by then. “The silence from the club has been deafening,” said one source close to the matter.

It will surely not be long before the other SPL clubs start to take an interest. Hearts’ monthly wage bill is thought to be in the region of £250,000, and that saving -- if they do not pay it -- gives them an unfair competitive advantage in a league where every penny is a prisoner.

If the other 11 clubs think Hearts can continue to not pay their staff and effectively get away with it, they may start to wonder whether they could then start to do the same.

Hearts’ cashflow difficulties, or perhaps just an unwillingness to make payments on time, is not just restricted to players’ wages. On several occasions, including as recently as two months ago, the club was threatened with administration by HM Revenue and Customs over unpaid tax bills, a sign that all is not well behind the scenes at Tynecastle.

“At most companies the first thing you pay each month is your wages,” Neil Patey, a football finance expert with Ernst and Young, told Herald Sport. “If you don’t have a workforce, you don’t have a business. So it’s pretty unusual, apart from in those companies in danger of going into administration, that you don’t pay your wages. It’s a dangerous game to play.”

That non-payment of wages, combined with the statement released earlier this week in which he opined that “there is no point in spending millions to watch someone else’s show”, again cast into doubt Vladimir Romanov’s enthusiasm for his Scottish project. Hearts’ majority shareholder has owned the club since 2005 and their debt, thought to be around £26m, is owed largely to his UBIG investment banking group.

This is not the first time Romanov has delivered a cryptic message suggesting he may be formulating an exit strategy -- there were similar noises made last year -- and, with the Russian-born Lithuanian tending to pay more attention to his basketball team these days, there is every chance he may feel he has gone as far as he can with Hearts.

Finding someone willing to take the club off his hands, however, may prove as onerous a task as Sir David Murray had when he tried to offload Rangers. Romanov would have to find someone willing to take on the debt in return for the club being sold for a token sum, or write off the debt himself.

Neither seems likely at this juncture. “The other thing with Hearts is that it’s wages-to-turnover is 115% so you would be inheriting a club that makes an operating loss,” added Patey. “If it hadn’t foregone further debt in their last accounts they would have made a loss of around £8m. So you would be inheriting, or buying, a loss-making entity.

“You would immediately need to go through a major cost rationalisation in terms of the size of the squad and wages, unless you were another like Romanov willing to fund the club from your personal wealth, rather than on a commercial basis. There aren’t many people like that around.

“You’ve got a club with the largest debt in the SPL, which is fine as long as Romanov continues to fund the operating loss it’s making each year. But as soon as he either loses interest or doesn’t have the cash the club is effectively bankrupt.”

Romanov, who once ran for Lithuanian president only to be foiled because he is Russian, is not the only politician to become embroiled in Hearts’ sorry affairs.

The possibility of Edinburgh City Council locating a site and then paying for the construction of a new stadium in which Hearts would be tenants after selling Tynecastle has led, unsurprisingly, to accusations of pro-Jambo bias in the corridors of power.

Despite commissioning a report to investigate the feasibility -- the council and Hearts split the £30,000 cost of the study -- the council have subsequently decided a community stadium used by Hearts could not be considered a “serious option”.

If this was Romanov’s method of finally making some money from the club, he has once again been thwarted.