Heart of
the matter

Ann Budge OBE is a familiar face in Scottish business and football. Having made her fortune in IT, she helped rescue Hearts from administration. Now, with exciting new investment secured, the former Chair (and Honorary President) has the club dreaming of a first league title in decades 

Words: Richard Purden

Scottish football is enjoying a season of rare excitement. The international side has made it to the World Cup finals for the first time since 1998. On the domestic front, the age-old duopoly, which has seen the Scottish league title won by either Rangers or Celtic every year since 1985, is under threat, with Edinburgh’s Heart of Midlothian (better known as Hearts) currently sitting at the top of the table, a position they’ve held since September.

The turnaround is all the more remarkable given the mess the club were in little more than a decade ago. In 2013 Hearts entered administration. “The supporters felt that if it could happen to Rangers [the Glasgow club was put into liquidation in 2012 and relegated to the fourth tier of Scottish football], it could happen to Hearts,” explains Ann Budge OBE, who is now Honorary President at Tynecastle. “I didn’t labour on that,” she adds. “I have to be honest. My focus was that everything here is broken, so we’d better start fixing it.”

It’s a wet morning at the tail end of 2025 when CA magazine meets Hearts’ former Chair at Tynecastle. It’s not unlike her early days in Gorgie, the west Edinburgh district where the club is located. Hearts were collapsing under the previous owner, Lithuanian businessman Vladimir Romanov. Budge was a well-known entrepreneur in Edinburgh, having co-founded a successful IT company, which she later sold for a personal haul of around £30m, and a recognisable face in the Wheatfield Stand when she began to receive handwritten letters from desperate fans asking for her help.

“I had a lot of good female managers, and that does help sometimes in building a culture where the place is a bit more fun”

“When I first got involved with what became FoH [Foundation of Hearts], I got my first real insight. It was utterly frustrating because there was no real direction.” Budge tried to introduce other potential suitors “in the hope that I could then step back, but that didn’t work”.

She was eventually won over by fans who turned up in their droves, passing envelopes stuffed with cash to the club, raising over £1m in six weeks. “That got to me, and that’s why I stuck with it,” she says. “Things were a lot worse than I imagined. There was an old building that had been police cells; it was in a terrible state of repair. There were shoe boxes in the corner catching rodents. I remember, a few days after I came in, overhearing someone in the corridor saying the Gorgie Suite [the club’s main reception room] had flooded again. It happened every time it rained heavily.”

Budge grew up in West Pilton, the same tough, working-class part of the capital as Irvine Welsh, and like the Trainspotting author, she had strong ties to Leith, where her Hibs-supporting father worked as a labourer. In fact, family from across Edinburgh’s footballing divide played an important role in repairing the mess she inherited at Hearts. Early on, she placed a call to her brother, a season ticket holder at Easter Road. “My brother is in the building industry. He said: ‘I’m not going to have to help Hearts, am I?’ He got some people in and fixed the drains. At the time, the club couldn’t even buy a bag of sand.

“I had this outline plan of what I wanted to do in around three years in terms of financial stability and getting things on an even keel. I had to get a plan in place to replace the old stand. It became clear we didn’t have the luxury of time; we had to fix the stand there and then if we were going to be financially stable again.” 

Valuable lessons

Budge, though, is no stranger to challenge. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Strathclyde, she rose to a senior level at Scottish & Newcastle (S&N) breweries in Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge area – the first woman to do so – where she met some cultural resistance. “I was a trainee programmer and was promoted to a particular senior grade with a company car, private dining room and use of a gym,” she says. “When I said I’d like to place an order for a car, I was told it was only for a certain grade. When I informed them I was that grade, they said they’d have to look into it. The gym was much harder; I let them off the hook with that.”

One boss, described as an “autocrat”, taught her a valuable lesson. “There were four of us in senior positions. The three men would shake in their boots when [the autocrat] raised his voice,” she says. “He never did that with me. We were told reductions needed to be made, and by the following Monday, we had to each suggest three or four names from each of our teams that were to be made redundant. When the time came, I said: ‘No one in my team merits losing their job, they are all first class.’ Everyone else expected an explosion, but it never came. The others had to make further redundancies. What he wanted was people who stood up for what they believed.”

Budge was soon being headhunted. She joined F International, the freelance software and systems service company founded by Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley. “I had a little bit of a profile by then,” she explains of her decision to join. “My husband at the time also worked at S&N, so there were some personal reasons for leaving – I would be able to get out of his way. And I also decided on a totally new challenge.”

She recalls an early encounter with Shirley, describing her as “flamboyant and quirky, a different character altogether. I had a meeting arranged with her at the North British Hotel [now Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel].” With no sign of Shirley, Budge asked the desk to call her. “She came bounding down the stairs with hair dripping wet,” says Budge, “and said, ‘Sorry, I fell asleep’. She had just come out of the shower. We then went out for dinner. She was very inspirational but very different, possibly because of her background and personal history [Shirley escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, arriving in the UK as a child refugee on the Kindertransport]. She was very focused and very driven. Her family life wasn’t easy; she had a son who was unwell [Shirley’s son was severely autistic and she donated much of her fortune to her charity Autistica], but she balanced everything very well.”

After around five years, Budge left F International and, in 1985, she and Allison Newell founded Newell & Budge, making bespoke IT systems and software. Twenty years later Budge sold the company to Sopra (Newell had sold her share a few years earlier), netting herself an estimated £30m. That same year she was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneurial Exchange.

Vibe shift

At Hearts, Budge has drawn on the model that Shirley pioneered at F International, bringing women into a largely male-dominated sector. Often described in the press, inevitably, as the Queen of Hearts, she is comfortable being regarded as the club’s matriarch. And the many women employed there have helped soften the edges. “This is a huge generalisation,” she says, “but I had a lot of good female managers, and that does help sometimes in building a culture where the place is a bit more fun. I was more interested in creating an environment.”

The business side of Scottish football continues to have an overwhelmingly male presence. A survey in 2022 by the Scottish Football Association and award-winning campaign, Her Game Too, found that one in four women had experienced sexist or misogynistic comments at games. Budge admits she witnessed behaviour at Tynecastle that she wanted to change.

“I used to come as a fan and sit in the Wheatfield Stand. I enjoyed the football, but then I began to understand there were many things that I thought were shocking to put up with.”

The ingrained prejudice was present at board level too: “I was at an away game, and there was a comment like: ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing here? Should you not be shopping on a Saturday afternoon?’… It was being there and thinking there are so many things wrong with this; how do we make it better? We’re going to have to do it right by having values. Standards inside the club also had to shift.”

Budge’s other half, Eric Hogg, was soon appointed Operations Director in an unpaid capacity. “I asked him to come in for a year, and he did it for three,” she says. A strong Finance Director arrived in the form of Jacqui Duncan, who joined in 2014 and remained until the end of last season. Ann Park was brought onboard as Director of Community and Partnerships. “I said to Ann, ‘How would you like a new challenge?’” When Budge explained that finances were tight, Park laughed and said, “I’m sure we can sort something out”. Park spent 12 years with the club, stepping down in January.

At the time, Hearts weren’t the only club being run into the ground in Scottish football. “That became clear very quickly,” adds Budge. “It was the bigger names at that time. The attitude was, ‘He’s a brilliant businessman, but when he’s in the [football] boardroom all of that goes out the window.’ I saw a lot of evidence of that, but I didn’t worry about it because it wasn’t going to be me.”

One major shift has been the £10m investment from Brighton & Hove Albion owner Tony Bloom and the club’s partnership with Jamestown Analytics, an offshoot of Bloom’s Starlizard data firm, which has helped transform Brighton into a Premier League team in England and made champions of Belgian club Union Saint-Gilloise. Bloom’s data currently seems to be having a similarly transformative effect in Edinburgh.

“It was clear we could never challenge Celtic and Rangers if it was just about money – we had to be smarter”

“I got a call in December 2023 that said Tony Bloom was looking to invest in a Scottish football club,” says Budge. “I googled him and thought this isn’t going to be the right guy for us. This was a man who had made his money in gambling, and I’d been preaching about not having betting firms on our shirts. When I went to meet him, I was being polite. Having said that, this was someone looking to invest with an interest in growing the club. I would have been very foolish not to go.

“When I came out of that meeting, I felt the opposite; I liked him, and I felt I could work with Tony. After another couple of meetings, it was clear there were two deals. We had to commit to taking Jamestown Analytics; and we would be the only club to get it in Scotland.”

She admits the board was at first “doubtful and suspicious”, before adding, “It was clear we could never challenge Celtic and Rangers if it was just about money – we had to be smarter.” When Bloom came to Gorgie to deliver a presentation, he explained that during the next decade, Hearts were going to win the league and be contenders in the Champions League. Would Budge be disappointed if it didn’t happen this season after such a promising start?

“I don’t think so, as long as we do well, it’s about continuous improvement. When we got involved with Tony, it was said it could be two, three or maybe four transfer windows [before Hearts would see the benefits]. It would be amazing and I do think it’s possible. Do I think we’ll have failed if we put up a good fight and don’t quite make it? No, we will have to fight harder next year.”

During the winter evenings, Budge enjoys a drive past the stand with the lights on. The club also operates a hotel from inside the stadium. There’s a lot for her to take pride in over the past 12 years, but there’s one moment that stands out. “The day I won’t forget is the end of the first season, and walking around the pitch holding the cup when we won the championship [ahead of the Old Firm giant Rangers and local rivals Hibs]. A few months earlier, we were almost dead and buried,” she says. “That sentiment came back from the stands, and it was brilliant. I thought maybe I’ve done the right thing here.”

heartsfc.co.uk

Read our interview with former Scotland Women’s captain Rachel Corsie CA