JAMES ANDERSON’S millions were a lifeline to Scottish clubs during the pandemic.
Now he’s backing Hearts to breathe new life into the SPFL title race.
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Anderson ploughed vital cash into clubs when fans were locked out of grounds during the Covid-19 season.
His Jambo favourites also revealed he’d pledged another £4m last year via the club accounts, and his generosity is not done yet.
He said: “I would be deeply disappointed if we could not keep carrying on contributing. We need to find ways to do this and it has to be long term.
“We have given away quite a lot of money and the financial markets have not been kind over the past couple of years but I am not remotely going to plead poverty.”
He hopes to do more and his vital help for teams – especially at the bottom of the pyramid – was used for important infrastructure projects.
“I genuinely cannot remember who sent me this but one club said they were able to put up pigeon netting over the disabled people’s seats so they didn’t get messed up. This is the real world. That to me is incredible, wonderful,” he told the Daily Mail.
“I am particularly interested in some of the smaller clubs. The contribution they make is more interesting to me than the machinations at the top of the game.”
But further up the ladder he reckons his own team at Tynecastle have the capacity to eventually challenge Rangers and Celtic’s stranglehold in Scotland.
But only with a long-term plan.
A regular in Italy, he pointed to Atalanta in Serie A as a smaller team who upset the apple-cart during his interview. AZ Alkmaar and Villareal were also mentioned in Holland and Spain.
He added: “I find the sheer dominance of Rangers and Celtic puzzling.
“If you go through different European countries in all of their leagues, there have been serious challenges to the big two or big three.
“These may not end up in you winning the league but it does amount to a serious challenge and it does change the structure of the club and its aspirations.
“Too much attention is on the manager.
“The last match is all that matters and if it goes the wrong way then it is ‘sack the board, sack the manager’.
“We should be able to get on a self-replicating higher level: European football, more revenue, more potential for players to be sold.
“There has been fundamentally a failure of the other Scottish clubs going back to the Ferguson-McLean era at Aberdeen and Dundee United.”