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Hibs now have an extra player at both ends of the pitch... and third place in their sights

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My dad played for Hibs. We don’t share a surname (none of your business, that’s why), but we have shared several visits to Easter Road. On one such occasion, a mid-level celebrity whose name I’m omitting from this story on grounds of both relevance and awkwardness, responded to a fan remarking “there’s something special about this club” with “there’d fuckin’ have to be mate, because nobody’s here for the football”. They were then immediately beaten 3-1 by Dundee United. Three months later they were relegated.

He was right though, the fan, as there is something special about Hibs that feels almost entirely unique across European football. They are one of just two clubs where the industrial, creative, and financial power of being based in a capital city manages to be entirely canceled out by the whims and torments of the spiteful football gods. The other team is Hearts, obviously.

Nowhere else across the footballing world do teams from a country’s seat of power wane so predictably and frequently into the mire of the league pyramid. Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Moscow, Dublin, Vienna, Kyiv and Zagreb are all home to their nation’s most successful clubs. Anderlecht might be a different word to Brussels but it’s in the same part of Belgium.

Valerenga, AEK Athens, Roma and Young Boys aren’t the powerhouses of their respective leagues but have all won the thing this side of Euro 2000. While south of the border Cardiff are too big to even play in their own league, and Arsenal and Chelsea are widely considered to be Quite Good.

I won’t be doing the 3,000-word history dissertation required to explain to you why none of the teams in Berlin were really in a suitable place circa-the-1990s to capitalise on football’s big money boom at that time. Let’s just say it’s extremely Not Their Fault.

But anyway, yes, Edinburgh.