Key Takeaways
- Hearts lead the SWPL by one point ahead of Friday’s meeting with second-placed Rangers.
- Head coach Eva Olid will leave the club this summer after five transformative seasons.
- From bottom place to title favourites, Hearts have become a force under the Spaniard.
Edinburgh is buzzing ahead of Friday’s top-of-the-table clash at Tynecastle Park. A win for Hearts Women would open a four-point gap over Rangers with only four rounds left, putting the club within touching distance of a first-ever Scottish Women’s Premier League trophy.
The timing is laced with drama. Eva Olid, the 38-year-old architect of the fairytale, has agreed to step down when her contract expires in June. The choice, described by both parties as mutual, ends a five-year project that dragged Hearts from the foot of the division to the summit.
When Olid arrived in 2021, the squad was young, part-time and short on confidence. Training quickly moved to five days a week, with heavy emphasis on first-touch, body shape and pressing angles. Steady improvement followed: eighth place in her debut campaign, then back-to-back fourth-place finishes and a first victory over a traditional powerhouse, Rangers, in April 2024.
Investment followed results. Ahead of the 2022-23 season the club shifted to a semi-professional model, allowing key players to reduce day-job hours. This season Hearts have already defeated Celtic and Glasgow City twice, results that tilted the title race in their favour.
Olid’s pathway was far from obvious. Raised in Catalonia, she played with boys until joining Sabadell’s girls’ set-up, the same academy that once nurtured Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas. A teaching career beckoned, but she swapped the classroom for the tactics board, cutting her teeth with Sant Quirze’s women before moving to Sant Cugat’s boys’ academy. A short spell with Houston Dynamo’s academy in the United States sharpened her English and broadened her methods.
Scotland came calling through fellow Spaniard Fran Alonso, then at Celtic, who told her about the Hearts vacancy. She accepted the challenge despite the club having just finished last.
Players speak of a coach obsessed with detail: how to break the first line of pressure, when the centre-back should step in, where the winger’s first touch should take her. That precision has turned a rag-tag group into genuine contenders.
Whatever happens between now and May, Olid’s successor will inherit a squad hardened by victory and backed by a board finally convinced of women’s football’s worth. First, though, the departing coach wants one more piece of history: the shiny SWPL trophy that would be the perfect leaving gift.