Following the completion of the Tynecastle Park hotel, the next big project for Heart of Midlothian is the future of the club's training base - and in the meantime, investment will be focused on the playing side.

Hearts have a lease at Oriam until 2029 meaning there is no pressing need for an immediate solution. Prolonging the partnership at Scotland's sports performance centre is the club's preferred option but chief executive Andrew McKinlay admitted that the club have looked at alternative sites if the link-up was not to continue.

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"The next big project is the training ground," McKinlay confirmed. "I've been working on that for a long time and I'm still working on that. We are still five years out from our lease up at Oriam but I've already had some discussions with them about what is possible up there. Also looked at alternative sites but that's in the embryonic stage.

"The own site is more a backup if we can't get to where we want to get to with the Oriam. That's our first preference. With the Oriam we are at the stage of looking at feasibility studies of what a better training facility at Oriam would look like, how we would fund that, and all these sorts of things. That is one of the focus areas this calendar year."

Speaking to Hearts Standard, Ann Budge said any big capital projects "will go on the back burner" until the club decide how to proceed with the training ground.

Now having completed the Main Stand, she believes "all investment" can be focused on the pitch.

"[The training ground is] a big, big commitment," she said. "Two things, can we make Oriam work a bit better than it does at the moment? If we can, is that the best option? If not, where do we go, what do we do and how do we fund it? Because that would be another huge capital to do properly and that would take a while.

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"My feeling and I’ve said this at board meetings, we’ve done the big stuff, yes there are other things I would like to do, with the supporters' bar for example, but fundamentally the big capital project, at the moment, will go on the back burner until we decide what we do with the training ground.

"Which actually means all the investment can go into the playing side. I think we will have a couple of years of nothing big. Continuous improvement, yes, but the money we make will go into the playing side."