Heart of Midlothian CEO Andrew McKinlay believes the club’s incoming sporting director Graeme Jones will be ‘transformative’ at Tynecastle.

Jones is set to relinquish his role as SFA performance director to take over from Joe Savage who stepped down earlier this year.

The former Hearts season-ticket holder has spent nine years with the Scottish FA and national team, and is expected to start his new role in November with Steve Clarke admitting he "will be a big miss". 

In a Q&A with Hearts TV, CEO Andrew McKinlay has explained the reasons behind Jones’ appointment and why he thinks he will revolutionise the club. Here’s everything McKinlay said on the incoming sporting director.

"There is a lot of misapprehensions around what does a Sporting Director do. Again, I’ve heard people saying; 'he doesn’t know anything about recruitment, it’s a joke, they don’t know what they’re doing.'

"When I knew Joe was going I had some names of people in my mind and Graeme wasn’t actually on that list, Graeme was put to me by somebody else.

"At first, I thought that Graeme didn’t have the breadth that I was looking for, but, having had a lot of conversations with him since then I became very aware that I was wrong, and that I think he will be transformative for us up at Oriam. That’s not to say that he’ll be better or worse than Joe. They’re different. It’s the same role but it will be done in a different way.

"What do I mean by that? When we brought Joe in, he had a recruitment background and we knew that and we wanted his focus to be on recruitment and his focus had been on recruitment so that’s not a criticism of him because, like I said, recruitment has been largely very good.

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"Having said that, when he left we took a step back and thought let’s take a look at this a bit wider and let’s think what we really want our Sporting Director to really be. We want them to be up at Oriam and look after everything that goes on at Oriam. They’ll have oversight of all the teams, as well as the recruitment department, which is a department, we also have a performance department and we have an academy. These are huge departments in their own right and are very important to the future of the club.

"What we’ve got in Graeme is someone who brings huge experience from working with Steve Clarke, who, I know is not happy to be losing Graeme but is happy for him, because he’s an integral part of how things work at Scotland, and he will become an integral part of our performance and I meant that in the widest sense of how everything performs up at Oriam.

"I am really looking forward to him coming him. Although he is still with the SFA, they have been very generous and they know that in the intervening period between him coming in that it would be helpful for him to be involved in some of the things we’re doing, and I’ve reached an agreement with them that that can happen, so I’m grateful to them for that. I think it’s very important that Graeme is part of the process that we’re currently undergoing.

"It’s also important to note that we knew, when we were recruiting for a new Sporting Director, that we were in the throes of doing recruitment in a slightly different way with the whole analytics piece and therefore we factored that in very much to how we recruited a Sporting Director, and with any conversations we had with prospective Sporting Directors we talked about analytics and made sure that they understood what they were coming into. That will also be a key discussion with any future manager, which will also be around analytics.