There has been much talk about the potential investment into Heart of Midlothian in recent times.

Last month, it emerged that Brighton & Hove Albion owner Tony Bloom was preparing to get involved at Tynecastle Park, bringing the resources of his Jamestown Analytics as part of the deal.

Hearts chief executive officer Andrew McKinlay has not named anyone involved in any potential deal due to its commercial sensitivity but revealed that an analytics company was involved in providing managerial candidates for the current manager vacancy.

On Friday, Norwegian Per-Mathias Hogmo emerged as the frontrunner before talks broke down.

McKinlay hopes that any future deal will help to bridge the gap to the top two in the Scottish Premiership, though the immediate aim is to peel the club off the bottom of the league.

Incoming sporting director Graeme Jones – who the new manager will report to – was down at Liverpool recently to learn from their methods. A club where analytics had played a huge part in their recent success.

A recent book entitled How To Win The Premier League mainly focuses on how Liverpool embraced the data revolution to do just that – and it is a book McKinlay was reading in Azerbaijan.

In it, author Ian Graham – who until last year was Liverpool’s director of research – details how his analytics company Ludonautics aided Jurgen Klopp and his management team in areas such as recruitment and player performance.

Graham says that by now every English Premier League club will have a range of data specialists and companies that they work with. The key, according to the author, is how much their input is listened to.

Ludonautics found Klopp, as well as the club hierarchy, to be very susceptible to their ideas, something not afforded to them as much by previous manager Brendan Rodgers – or the previous club Graham worked with, Tottenham Hotspur.

Liverpool used data analysis for recruitment to sign players like Mo Salah, to aid Klopp in analysing players’ performances and even to identify and appoint Klopp in the first place.

Before the German manager's appointment at Anfield, Graham was confident his data analysis model showed that Klopp's final season in the Bundesliga with Borussia Dortmund was an anomaly.

Chapter six of the book focuses on Bloom’s company Starlizard as well as Smartodds, which belongs to Brentford owner Matthew Benham.

They were initially set up to identify discrepancies in Asian handicap markets in the Far East – gaining an edge by amassing data that didn’t previously exist in order to better predict outcomes. They later extended this to in-play betting.

It meant they employed a more analytical approach than the traditional bookmaker method of intuition. Bookies in the past would adjust odds when a player was injured or during a period of dominance for a certain team.

Bloom and Benham would combine their intuitions with their data analysis.

Starting from the premise that goals are difficult to come by – ie, the very thing that is the most important is one of the most rare events and difficult to measure – they concluded that assessing the quality of chances is important.

With their “chance quality data”, Bloom and Benham were hugely successful, even when the betting markets reacted and tightened their own practices.

That’s when they turned to football. The transition worked because, says Graham, aspects of football, like recruitment, are similar to gambling in that it is about taking a number of small risks.

According to Graham they “implemented an evidence-based, decision-making process for running their clubs. Being a professional gambler is a very risky business, one in which it is lethal to mistake signal for noise by overreacting to short-term fluctuations in a team's form or to irrelevant information”.

In short, they both understand the relationship between risk and reward and are able to exploit it.

The approach has allowed both Brighton and Brentford to overachieve while keeping transfer and wage spends low. Although Brighton’s approach to recruitment has taken various guises over the years under Bloom, going between summer splurges and cashing in when players reach peak market value.

Again deploying the gambling analogy, Graham says the idea “is to sell a player's contract whenever the transfer fee offered is worth more to the club than the player's performance, and buy a player's contract whenever the cost is lower than the value of the player's performance brings to the team”.

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The approach to scouting is not exclusively data-driven but it is very much at the heart of the decision-making. There is nothing better than the eye test for judging a player’s ability, but data allows you to do what the eye cannot: analyse thousands of players and matches simultaneously.

In recent years, Brighton have signed players on Liverpool’s radar, identified by Graham’s data analysis model, such as Pascal Gross and Kaoru Mitoma. Graham in particular regrets not pushing harder for the club to sign the latter.

Data allows you to whittle down the options then look for more qualitative data, ultimately providing a better shortlist of options. Therefore, the better your data analysis model, the more of an edge you can gain in the transfer market.

These are closely guarded secrets at these companies and are why employees must sign non-disclosure agreements.

But it all comes back to understanding the relationship between risk and reward.

That also extends to both Bloom and Benham’s preference for attacking football, almost regardless of the circumstances. Unless you are significantly worse than your opponent, that is.

Hearts hope that any link-up with Jamestown Analytics will give them an edge over their opponents in the Scottish Premiership and take the club on to the next level in Europe.

Though just as in gambling, there are no sure things in football and no guarantee that Bloom or Brighton’s success will translate to Hearts or to Scottish football.

How To Win The Premier League: The Inside Story of Football’s Data Revolution by Ian Graham is available now from Penguin Books