Hearts have an opportunity to move one step closer to making history when they face Rangers on Friday. Hearts have never won the Scottish Women’s Premier League but they sit top of the table, one point above their opponents and two ahead of the country’s most successful women’s team, Glasgow City, with five games remaining.
Win or lose, lift a first league title or not, the rise of the Edinburgh side has been remarkable and their manager, Eva Olid, has been a hugely significant part of the journey.
Despite being on the cusp of making history, Olid is set to leave at the end of the season, with the option of extending her contract by a further year not triggered and the decision a mutual one. She signed a two-year extension in 2023, taking her up to this summer. At the time, she told the Edinburgh Evening News she couldn’t be “in a better place than Hearts” saying she felt “so validated”.
“I have freedom for the project that we started creating two years ago and that is something that you don’t have in many places.”
To say she has made the most of that opportunity is an understatement, and she no doubt has had many suitors interested in her services.
When the unknown Spanish manager arrived in Scotland five years ago, Hearts had just finished bottom of the table, only avoiding relegation because the league was set to expand to 10 teams.
Olid has transformed them, securing safety with an eighth-place finish in her first season and back-to-back fourth-place finishes before last season’s fifth place.
So unknown that her Wikipedia page does not detail her career prior to joining Hearts, Olid was a football-obsessed child, watching match after match with her father on TV. She began playing alongside boys aged seven before joining the Catalan women’s team Sabadell, which once had a young Alexia Putellas in its academy.
At that stage professionalism was a pipe dream and Olid went to university with the ambition of becoming a teacher, but the obsession with football did not go away and she began coaching with the third division women’s team Sant Quirze.
She moved to Sant Cugat’s boys’ academy for a few years but then wanted to return to the women’s game and use the knowledge accrued at Sant Cugat to help develop women’s football, so she returned to coach at the team where it had all begun for her, Sabadell.
That time in Sant Cugat’s academy with the boys was hugely important to her coaching development, though.
“Even now, working with professional players in the women’s game, there are basic things I have had to coach to players at first-team level that I had coached to boys at Sant Cugat,” she said in a piece for Coaches’ Voice in January 2025. “For example, correct body shape. That is sad, because it means nobody taught these basics to women when they were younger. Fortunately, girls growing up playing football now will have more knowledge of these basics.”
Her first professional coaching contract was in the United States with Houston Dynamo, working with the under-19s men’s side and the women’s team.
The Covid pandemic sent her back to Spain and she began working with the Catalan Football Association. Scotland may seem like an unlikely next destination but the opportunity at Hearts was relayed to her by her fellow Spaniard Fran Alonso, who was coaching Celtic women at that time, and she was interested.
The task was huge, Hearts had finished bottom and had a very young and inexperienced squad but the work began straight away. “We started training five days a week,” she told Coaches’ Voice. “We did a lot of work on technique and learned the basics before we worked on tactics.”
Her astute and diligent approach to the tactical and technical aspects of the game has helped Hearts punch above their weight, driving success and thus eking more investment from the club which committed to semi-professionalism ahead of the 2022-23 season.
A first-ever victory over a top-three side came against Rangers in April 2024, a defeat the Rangers manager, Jo Potter, said cost them the league title. Back-to-back wins over Celtic and Glasgow City, who they have to play again in the round-robin top-six mini league to complete the season, has given the attack-minded side momentum going into Friday’s critical game against Rangers.
Olid’s exit will leave a huge hole at Hearts, one that will be very difficult to fill, but she is leaving them in a very positive place regardless of where they finish. Meanwhile, the progression of the exciting Spanish manager, whose “obsession is how we beat the first lines of pressure”, is only going to draw more and more interest. A league title win would step that up a gear.
