Craig Levein isn’t shy in telling stories from his time at the coalface of Scottish football.
From being a classy centre-back for Hearts and Scotland and tipped to go higher in the game, before injury cruelly robbed him of that chance and also forced him to retire.
To managing Cowdenbeath, the Jambos, the national team, Dundee United and Leicester before becoming a director at Tynecastle.
Levein has pretty much seen it all in football and has some stories to tell.
And he does so regularly in his roles as a pundit for BBC Sportsound and on his popular podcast Sacked in the Morning.
Levein on exorbitant Hearts wages
Craig Levein had two spells as Hearts manager as well as one as director of football.
The first was a successful one where he managed back-to-back third place finishes despite having to bring down the wage bill while reducing the size and average age of the squad.
That was after his own assessment that the Tynecastle club had too many older players on big wages.
And he was alarmed at discovering just how much they were earning just three years after he’d left as a player on £1,000-a-week.
Speaking on Open Goal, he said: “I think it was round about, remember when all the teams in Scotland went mad with the money they spent?
“The likes of Kilmarnock were paying £5k-a-week, Dunfermline were paying £6k-a-week.
“Hearts kind of went crazy as well. When I left Hearts in 1997 (as a player), my highest salary when I was there was £1k- a-week. When I came back in, in 2000, there was four players on £10k-a-week.
“It just went mental. But I got the job because I had to get the wage bill down.
“There was quite a lot of guys coming to the end of their careers. But you know what it’s like, they don’t see it as clearly as other people do.
“It’s the worst thing ever you have to do as a manager, telling a player ‘I think you should seriously consider this being your last season.’
“But it’s not just getting players out. You’ve got to replace them with better for cheaper.”
Levein on appointing himself Hearts manager
The 60-year-old left Hearts just before the mad Vladimir Romanov years to become Leicester boss and would go on to manage Raith Rovers, Dundee United and Scotland before returning to Gorgie as director of football.
The successful appointment of Robbie Neilson as manager was followed by the not so successful appointment of Ian Cathro.
And during being involved in finding a replacement Hearts boss for the rookie, he was asked by the board to do it himself.
That earned him flak amid a public perception that he had essentially appointed himself.
Reflecting on that, Levein explained: “After Ian left, we were putting together a list who might be suitable for the job and the board weren’t particularly impressed.
“Some of them were obviously quite capable but getting on in years, others were young and hungry but…
“I always think that you’ve had a young manager that hasn’t worked, invariably a board will want a safe pair of hands. I don’t see why there’s any logic in that.
“We’d be going through this process of names coming in and all the rest of it and one of the board members said to me ‘why don’t you do it?’
“At the time I wasn’t thinking about that because I’d got into a position in my head where I could clearly separate what my role was as a director of football.
“I’d got that very clearly in my head about where the line was and I was enjoying doing that job. But as the weeks went by, because it was actually quite a period of time, I’d been asked if I would do it and I went home and thought about it.
“And I thought ‘well, I’ll just give it a go.’ There was also a part of me feeling responsible because I’d said to the board ‘put Ian in.'”