Stay in the game: Inside Edinburgh's new stadium hotel

Where: McLeod Street, Edinburgh

How much: Executive rooms start at about $350 per night. Standard rooms begin at about $180. This is very good value for Edinburgh.

Heart of Midlothian FC ("Hearts") is one of two Edinburgh soccer teams in the Scottish Premiership. It maintains a flirty, friendly relationship with its sister club, Hibernian FC ("Hibs") and the two groups of fans are broadly interchangeable.

Just kidding: Hearts and Hibs hate each other.

Since 1876, Hearts has played its home games at Tynecastle Park Stadium in gritty Gorgie in south-west Edinburgh. The main stand at Tynecastle Park was rebuilt in 2017, in the wake of a takeover of the club by its fans. In February 2024, Hearts opened a widely admired 25-room hotel within the stadium itself. On the night I stayed, the hotel won Commercial Project of the Year at the Herald Property Awards for Scotland.

Stadium hotels are becoming a thing. Although Tynecastle Park is the only example in Scotland, there are two others in the United Kingdom - at Bolton Wanderers FC and Blackpool FC. The first stadium hotel in Australia opened in 2020 in Adelaide.

It's in a soccer stadium. I find this surprisingly exciting, a forgotten childhood dream come true.

Thoughtful corporate-modern, deliberately light on overt and kitschy football references. The hotel is sealed from the rest of the stadium by a futuristic system of electronic locks that makes me feel a bit like I'm in a space station orbiting Planet Soccer.

I stay in a Plaza Executive Room with windows looking out to the car park, but I'm also shown a standard Roseburn Room which has no window but a window-sized television screen broadcasting from inside the stadium, 24/7. For most of that time, there's nothing much to see except groundsmen tending the turf and painting the lines. For me, this disinters deeply buried boyhood memories of sitting in an empty stand at a provincial English football ground on Sunday afternoons with my best mate Colin, watching the sprinklers turn.

Just for a moment, this breaks my heart.

All rooms have Molton Brown toiletries and football WAGs' getaway essentials such as Ghd hairdryers and straighteners. The bathrooms are great. In the Executive rooms, the complimentary minibar is generously stocked with beer, wine and haggis-flavoured crisps.

Tynecastle Park's Skyline Restaurant looks sterile and unpromising, but the food is an unlikely treat. Scottish seafood shines. Tynecastle's hot smoked salmon with horseradish espuma, pickled radish, celery and apple sauce is both rich and delicate. Beer-battered haddock with hand-cut chips, peas and tartare sauce is traditional fish and chips par excellence. The breakfast buffet includes a selection of delicious bread rolls and would have made for an even better experience had I not swallowed a spoonful of undersized black olives in the mistaken belief they were oversized blueberries.

A 15-minute bus ride from Edinburgh's centre, Tynecastle Park is in the vicinity of an eclectic range of cheap ethnic restaurants and a genuine Scottish fishmonger with a proprietor in a white coat and gumboots. There is also a baffling number of barbershops and a few historic buildings, but the main reason to come here is to watch Hearts.

The view from the windowless standard room. And, the hot chips at Skyline.

Explore more: tynecastleparkhotel.com

The writer was a guest of the hotel.