To Hull & Back

Hull City supporters thought there was going to be a bright new dawn, but less than two years in the ownership of Acun Ilicali is already turning sour.

Sometimes, a headline says it all. “Reason for hope despite Hull City losing fifth straight Championship game at Middlesbrough”, read the Hull Mail after the team lost at Middlesbrough last weekend. According to the lede, it was a ‘plucky showing’. The body of the article was less optimistic than the title, though, and not without good reason.

This wasn’t only Hull’s fifth consecutive defeat. It was also their tenth game without a win, a period during which they’ve picked up just two points. Indeed, if you strip out an eleven day period between the 20th September and the 1st October, when they strangely acquired superpowers and won three straight games while scoring ten goals, they haven’t won a single game all season.

They were, of course, until this morning managerless again. Tim Walter went after just 18 games in charge at the end of November, and it doesn’t really feel as though many tears will be shed. Following the incomprehensible decision to sack Liam Rosenior at the end of last season, their form so far this season might have been considered the “finding out” part of the well-known profane slogan.

There are some clubs at which the answer to the question of where to begin is, “how far back do you want to go?”, but with Hull City at least January 2022 marked a clean break with the past. Farewell, Assem Allam, whose hare-brained idea it was that changing the club’s name to Hull City Tigers (the legacy of which lives on in the name of the limited company, which Allam changed) would inspire the club to greater heights rather than alienating a fan base who were quite happy with their current one, thank you very much.

By the time that Acun Ilicali bought the club, the relationship between the Allams and the club’s support had deteriorated well beyond a point of any return. The only consolation of finishing bottom of the Championship in 2019/20 was that the run of six successive defeats which took them down was played behind closed doors on account of the pandemic, so no-one had to see it up close and personal. The problem was that when they were promoted back the following season as champions of League One the same rules applied, so no-one saw that happen up close and personal, either.

The change of ownership came just over midway through that first season back. At the time, they were 19th in the Championship and seven points above the relegation places. Ilicali acted quickly. Grant McCann, the manager who’d taken them both down and back up over the previous two seasons, was out, and replaced by Shota Arveladze, the former Georgian international whose last managerial role had been in Uzbekistan with Pakhtakor Tashkent. Hull ended the season 19th in the Championship and fourteen points above the relegation places, which was progress, albeit of one of the loosest sorts possible.

Arveladze lasted until September, when a run of four straight league defeats did for him, and on this occasion it looked as though Ilicali had made a really smart decision. Liam Rosenior was already highly thought of in some circles within the game, despite his actual coaching career to that point having only amounted to a handful of years on the staff with Brighton under-23s and at Derby County, where he was briefly the interim manager following the departure of Wayne Rooney. Rosenior had previously played more than 150 games for Hull. It felt like a good, forward-looking fit.

Progress was slow to start with, but it did come. Hull were in 21st place in the Championship and a point above the relegation places on the 3rd November 2022, when Rosenior was appointed, but they only lost six more games that season and ended in 15th place, fourteen points above the relegation places. But the following season a plan started to come together and they only narrowly missed out on a play-off spot for a place in the Premier League, falling at the last after taking just one point from their final two matches when four would have seen them into the top six.

But disappointing though that was for all concerned, what followed was absolutely baffling. With a jerking of the knee, Rosenior was sacked. It’s the sort of decision that sets off immediate alarm bells about the person who made it because it not only displays an absolute failure to look at anything beyond the extremely short-term indeed, but also a complete failure to understand the surroundings in which the club were situated.

Despite ultimate failure to get into the play-offs at the end of last season, the trajectory since Rosenior had clearly been upward; from 21st when he was appointed to 15th by the end of that season, and then to 7th by the end of the following season. Furthermore, all of this was happening in the Championship, where the odds are always stacked against clubs who aren’t in receipt of Premier League parachute payments, and Hull stopped receiving those in 2019.

Getting a team in that position to within a whisker of a play-off place in his first full season in charge of the club when they hadn’t finished above mid-table in that division since relegation six years earlier was a bigger achievement than Ilicali apparently believed. Indeed, the owner had apparently prioritised attacking football over everything else, and told BBC Radio Humberside that this had all been “a difference of opinion on the team's style of football”.

The fact that crowds had grown to their highest level in almost a decade, indicating that supporters were pretty happy with the progress being maintained under Rosenior, was certainly overlooked. The fact that he had been nominated for the Championship’s Manager of the Season also… didn’t seem to matter. The owner knew best, and that’s all that really seemed to matter.

Rosenior’s departure was the beginning of what has turned out to be a pretty disastrous six months for the club. Ilicali replaced him with Tim Walter, latterly of Stuttgart and Hamburg, but in the meantime the owner’s ongoing utterances over why he got rid of Rosenior in the first place, saying that it was all about the style of play while also stating that Rosenior would have stayed in the job had they gone up, for example, were starting to cause concern about his judgement.

This was further reinforced when, in a Q&A with supporters, he launched off on a list of other reasons for having got rid of the previous manager, including his choice of goalkeeper, while other players had been underused—in one case, one who had been almost constantly injured since he arrived at the club—and added that another was overweight. Hardly the sort of words that will keep a dressing room already reeling from Rosenior’s sudden departure happy.

Coupled with the fact that some of Hull’s key players the previous season had been loanees from the Premier League and would need replacing, and going into the summer with an unhappy squad and with a growing cloud hanging over the club, it was starting to feel as though a rather too familiar turbulence was in the air again.

The news from the company accounts was little better. The wage bill had increased by 86% during the 2022/23 season to £24m while spending had increased by two-thirds, all leading to a total debt of £38m. 131% of the club's total revenue was being spent on salaries. Furthermore, the club had managed this despite an 18 per cent increase in revenue to £18m and the money received from the sale of Keane Lewis-Potter—which was undisclosed but understood to be in the region of £15m—to Brentford in June 2022.

This season has brought an unwelcome return to type. At the start of the transfer window the club offloaded a good number of players while others ended their loan spells. The sale of Jaden Philogene back to Aston Villa was particularly botched. Hull had signed Philogene from Villa in the first place. The club had agreed an £18m fee with Ipswich Town earlier in the summer, but this prompted Villa to enact a clause in their original contract with Hull, allowing them to match the fee. Because of a 30% sell-on clause that was also in place, the fee that Aston Villa paid Hull City was only £13.5m.

Seventeen new signings eventually arrived, with players coming in from all over the world, but with the majority of them only arriving very close to the start of the new season after summer departures and loan returns left them with just nine in their squad. It all looked a little bit like panic buying and—as had happened before—with the players arriving at the club being players with whom Ilicali was familiar rather than being anything like the choices of the manager.

With this patchwork-looking squad having failed to win any of their pre-season matches, Hull started 2024/25 with five games without a win—three draws and two defeats—and a First Round elimination from the League Cup at the hands of Sheffield Wednesday. Three draws, against Bristol City, Plymouth Argyle and Millwall, were followed by two defeats against Leeds United and Sheffield United, with both of these defeats primarily serving as reminders of how far this Hull City squad was from getting anywhere near the top end of the table.

Furthermore, with just two goals scored from these five matches, Ilicali’s earlier claims about “attacking football” looked tattier than ever. The club had lost the scorers of 64 of their 68 league goals during the previous season over the summer, and in the flurry of transfer activity that did take place during none of those who did arrive looked particularly like they’d be able to resolve that problem.

But when form did briefly return, it was spectacular. During those eleven days at the very end of the summer, Hull beat Stoke City 3-1 away, Cardiff City 4-1 at home, and QPR 3-1 away in consecutive games over the course of eleven days. It says something for the state of their season so far that these ten goals make up comfortably more than half of the 17 that they’ve scored in the league this season (the joint second-lowest), while they haven’t scored more than a single goal in a match since that win at QPR more than two months ago. As things stand, no-one in their first team squad has scored more than two league goals so far this season, and that’s with over a third of it now having been played.

The departure of Tim Walter, following their recent 2-0 home loss against Sheffield Wednesday, wasn’t a shock. His muddled tactics and mule-headed determination to stick with what became known—increasingly mockingly over a relatively brief period of time—as ‘Walterball’ had left him with little sympathy despite an understanding that blame for the club’s chaotic summer in the transfer market could hardly be laid at his door with such an autocratic and temperamental man above him, essentially pulling the levers and not making a very good job of it. They’re currently in 22nd place, the final Championship relegation position.

So the buck really stops with Acun Ilicali, and it’s not difficult to believe that this is a man who is not used to being told that he’s wrong. After all, this is a man who owns broadcasters in Turkey and, as the man whose businesses have successfully adapted TV franchises such as Survivor and The Voice in Turkey, was announced by a slightly over-excitable media upon his arrival at Hull as “The Turkish Simon Cowell”.

And we certainly know that he can be skittish. He bought into the Dutch club Fortuna Sittard in June 2020 but sold his stake ten months later. He managed an even shorter period of time with the League of Ireland club Shelbourne, where he hung around for just five months between June and November 2023 before moving on again. Neither of those two clubs seem to have been damaged by him being there.

But the EFL Championship is different. The very particular circumstances of being a Championship club that is not in receipt of parachute payments matters. It puts a majority of them at a disadvantage to a relative minority, and many have tried and failed to spend their way through this glass ceiling before. It’s not impossible, but it is extremely difficult and may rely as much as anything else upon a modest team ‘clicking’ at a crucial period, as, say, Luton Town did two years ago.

Ruben Selles, formerly of actual crisis club Reading, is to be the new man in charge at The Kcom Stadium. Selles is one of the few managers currently plying their trade in this country for whom Ilcali is an upgrade on their previous boss, but the owner would be best advised to keep his beak out of playing affairs and let a manager who has impressed by keeping the Royals anything like stable on the pitch just get on with his job. Whether he’ll be able to is the biggest question that Hull face, right now.

This all requires delicate handling, and at this stage in proceedings there is little indication that Acun Ilicali has anything like the temperament to steer this particular football club in the right direction after several seasons of stagnation back towards calmer waters. He’s been profligate to the point of negligence with money, he’s already isolated a fan base who were desperate to get rid of the previous owners less than three years ago, and his dealings in the transfer market have fallen somewhere between muddled, skittish and incompetent. Whether Selles can arrest this slide through coaching is a question that cannot be answered right now. What we can say for certain is that Hull City cannot continue on the trajectory that they’ve been on since the departure of Liam Rosenior.