Hull are still left in football HELL
They climbed off the bottom yesterday, but with fans in revolt, owner in dispute and the club up for sale for 1,012 days...
IT was lowered into place last Monday as part of the celebrations to mark the start of Hull’s year as England’s City of Culture and now the giant rotor blade from an offshore wind turbine cleaves Queen Victoria Square in two, gleaming brilliant white amid the elegant century-old stone facades of City Hall, the Maritime Museum and the Punch Hotel.
Made in Hull by Hull people at Siemens’ Alexandra Dock plant, the Blade represents the city’s hopes for its future now that its fishing and shipbuilding industries have declined and died. Gaggles of Hull City fans stopped and stared at it on their way to the game against Bournemouth yesterday before they set off on their 20-minute walk to the KCOM Stadium.
‘I like it because it’s so far from everywhere else,’ Philip Larkin, the poet — and Hull University librarian — once said of the city. ‘On the way to nowhere, as somebody put it. It’s in the middle of the lonely country and beyond the lonely country, there is only the sea.’
Maybe geography dictates that that feeling of living at the margins will always remain but a little optimism is creeping into the city’s psyche. In the first week of the new year, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the city centre to watch a spectacular light show.
The place felt alive and admired. After years spent high in lists of the top 10 worst places to live in Britain, Hull is bathing in a sense of civic pride at last.
If only Hull City could catch the mood. If the Blade and some of the art installations around the city symbolise a fusion of tradition and ambition, the football club’s struggles are a sad and salutary example of what happens when an owner disregards tradition and attempts to desecrate a club’s heritage.
Assem Allam, the chairman, should have been a hero here. A local businessman and philanthropist, he saved the club from oblivion in 2010 and the fans’ gratitude knew no bounds. Then, to the horror of most supporters, he decided he wanted to change the club’s name to Hull Tigers and everything went wrong.
Allam is gravely ill now and his son, Ehab, is in charge. A membership scheme that has introduced punitive pricing for kids and OAPs has made unrest even worse. It has got to the point where Ehab was involved in an altercation with fans on the M62 after the EFL Cup semifinal first leg against Manchester United last week. Crowds are falling. In its own way, what has happened at Hull is a football tragedy.
Closer to the stadium, four City supporters sit in The William Gemmell pub. It sounds like a grand Victorian red-brick enemy of temperance in a well-to-do suburb of a northern town. But The William Gemmell sits on a terrace of take-aways within sight of the ground and is not like that.
It was only recently rescued from the financial embers of a oncepopular social club that was going bust. There are some broken and boarded-up properties on the road, the elegant old Carlton Theatre fallen into disuse and boarded up, another pub with a ‘For Rent’ sign outside.
Named after a wealthy shipbuilder who lived there in the late 19th century, The William Gemmell sits amid urban decay on Anlaby Road, one of the main arteries running out of Hull towards the Humber Bridge. It is one of the favourite meeting points for supporters of the club, who moved off the bottom of the Premier League with their victory over Eddie Howe’s side yesterday.
On Monday night, there was a darts tournament taking place in the large back room, with five boards in a long row and men standing at every oche. In the lounge, John, Michelle, Chris and Lee said with nervous laughs that they would probably be in trouble when the club read what they had said. So we agreed to stick to first names and leave it at that.
Most of what they had to say was couched in sadness rather than anger because they are fiercely loyal to Hull City, have supported the team all their lives and hate the idea that their views could be seen as seditious. But as their team fight for survival in the top flight, it has become obvious that its struggles on the pitch are mirrored by its agonies off it.
In the wake of owner the Allams’ thwarted determination to trample over the club’s history by renaming it, its fans have become part of the high-profile conflict between tradition and corporate iconoclasm that is being played out in one form or another at so many of English football’s proud league sides.
That conflict is everywhere in modern football. It is there at West Ham where the club has moved away from Upton Park and added ‘London’ to its club crest. It was there in Cardiff City’s decision to wear red shirts instead of blue. It was there at Manchester United when the words ‘Football Club’ were removed from the club crest. That decision, thankfully, was recently reversed. And it is there in absurd ticket prices at clubs like Arsenal.
At Hull City, the latest problems began in 2013 when Assem Allam, still basking in his popularity with the supporters, became intent on changing the club’s name to Hull Tigers after Hull City Council refused to sell him the stadium freehold.
He accompanied his plans with threats to sell City if they were rebuffed. The Hull Tigers namechange was rejected twice by the FA and Allam seemed surprised that his plan to hurl a century of tradition into the North Sea had met with opposition from the supporters, too. ‘I’m City till I die,’ became a rallying cry at home games. Allam took it personally. ‘They can die as soon as they want,’ he said.
He put the club up for sale, just as he said he would. That was 1,012 days ago. It has been hard to shake the feeling that City are in limbo. Steve Bruce was a fine manager but he left, exasperated, last summer. Mike Phelan never really stood a chance. Now it is the turn of rising Portuguese star, Marco Silva, who took charge of his first Premier League game.
Hull played well and showed spirit and tenacity to come back from a goal down to record a fine win. Silva has made a difference immediately and the crowd sung his name. But their next four league matches are against Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal. And, anyway, the underlying issues would not be solved even by Premier League survival.
‘It’s such a shame,’ said Lee. ‘We would have been building statues of Assem Allam by now after everything he did for the club and the success he brought.
‘There were banners in the crowd thanking him for what he had done. He was very popular locally. He has given a lot of money to local hospitals. But then it all went wrong.’
Like many rich men, Allam reacted badly when he did not get his own
way. He removed ‘Hull City’ from the club’s crest and kit at the start of the 2014-15 season. The continued contempt the owners feel for the club’s name is evident in many of its dealings.
It is not the first time the name has been absent from crest and kit in the club’s history but within the context of the push for the namechange, it was still a provocative move. At the start of this season, the rift between the club and the fans widened when the Allams introduced a new membership scheme that ended most concessions for children and pensioners.
Many adults get a better deal under the membership scheme. But for the young and the old, the price of going to watch their club has risen sharply and many can no longer afford the cost.
If it were intended to alienate the next generation of City supporters, it could scarcely have worked better. Many of those who had some sympathy with the Allams over the name-change issue have now lost faith in them, too.
Fans who have been supporting the club for decades were particularly irritated when the promotion for the new membership scheme was titled Earn Your Stripes. ‘I’ve been supporting the club for 30 years,’ Lee said. ‘I don’t think I need to earn my stripes any more.’
Bitterness over the changes reached the point last month where a businessman who had paid £2,500 to be the main matchday sponsor of Hull’s game against Crystal Palace was ejected from the KCOM Stadium before the game after making a protest in the centre circle.
John Oxley has sponsored a match every December for the past 10 years but this time he used the sponsors pre-game photo opportunity to unfurl a flag he had smuggled in. ‘Bring back concessions,’ it read. ‘Hull City generation after generation. Allams out.’
Last weekend, each of John, Michelle, Lee and Chris took part in the fan boycott of the FA Cup third round tie against Swansea City that slashed the attendance at the KCOM Stadium to just over 6,000, 68 per cent down on the average. They gave the ticket money to charity.
‘It nearly killed me not to go,’ Michelle said. ‘Poor Josh Tymon scored his first goal and there was no one there to see it.’
‘My dad went on his own,’ Chris said. ‘His four kids and his wife stayed at home. The whole thing is not just dividing the fans. It is dividing families, too.’
‘A lot of us have not bought shirts because the name is not on them any more but I have still bought one for my son,’ John said. ‘We have only just got to a point where local kids are wearing Hull City shirts instead of Arsenal, Liverpool or Manchester United shirts. The fear with what is happening now is that we will go back in time.’
A request to speak to Ehab Allam for this article was submitted to the club but it was politely declined. Hull City is still for sale — the asking price is said to be £100m even though the Allams do not own the ground — but the respected fans’ group, the Hull City Supporters Trust, and other observers are increasingly sceptical about the Allams’ intention to leave.
Maybe one day, they will realise their mistake and embrace the history of the club they saved. Until then, Hull City will linger in their purgatory.