From tortured dissident to football glory: The remarkable life of Assem Allam
‘I realised that the future would be big, very big, or nothing’: Assem Allam. Picture credit: Hull City
By Phil Ascough
As if we even needed it amid FIFA’s current greed-fest in the desert, the death of Assem Allam provides another reminder that football is a dirty game.
Unfortunately for the man who saved Hull City, he didn’t realise until after he bought the club in 2010 that football could be the pits. Bear pit, snake pit, money pit.
Belatedly, he admitted as much when I interviewed him at his office in Melton on a glorious summer’s day in 2012, maybe 18 months after he’d sealed the deal to clear the club’s debts and provide a platform for a return to the Premier League.
The focus of our chat was supposed to be Dr Allam’s business career but, because of his predicament with City and my background of reporting on football since the 1970s, and more recently working in the game for 11 years, we became distracted.
Fuelled by our mutual football interest, the host’s gentle humour and his endless supply of tea and chocolate, the scheduled one-hour meeting lasted three hours and could have gone on. Plenty of time to explore Dr Allam’s motives for buying the club, bearing in mind this was before the furore over his attempt to change the name to Hull Tigers.
He had experienced huge success with his business, Allam Marine. We discussed how the manufacture and distribution of generators had driven the value of the company from around £3m in 1993 to £185m in 2011.
“I realised that the future would be big, very big or nothing,” he said.
“Being one of 250 businesses that all did the same thing would not work. I knew we had to be big, very quickly, to survive.”
Dr Allam told how he approached some of his main competitors with his plan to build a factory that would manufacture for all of them. When they turned him down he did it anyway, stopped selling to the end user and instead started supplying those former competitors.
“My success in turning competitors into customers was the main reason for me being voted the Ernst & Young UK Entrepreneur of the Year,” he said, adding that Allam Marine also received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2006 and 2010.
“The business model was similar to a supermarket, relying on volume and standard products. You can’t do that with marine engines because different boats have different requirements so we came out of that side of the business, but you can do it with generators and the business went from strength to strength.”
With growth came profile, and as a result Dr Allam had often featured in the dreams of supporters yearning for someone local and loaded to transform the fortunes of their football club. The others on those wish lists steered clear. One or two committed modest amounts through sponsorship and have since explained privately that they preferred to keep their distance, mindful of how Martin Fish, a previous chair of City, was hounded out during the 1990s.
Of the owners who followed, only Adam Pearson emerged with credit. David Lloyd locked the club out of Boothferry Park. Stephen Hinchliffe went to prison for fraudulent business dealings. Pearson steered the club back to the good times and then handed over to Russell Bartlett and Paul Duffen who brought Premier League football, and then financial catastrophe.
Dr Allam completed the purchase of the club in December 2010 when, in the first season back in the Championship, the team stood 19th in the table. They climbed to finish in 11th place, then eighth the following season, with promotion back to the Premier League secured by a second-place finish in 2013.
The glory days were about to unfold, with first ever appearances in the FA Cup Final and European competition. Relegation in 2015 was followed by immediate promotion back to the top flight before the yoyo string snapped, along with the trust between the owner and the fans.
Looking at the level of Dr Allam’s support for major health projects at Hull Royal Infirmary, Castle Hill Hospital and the University of Hull, it’s inconceivable that his investment in Hull City was anything other than part of that same desire to protect and nurture an asset for the city and the region.
It’s likely that changed after the man who knew nothing about football lifted the stone and didn’t like what he saw. He told me of his sense of betrayal from the lack of trust in the game – a clear reference to the decision by team manager Nigel Pearson to leave in November 2011, turning his back on a year of significant support from the owner.
‘The name change was a step too far’: Lord Coe, right, pictured with Phil Ascough at a sport and business conference in Turkey
There were reports that Dr Allam felt marginalised by the working relationship between the new manager, Nick Barmby, and Adam Pearson, who was back at the club as a consultant. Steve Bruce, recruited a few weeks before our interview, brought unprecedented success but at great expense.
There were also other factors. A year before our meeting, Dr Allam had performed the official opening of the Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce Expo at the original Bonus Arena – now the Airco Arena. He cut the ribbon, toured the stands and gave the Chamber President a lift in his Rolls Royce to the stadium a few hundred yards away. It’s perhaps worth noting that his other car really was a Mini.
As the keynote speaker at the Expo lunch, Dr Allam told of his plans to create a £114m sports village around the stadium. But as we took our seats at the top table it became clear there was quite a distance between the owner of the football club and the other guests of honour – the elected representatives of Hull City Council, an essential project partner as owner of the land.
Criticism of his idea was probably down to fears of a Lloyd-style lockout in the event of a deal turning sour, but when the development didn’t happen Dr Allam reinforced his position that, having ensured the club was debt-free, he would run it as a proper business: “We don’t throw money at the club, we simply invest in the club.”
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Ticket prices increased and in August 2013 he announced plans to market the club as Hull City Tigers to appeal to a wider, international audience.
On the day in April 2014 that the FA rejected the proposals I was working at a sport and business conference in Turkey and had two conversations which illustrated the polar opposites in football attitudes.
While awaiting the arrival of other journalists for a press conference with the British Olympic Association I asked its President, football fan and middle-distance gold medallist Lord Coe, what he made of the name change idea.
He said fans recognise that clubs need input and investment from wealthy owners and that having committed large sums the owners can pretty much do what they want. But he added the name change was a step too far: “Football clubs do have a heritage in local communities and you lose that at your peril. For many people sports clubs and football in particular are often anchor points in the lives of the local community.”
Half an hour later I received a bizarre response from a member of the Qatari delegation at the event. I suggested we might want to talk about his country’s investment in sport and its success in securing major events, including the 2022 World Cup.
He replied: “Yes, we have some big events coming to Qatar and we haven’t bribed anybody.”
Dr Allam’s position was somewhere in between Lord Coe and Qatar. Shocked by the state of football and buoyed by his success in transforming his business sector, he became convinced that he had what it took to change what he considered to be outdated, restrictive practices dressed up as tradition. A new name would be radical, modern and perfectly within the law.
It was stubbornness rather than arrogance which led him to dig in his heels in an attempt to deny reality, and the situation wasn’t helped by some cavalier comments. Dr Allam never actually wished an early death on his opponents, but his rhetoric was perhaps a reckless throwback to his early years as a dissenter in President Nasser’s Egypt.
“I was very outspoken when I was young,” he said.
“I used to make speeches against Nasser. When I think what I used to say I can’t believe it – the things you do when you are young!
“I ended up being arrested. I had my share of torture, then arrested again, and I decided I had no option but to leave.”
His stance at City led to the collapse of the club’s fortunes. From a high of leading Arsenal from the 4th minute until the 71st in the 2014 FA Cup Final, the team slumped to a low of losing 8–0 at Wigan Athletic as they ended the 2020 season with a run of one win in 20 matches.
Dr Allam won’t have been familiar with the old adage when he bought Hull City, but by the time he passed a debt-free club to the new owner in January this year he’ll have been well aware that the way to make a small fortune from football is to start with a large fortune.
Without his investment 12 years ago would City have gone into administration? Probably. Out of business? Unlikely. Would they have experienced two Premier League returns, the FA Cup final and Europe? Not a chance. Where do they go from here? Ask Acun Ilicali.