‘Welcome to City, Acun, but please respect our heritage’
NEW ERA: Acun Ilicali celebrating his takeover of Hull City. Pictures by Hull City
By Sam Hawcroft, Hull City correspondent
It’s over.
The reign of the Allams, which began back in December 2010 and was ushered in with much celebration, relief and a boom in fez sales, has at last come to an end.
It follows an agonising wait by City fans desperate to pop the champagne corks after weeks of rumour and intrigue surrounding new owner Acun Ilicali’s takeover bid.
Some fans turned into amateur plane-spotters, excitedly trying to track the media mogul’s private jet on radar apps, while the more cynical among us – fairly understandably – refused to believe it would happen at all… that the Allams would stick one last spanner in the works.
There had, after all, been false dawns before, most notably in 2016, when a deal with US businessman Peter Grieve collapsed after Ehab Allam allegedly increased his asking price, and then stood him up.
The then-City managing director Nick Thompson claimed the papers were ready to be signed, but Ehab never showed up at Grieve’s London hotel as arranged. City dismissed these claims at the time as “ill-informed, substantially inaccurate, tittle-tattle and misleading gossip”.
In the past few weeks, every post by the official Hull City Twitter feed had supporters’ pulses racing – desperately hoping for that corner flag image accompanied by the words “Club Statement” – but it was not until yesterday, at 6pm, that it was officially confirmed.
Those hallowed words were there at last – but the image was not of a corner flag. Instead was a picture of a stadium skyline accompanied by the message, “NEW ERA – TAKEOVER COMPLETED”.
And, last night, City got the party started in some style with an impressive 2-0 win over Blackburn, watched by a jubilant Ilicali, who had flown in from the Dominican Republic earlier that day.
In 2001, when Adam Pearson was introduced on to the pitch at Boothferry Park as City’s latest knight in shining armour, I was spinning the discs in the PA box alongside Martyn Hainstock.
That day, we played Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who. As it turned out, unlike David Lloyd or the Sheffield ‘mafia’, Pearson was the real deal; he paved the way for the Tigers reaching the top flight for the first time in their history.
But we did get fooled again. City fans thought the Allams were the real deal, too, when they rescued the club from oblivion just over 11 years ago. But it will remain a crying shame that the club’s biggest achievements under their ownership will be forever overshadowed by the name change debacle, which soured relations to the point of no return.
And yet… even in the past couple of years, had they held their hands up and said, “You know what, we’ve listened to fans, and we got this wrong”, fans would arguably have accepted it.
Privately, they must know they got it wrong, having quietly reinstated the “Hull City” name across social media, in their new website address, and using the #hcafc hashtag once more. (They need only to look across the Humber for a lesson in humility – Grimsby Town were recently refreshingly honest about creating their new crest without consulting fans.)
But the Allams dug their heels in ever deeper and refused to budge, even when the FA rejected their application to change the club’s name. During some of our best times on the pitch – the FA Cup Final and promotion to the Premier League a second time – the discord in the background, the threat to more than a century of heritage – was unsettling, unseemly and impossible to ignore; like Michael Gove at a nightclub.
Some argued that it didn’t matter – we should just support the team no matter what. Who cares what the team’s called? But for the majority, it did matter. History and heritage are why we support our local club in the first place.
It became a battle for the heart and soul of the club, but it split the fanbase, somewhat Brexit-style, with some of the more craven supporters not wanting to rock the boat. They trotted out the wearisome argument that, “It’s his money, he can do what he likes”, and, worse, came the absolute nadir of fans booing fellow fans chanting “City Till I Die”.
When trying to explain this to people from outside the city, they’d invariably say something like, “Oh, these foreign owners, they’ve no idea”. But they weren’t “foreign owners”.
Assem Allam might have been Egyptian-born, but he’d been doing business in Hull for longer than a lot of fans had been alive, and Ehab was born and raised in the area. They were Hull through and through. Which makes the name change misjudgement all the more mystifying.
The justification for the change was the argument that being rebranded as “Hull Tigers” would lead to untold riches pouring in from Asian markets – but if it had been a pitch on Dragons’ Den, they’d have all said “I’m out” quicker than it took a steward to remove a Turkish flag.
The reasoning ranged from nebulous (“We need something that makes us stand out … we feel the Hull Tigers brand would give us an edge in any negotiations” – Ehab) to downright bonkers (“If I were the owner of Manchester City I would change the name to Manchester Hunter – you need power” – Assem) and the figures were just plucked from the air.
There was zero acknowledgement of the fact the most well-supported clubs in the Far East were simply those with decades of top-division titles to their name. Otherwise, millions of people in China would surely be going around in Castleford Tigers shirts. (If they do, I stand corrected.)
But, of course, what it really boiled down to was the barely disguised beef with Hull City Council over its refusal to sell the MKM Stadium. Thank god they didn’t.
And then there was the membership scheme introduced in 2016 – which did away with concessions and arguably turned a generation of youngsters away. One lad I sat near saw his annual season pass rise from £60 to more than £480; he didn’t want to move from the seat he’d occupied for some time, and his parents didn’t want to fork out for the excessive price increase. He doesn’t go any more.
Outside football, the Allams are less despised; the family has donated millions to healthcare in Hull and the name will live on in the Fatima Allam Birth Centre at Hull Royal Infirmary, and the Allam Medical Building at the University of Hull.
But for too many people in the city, this legacy will be forever tarnished, and for what? They could have been heroes, to paraphrase another 1970s hit. Their charge sheet of gaffes is too long for the space I have here – there is, indeed, a whole website dedicated to them at allamout.co.uk, which makes for cringeworthy reading.
So, what will this new era bring for City? We can, really, only sit back and watch this play out, for now; there’s no doubt Ilicali has the bunce to pay for some top-class players, but some of the transfer rumours of late have reached fantasy levels.
But this damaging period of limbo is, at last, at an end, and, crucially, there is time to turn this ship around.
Will Ilicali keep Grant McCann? Surely even the most churlish would feel for him; it can’t have been easy, or nice, trying to do the job in recent weeks with the threat of being imminently replaced hanging over his head.
He said as much after the Blackburn match – this period of uncertainty has had a negative impact on him and the team. I feel he’s done enough to be given a chance; and the way the players talk about him suggests that he’s well-liked in the dressing room.
And the rest… it’s not rocket science. The glitzy media background might be cause for concern for some, but one would hope Ilicali has done his research on what the Allams got so wrong over the years.
Just stick to the football, involve the fans, and keep your hands off our heritage.