To have generated unrest and disillusionment among many fans seems all the more unnecessary given the Allams’ tenure has been the most successful in the club’s history (by David Conn) please log in to view this image The semi-detached owners of Hull City spent their long, cold January insisting to widely disaffected supporters that they are not just clearing the decks, hauling in all the money they can net, and battening down for the anticipated relegation of a club they are trying to sell. The £20m trawled from selling Jake Livermore and the season’s brightest attacking force, Robert Snodgrass, did not greatly help their case but the vice-chairman, Ehab Allam, did spend his transfer window final day in a flurry of deadline trading. Sources close to the club say the aim of the Allams, Ehab and his father Assem, who is suffering ill-health, is to make a £40m cash surplus this season, given their small squad and £100m or more gushing in from the Premier League’s lavish 2016-19 TV deals. Such a cash pile can be presented as an asset in the continuing efforts to make a profit from a sale. It could be used to repay some of the £77m the Allams have loaned to the club over their six years of autocratic ownership and used as ballast if City do sink to the thinner waters of the Championship. Some supporters saw the Livermore and Snodgrass sales as further confirmation of this strategy but Ehab Allam maintained in a response to the Guardian that the aim is to replace them and to build a team for the engaging new coach Marco Silva who can salvage Premier League survival. While not commenting on the £40m surplus figure, Allam said: “It is not the intention of the family to have their loans repaid through the recent sale of players. All players sales, as authorised by Marco Silva, will be done with the aim of reinvesting this money back into the squad.” The frantic final day recovered some credibility for that promise, reeling in the loan recruitment of the Italy defender Andrea Ranocchia from Internazionale and the former Sunderland midfielder Alfred N’Diaye from Villarreal, and the signing of the Poland winger Kamil Grosicki from Rennes on a three-and-a-half-year contract for a reported £7m. City say they are to appeal for permission to sign the French midfielder Yannis Salibur from the Ligue 1 club Guingamp, claiming delay on the selling side pushed an agreed deal beyond Tuesday’s 11pm deadline. If that does happen, at a fee said to be £9m, it will take City’s spending on players beyond the £20m made from the sales. The new arrivals at Hull join Evandro, signed from Porto, Markus Henriksen whose loan from AZ Alkmaar was made permanent with a £4.5m signing, and the loanees Oumar Niasse, Lazar Markovic and Omar Elabdellaoui from Everton, Liverpool and Silva’s former club, Olympiakos respectively. For many supporters, it will take more than all this trading to repair a relationship which has never recovered from the Allams’ stubborn and flawed drive to change the club’s name to Hull Tigers, which was ultimately outlawed by the Football Association in April 2014. Assem Allam vowed he would sell the club within 24 hours but more than 1,000 days on his son remains in charge at a ground pockmarked by rancour, compounded by a new ticketing scheme which has removed concessions for young people and pensioners. Four different groups of potential buyers have sniffed over the club before departing with no deal concluded. One, led by a Chinese investor, was apparently agreed but fell away after the Premier League questioned how the funding was being structured. Geoff Bielby, the chairman of the Hull City Supporters Trust, which campaigned against the name change and the new membership scheme, says he has cancelled his season ticket of 12 years in protest at the abolition of concession prices. The Premier League is still in talks with the club about whether the scheme breaches the league rule which require concessions to be offered at all grounds. City argue it does not. The club believes it has been given too little credit for the general reduction in prices to the lowest in the league, incorporating some adult season tickets of £252; £9 and £15 matchday tickets for category C matches, and prices of £24-£33 for plum category A matches such as Saturday’s visit of Liverpool. The club’s argument is that many tickets are so affordable they in effect constitute concessions. Bielby rejects that, because adult prices have to be paid for children too and says the atmosphere in the ground had already become toxic after the name change debacle and during the relegation season of 2014-15: “My fear now is that because they have not been able to derive the value they wanted from a sale the Allams are trying to recover the money by running a small squad and relatively low wage bill, so they can remove large chunks of the Premier League TV money.” To have generated unrest and disillusionment among many fans and an enduring chill in relations with the local council extending into a year in which Hull is the UK’s designated city of culture, seems all the more unnecessary given the Allams’ tenure has been the most successful in the club’s history. please log in to view this image Silva’s team were bottom when they went to Old Trafford on Wednesday but the fact Hull are facing Manchester United in a Premier League fixture remains historically remarkable. This is still only their fifth season in the top flight, in the 111 years since the one-year-old club was elected to the Football League Second Division in 1905. Three have been played under the Allams, who saved the club from serious financial difficulties under a previous owner, Russell Bartlett, in 2010, and have since pumped in loans from their generator manufacturing company, Allam Marine. City played gallantly in their first FA Cup final in 2014, which they lost 3-2 to Arsenal, and when relegated in 2015, the Allams took out a £23m bank loan, now refinanced, to maintain a playing squad who could attain immediate promotion. That loan was refinanced this month with a further mortgage taken out with the London branch of the Australian bank Macquarie, secured on the Cottingham training ground and future Premier League TV money. Even in this miserable season the club reached its first League Cup semi-final, losing 3-2 on aggregate to United after a 2-1 home victory that roused spirits on a bitterly cold night – but with an attendance of only 16,831, still featuring blocks of empty seats. The appointment of Silva, greeted with suspicion, is now hailed as progressive. The club’s accounts for the year to 30 June 2016, the most recently published, show it took out that bank loan and made a loss of £21m to gain promotion, although £10m of that comprised bonuses payable to the players for doing so. The Allams invested £3m into the club permanently, for shares, rather than as loans, and did comply with the Football League’s financial fair play rules which, allowing for investment in youth development and facilities, permitted clubs to make a maximum loss of £5m, and up to a further £8m if the owners invested that in equity. All the players signed must accept clauses for their wages to reduce if the club is relegated, so that dropping out of the land of plenty does not descend into a financial collapse such as City have suffered twice in the past 20 years. “The club remains up for sale,” Ehab Allam said, “but the primary focus is on supporting the head coach in the transfer window and beyond with our fight for Premier League survival.” Such is life, during English football’s greatest boom, for the Tigers. https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...rked-rancour-allams-premier-league?CMP=twt_gu
This would seem to be confirmation that the recent bank loan was a refinancing of the existing bank loan, meaning we're still £100m in debt and the Allams are looking to reduce their debt by £40m this year.
It does read as though the signings made in the last few hours of the transfer window have somewhat spiked the guns of the article's argument. Replacing permanent established players with loaned new players, is surely the key risk that we have with the new squad.
If the financial assumptions are correct then we finish this season with debts of £37m to the Allams £23m to Macquarie Bank (secured) That would make us very attractive to buy as a PL club. But expensive for a Championship Club.
When I did my dissertation it was about the formation of the Premier League and how it effected the football league teams in which over 60% had been in administration. That was 10 years ago. Anyway to add relevance I asked David Conn a few questions and he was very helpful in my studies on the subject. Top fella. The Bournemouth and Scunny where also very helpful. Bournemouth where in turmoil at the time, funny how things change....
Whoever "Officer" is, they deserve a round of applause for his/her excellent comment on that article.
David Conn @david_conn .@MikeHirstesq To be fair to Hull City, the club engaged with all questions and provided responses, including from Ehab Allam.
Agreed. A round of applause as well as an awkward (on my phone) copy & paste Here goes Get yourself a glass of wine and settle down to read an exceptionally good online news comment (possibly the first time that has ever been said) Officer Thank you David. An interesting piece. It's worth mentioning, however, that the story of Hull City fans vs the Allams is a long and complex one. There have been notable flashpoints - the cack-handed attempts to change the club's name and the ill-thought-out membership scheme being the two main ones - but there has also been a drip, drip, drip of petty, malicious and sometimes downright nasty stuff coming out of the club. From the denial of funds/resources to Nick Barmby and his eventual trumped up sacking, to the humiliation of local rugby league legend Johnny Whiteley in an attempt to piss off Adam Pearson, to the petty attempts to stop YouTube channels showing old Hull City goals (which the club didn't have the right to anyway), the the sidelining of any backroom/communication staff that were popular with fans, to the threats to move the club away from Hull into East Yorkshire, to the petty manner in which any celebrations of our achievements were ushered away from the City Hall, to the disgraceful conduct regarding the use of Airco Arena that saw - among others - sports teams for disabled youngsters being left homeless, to the removal of some disabled concessions, to the fact that someone as amiable as Steve Bruce couldn't bear to work with them, to the complete and utter under-resourcing of this summer, to the lies about wanting to sell. Even with the name change, it's not just the fact that they attempted to change our name. It's the fact that we were initially lied to (our then CEO first told us there was no intention to change the name of the football team, which was "sacrosanct"), to the toadying that the local press had to do to get any access to the Allams, to the "they can die when they want" comments, to the horrendous 'poll' they conducted among season ticket holders regarding the name change that the FA rightly laughed out of court, to the continued branding of the club that keeps on using Hull Tigers over and over again and goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid mentioning us being called "Hull City". I could go on. I've been a Hull City fan since the early 1980s. I've been there throughout our brushes with extinction in the 1990s, throwing coins into a blanket at a crumbling Boothferry Park so the players could receive some payment. I know City fans from back then who would miss holidays, family occasions, nights out, even meals so they had the time and money to spend on going to away games even though we hadn't won on the road for months on end. Thanks to the Allams, many of these people will no longer attend matches at the Kcom. I saw a member of a well-known City supporting family at Wembley in May. I asked him where the rest of his clan were and he replied 'just me today'. There'd been about 20 of them at every other Wembley appearance for Hull City. If families such as that one are no longer able to muster the enthusiasm to support the club in person on such a landmark occasion, then things really are screwed. This is an important thing with the Allams. Just when you think they've managed to plumb a new depth, another interview is done, another idea is belched out, alienating yet more fans. Our support for much of the bad times (not all, admittedly) was good. When we moved to the KC and stormed up the divisions it was outstanding, in both volume and passion. It pains me to see empty seats at play-off finals and League Cup semi-finals. Because I know under any other circumstances we'd be locking fans out (as we did in League 2 matches just over a decade ago). With many of the people who I know who don't go to home games now, it's almost as if they care too much. The Allams are killing Hull City once ****witted idea at a time. They could and should have been feted, all-time legends at Hull City given the circumstances of their buying the club, given their philanthropy in the city in general. But their spiteful, vindictive, oversized egos mean that they are left nigh-on friendless. When loyal, able lieutenants such as Steve Bruce and Peter Chapman can no long bear to be associated with you, then something really stinks. The Allams can't leave Hull City quickly enough.
