I've been having trouble with links on my phone, but the computer is fine. I assumed it was the phone. anyway, for those having trouble, here is the article. Hull City owner Assem Allam still defiant over rebrand ahead of Tigers' FA Cup final with Arsenal at Wembley Exclusive interview: Hull City's Egyptian owner Assem Allam talks to Oliver Brown ahead of the club's historic FA Cup appearance Hull City owner Assem Allam still defiant over rebrand ahead of Tigers' FA Cup final with Arsenal at Wembley Tiger feat: Hull City's controversial owner Assem Allam is bouyant ahead of the club's FA Cup bow Photo: Les Gibbon / Guzelian By Oliver Brown 2:00PM BST 14 May 2014 Comments4 Comments Assem Allam arrived in the East Riding from Egypt with £20 to his name, still disfigured by the scars inflicted by President Nasser’s thugs. “I couldn’t swallow the idea that a dictator had the right to dictate,” Hull City’s chairman says of his days of political dissidence. “So I would make very, very strong speeches at Cairo University. It ended up with me being arrested and tortured, in nasty ways. After the Six Days’ War, Nasser abandoned his policy of long detention for harsh punishment. I had a lot of lashes on my naked body.” Forty-six years later, Allam has turned his £20 into a £320 million fortune, even if he laughs off that figure as hypothetical when we meet at his well-fortified headquarters – fingerprinting at the door, no less – on the Melton Industrial Estate. At 74, he identifies his abiding virtue as “sheer determination”, a quality born of having once combined postgraduate studies in economics at Hull University with a job as a labourer at a local flour mill. “I had sold all my assets, because for me leaving Egypt was a point of no return. Nobody believed that the dictator would die. And when I put money in what was then Midland Bank, a gentleman called me to say that all of it was fake – the dollars, the banknotes, the travellers’ cheques, everything. So I had to start my life in England with £20. But I’m not the sort of person to sit around and cry.” It is against a backdrop of such toil that one can understand why Allam, when faced with the sentimental misgivings of Hull City supporters implacably opposed to his plan to rechristen their club Hull Tigers, is not especially ruffled. Today at least, in his expansive but functional boardroom, he is of a sunny enough disposition to resist repeating a recent comment that his detractors could “die as soon as they want”. The prospect of Hull’s first FA Cup final, against Arsenal on Saturday, mollifies him slightly. But at the risk of alienating the core fan base, he is still utterly undeterred in his resolve to force through the name change. Almost revelling in his own description of himself as “not a football man”, Allam says: “When I took over, I wasn’t even aware of the ‘Association Football Club’ bit. I put in £27 million to protect football for the community, not to maintain the name. What, should we have let the club go down to League One but protected the name? That money was to save the sport itself. “You see, when you are in the Championship, you are a local club. The income from gate receipts represents about 60 per cent of your total income. When you are in the Premier League, that proportion shrinks to seven per cent. The rest of the money comes from television, and TV means the world. You don’t have a global club and continue behaving in a local manner.” The concept of Hull Tigers – and it is worth considering that Allam claims he would reimagine Manchester City as ‘Manchester Hunter’ – thus represents his antidote to small-time thinking. “I am 74, I haven’t got too much time left. You need to promote yourself worldwide, very quickly. You must think about the future, and the first thing that comes to your mind is the brand name. The shorter it is, the more powerful it becomes: Apple, Google, Twitter. You will never make it if your name is Hull City AFC.” At this point his words almost drip with condescension. “Do you drop Hull, or City, or Tigers? You drop City. It means nothing.” It is an inescapable truth that any foreign-born owner threatening to ride roughshod over tradition is demonised as a symbol of meddlesome malevolence. Cardiff City’s Vincent Tan, for example, is unlikely ever to be rehabilitated after changing the home strip from blue to red. However, there is scant evidence that Allam’s motives in investing in a sport he knows next to nothing about are anything but munificent. “This is not an investment, it never has been. The intention was to save Hull from bankruptcy because normally, when a club gets relegated, it goes into freefall. So we manage it for the community’s benefit. It has never been the other way around.” Allam’s generosity even extends to laying out three trays of chocolates for this interview. He cuts a jovial figure, at odds with his uncompromising business reputation, and the master plan that he and son Ehab have concocted for Hull is fast bearing fruit. Top-flight survival was assured weeks ago, while Steve Bruce, the manager, has brought the requisite Premier League poise ever since the club struggled in Championship mid-table. A maiden FA Cup final, for a club founded 110 years ago, is a reward that Allam acknowledges, with mischievous understatement, “came a year earlier than anticipated”. While Allam is not a gentleman prone to self-doubt, or to shrinking from his view of how things must be done, he purports to feel an acute indebtedness to the people of Hull for setting him on the path to riches. “None of us have a licence to print money,” as he puts it. “I have had a good life here, a good share, and there is a time when you must pay back.” True, there are certain gaudy monuments to his success – not least the personalised speedboat mounted outside his offices at Allam Marine – but his football acquisition will never be a vanity project. “You wouldn’t see even my initials there,” he promises. “The stadium is there to bring a quality of football to the community.” For those more anxious about his apparent obsession with the Tigers theme, he adds: “I’m not going to be changing our colours, or our logo. The tiger is a very good-looking animal. Very powerful.” On occasion Allam has done his cause few favours, not least when he infelicitously labelled the Tigers naysayers as “hooligans”. But when pressed on his commitment to the club, he is adamant that it stems from an ingrained sense of loyalty. “It’s funny you ask this, because a few months ago my son was asking me the same question. I explained to him that as a family, we come from a generation of farmers. “Our village is 15 miles north of Cairo, and many years ago the whole village was owned by my great-great-great-grandfather. I would have followed my father as head of the village if I had stayed in Egypt. "When I was 12 I would ask my father: ‘Why is it, every time I want more pocket money, the answer is negative? But I see you going there, dad, and giving money away?’ He used to explain to me in simple language that we had a duty to do these things. I wasn’t convinced, but by the time I went to university it started to click in my mind.” Allam’s social conscience was suppressed during his first years in Hull, as he was forced to suffer the indignity of swapping a livelihood as a senior auditor, his Egyptian profession, for menial manual work. His scholastic grounding, though, offered an escape. “I always wanted to do business, but I come from a very academic family. There’s no question of what to do when you leave school – you go to university. You don’t ask the question, I wouldn’t have dared. “After I obtained my first degree in 1966, my mother asked me: ‘Is that it?’ She expected me to do a postgraduate course, and she offered me £200 as a reward for completing a masters. It was a lot of money then. It proved to be useful here, because I had a 2:2 in my bachelor’s degree, and Hull University would only accept a minimum of 2:1 for postgraduate entry. But on the basis that I had a masters from Egypt they allowed me to register.” These days Allam is not simply a distinguished alumnus at his alma mater, he has a building named in his honour, while three of his children have studied there. If he is true to his word that Allam will never be emblazoned upon the KC Stadium, then this owes much to his belief in sport’s capacity to revitalise the city he loves. This week, indeed, he has been less preoccupied in the looming Cup final than in the Allam British Open squash tournament in Hull – an event which, he assures, is the “equivalent of Wimbledon in squash”, a sport that runs in his blood after his brother, Galal, reached a world championship quarter-final. “I am a man who tries to get his priorities right,” Allam argues. “In managing a business, authority equals responsibility. I make the decisions there, and if it goes wrong I will pay for it. I buy a striker, and if he is the wrong player I will buy another one. I had a meeting with the fans and I made it clear to them that it will never, ever be, no matter what, that they have the authority and I take the responsibility.” If that happens, he says even in this most auspicious of weeks, his money will be withdrawn from the club at a stroke. And yes, that includes certain Hull fans’ stubbornly nostalgic attachment to ‘City’ in preference to ‘Tigers’. “You can be sentimental as much as you like,” says Allam, his ruthlessness rushing to the surface. “But pay for it. Don’t be sentimental and ask me to pay.”
Dr Allam wont be walking away from the PL gravy train anytime soon especially now we are in europe. Steve Bruce wont allow him.
It's a pity Gino Bartali was not his father ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27333310 ... His son said: "When I asked my father why I couldn't tell anyone, he said, 'You must do good, but you must not talk about it. If you talk about it you're taking advantage of others misfortunes' for your own gain...'"
Ironic that AA is behaving like the tyrannical despot he so despised. Wonder if they do irony in his house? Probably not. "When you pay the bills, you can have all the opinions you like. Until then..." Can't wait for a new owner to come along.
So in other words, **** the fans and the City while we're in the PL, but come back if we get relegated, we might need you. In the meantime, we're happy almost filling a tiny stadium and have no ambition to expand our fanbase. Yeah we'll see. I might have to make a note of this bit. He's such a ****.
Ours. It was here before anyone had heard of him and it will be here long after he's gone. And it will be called Hull City throughout.
That's a bloody good question. Short answer is that chairmen are only really custodians, but the FA have shown him he can't just do as he pleases.
Never gonna change his mind. Never gonna listen to anyone. Therefore I will never warm to him and I will never accept his dictatorial ways. And I have been given no reason not change my opinion that he is a very flawed person, and basically a huge ****.
Very well put, that's exactly how I felt after reading that. Explains in a lovely manner why he gives so much away, but also explains why the majority of people who do not do that, suspect an ulterior motive from him. I guess they'll never ever understand his philosophy on that. Some of our resident drama queens wouldn't know a despot, tyrant or dictator if one came up and stabbed them in the face for fun.
The daft bugger probably thought it was way to quiet in the ground on Sunday. I'll have another dig and that will get them singing. Seriously though can't he just be satisfied that the club is getting all this exposure. Surely all the TV and press interest not to mention the global appeal of the FA Cup Final is giving us far more exposure then the stupid crass Hull Tigers ever could.
I can't remember who it was, but somebody in the media pointed out that Allam mistakes the coverage as proof that Hull City are global, when in reality it's the Premier League that's global, and Hull City are a small part of that...for now.
