Hull City: If I hadn’t seen such riches…

…I could live with being poor. 

The brilliant, if over-quoted, lyric from James’ “Sit Down” over the years applies to Hull City’s past, present and future as much as anyone. Conventional wisdom suggests that the good times are over. And the future is bleak.

For nearly twenty years, we’ve had it good. Since Adam Pearson picked the locks of Boothferry Park in 2001 we have seen five promotions, three to the Premier League, two at Wembley, we’ve played in the FA Cup Final, qualified for Europe and seen the best players we will ever see pull on black and amber shirts. We’ve gone from bust to boom to bust to boom to gloom and doom to now – whatever now is.

Pearson rescued a “sleeping” not-quite-giant in Division Three in 2001. After two false starts under managers Brian Little and Jan Molby, we moved from Boothferry Park to the shining beacon of the KC Stadium where Peter Taylor assembled a squad of club legends who dragged the club out of the bottom tier and straight through the newly forms League One. We brought Nick bloody Barmby home from exile in Leeds and marched straight into the Championship. Honestly, I never dreamed it would get better than that.

Taylor moved on and after a brief struggle under Phil Parkinson, Pearson appointed Phil Brown as manager and sold the club to Russell Bartlett and Paul Duffen to take us to the next level. Dean Windass came home too while Brown brought and Jay Jay Okocha (which still makes no sense written down) and Caleb Folan became the club’s first million pound signing. From nowhere in the spring of 2008, his side just missed out on automatic promotion to the Championship before winning that play-off final at Wembley. The greatest day in the club’s history.

We started brilliantly in the Premier league and we’re still banging on about those wins at Arsenal, Spurs and Newcastle twelve years later. We didn’t even win at Old Trafford or Anfield but the performances filled us with pride. The joy didn’t last as we all know. Brown and Duffen got ideas above their station, the cost of the signings made to compete in the Premier League bled the club dry and neither Duffen nor Bartlett owned a calculator or a copy of Microsoft Excel. We survived, just, but were relegated the following season with Brown having departed to be replaced by… Iain Dowie. The club returned to the Championship in turmoil. We were haemorrhaging money, selling players to survive and the future was as bleak then as it is now.

Unlike now though, knights in shining hieroglyphics arrived to save us – the Allam family. The family, originally from Egypt, own local business Allam Marine and live in Kirkella. They were local-foreign owners saving the club for the sake of the community. Allegedly. For a couple of years, things went pretty well. They rid the club of some crippling costs and personalities and allowed Nigel Pearson to spend money in building a competitive side in a tough league. When Nigel Pearson left, they appointed Nick Barmby as manager, to their chagrin as it turned out, before sacking him unceremoniously at the end of the season. That was the first warning sign that not all would be rosy under Allam ownership but they appointed Steve Bruce as his replacement and backed him in the transfer market – appeasing most City fans.

Bruce oversaw a glorious four-year period taking us up from the Championship, automatically, at the first time of asking, kept us in the Premier League and through that FA Cup Final appearance in a spirited but losing effort to Arsenal, qualified for the Europa League. We were relegated from the top flight when we really shouldn’t have been close but bounced back via another play-off final win against Sheffield Wednesday.

Almost all the success under Bruce played out against a backdrop of owner/fan division. The controversial attempt to change the club’s name to “Hull Tigers” and subsequent backlash and campaign to keep it caused a rift that still exists seven years on. Despite the ongoing battle, the Allams still backed Bruce, and he was able to succeed, in a fashion, on the pitch. Off it, the Allams refusal to use the club’s name, having lost their appeal to change it, and introduction of an unpopular membership scheme, which axed concession pricing, further disenfranchised many in the fan base.

Following that second play-off final win, the Allams relationship with Bruce broke too. He left in the summer of 2016 and that and the lack of recruitment after Wembley, left the club woefully unprepared for life in the Premier League. Mike Phelan was given the unenviable task of challenging at the top-level. He failed and while we had some respite under the brilliant Marco Silva, he ultimately failed too. Since that relegation, Leonid Slutsky, Nigel Adkins and Grant McCann have all taken on the job of reviving the club in the Championship but as ambition and finances have decreased, so has the quality of the playing squad.

We’ve been spoiled for twenty years. We’ve cheered on Ashbee, Elliott, Burgess, Price, Allsopp, Myhill, Dawson, France, Green, Delaney, Duke, Cort, Fagan, Barmby, Turner, Ricketts, Marney, Pedersen, Brown, Garcia, Okocha, Campbell, Windass, Folan, McShane, Zayatte, Geovanni, Boateng, Cairney, Koren, Rosenior, Fryatt, McLean, Chester, Evans, Dudgeon, Stewart, Brady, Hobbs, Elmohamady, Bruce, Aluko, Faye, Meyler, Boyd, Quinn, Davies, McGregor, Livermore, Huddlestone, Long, Jelavic, Dawson, Hernandez, Diame, Snodgrass, Robertson, Maguire, Jakupovic, Clucas, Odubajo, Grosicki, Rannocchia, Markovic, Niasse, Tymon, Wilson, Clark, Elphick, Bowen and many, many more. They’d be all over a list of the top 50 players in the club’s history along with the stars of the mid-60s and the mid-80s. But what now?

In January, Bowen, Grosicki and Henriksen left. The last players left to have played in the Premier League for City. They leave behind a squad of young and hungry players signed for low fees to develop and sell-on. The few players left who cost multi millions (Dicko, Stewart, Kingsley, Toral) are unlikely to survive this next summer.

Thanks to a reasonable start and a good Autumn, City still sit 7 points above the relegation zone despite a run of 8 league games without a win. The play-off challenge is a distant memory as we’ve picked up 12 points from the last 42 available. Staying in the Championship is far from certain but to be relegated this season would still take a monumentally dreadful effort. But, even if we stay up, what then?

This is a dying club under the Allams’ ownership. It has been for years and years. In all fairness, they have tried to put right some wrongs. They have used the club’s name on the badge and all communication, they’ve brought back concessions, they’ve appointed good people in key roles, they’ve run good events for kids and adult fans, and they’ve stopped saying incendiary things. However, it’s all been fruitless. There are people who will never forgive them. There are plenty more who just won’t support a team that isn’t winning or challenging for success.

So, those of us who are left, a dwindling number but still more than there were when Adam Pearson came to our rescue in 2001, are left to watch what happens. The squad is surely about to get even worse as we try to replace £3 million signings with cheap players of promise from League One or the Scottish Premier League. McCann has a nigh impossible job to keep putting a brave face on the task he faces. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he succeeds but it’s being made harder and more unlikely by the week.

Tonight is Barnsley at home. In December, it would have been a much fancied three points to close the gap on the play-of places. Now it’s a relegation six-pointer in front of three men and a dog. The stadium is no longer a shining beacon of hope. It’s the soulless bowl most Rugby fans cried about when the capacity was first mooted two decades ago. It’s tired and it’s a miserable place to be.

It fits Hull City AFC in 2020 to a tee.