League tables have long been the enemy in Hull. At times in the recent past
the city has had the worst-performing council, worst-performing students,
the least healthy and the poorest people in the land. They know because the
tables said so. Tables that never explained circumstances, never recorded
the good work, never offered anything but damnation.
It is, of course, a city with problems. There are 150 education authorities in
the country and when the national table for 2008 GCSE results was released
on Friday, Hull was in the same position as in 2007. Last. Just 29.3% of
Hull’s GCSE students achieved the government standard of five A* to C
grades. The national average is 47.2.
Much has been tried to raise standards and the sense of a city trying to pull
itself up is found everywhere. It is evident in the magnificent railway
station, the museums, the marina, the new Paragon Centre, but the city
remains a particular challenge. Across from the train station, a tall
cylinder advertises a mobile phone company, an American beer, the coming of
a musical to town and the local council.
The council’s ad says: “In Hull, employment has risen to 66% — Your Council
creating new employment opportunities.” So, one in three people in the city
don’t work and somewhere there will be a table to show how bad this is. The
poet Philip Larkin was a librarian at the University of Hull. “Deprivation
is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” he once said.
So what has gone wrong with the city’s football team, Hull City, the newly
arrived high riders of the Premier League who began the weekend in third
place? For decades, the team were another symbol of underachievement, the
biggest city in Europe never to have played in the top flight of its
national league and all that. Now they sit close to the top of the richest
and most exciting league in the world.
And Hull has, at last, found a table that it is pleased about.
WHO knows for sure when the change in Hull City’s fortunes began? What is
certain is that the city council’s decision to build a new stadium was
pivotal. After the sale of its telecoms company for £130m in 1999, the
leader of the council at the time, Patrick Doyle, decided £43m should be
spent on building a stadium that would be offered, rent-free, to the city’s
football and two rugby league clubs.
The 25,000-seat KC stadium opened in December 2002, a year later the current
goalkeeper Boaz Myhill joined the club from Aston Villa and set out on a
journey that even the dreamers didn’t foresee. Hull City were in the lowest
tier of the league and even if the team had a magnificent stadium, the
Premier League was too far away to contemplate. “I remember the day we went
to Yeovil Town and got the draw that gained us promotion from League Two,”
says Myhill. “We showered, travelled by coach back to Hull and still in our
tracksuits, we rocked up outside a nightclub in the centre of town and all
had a great night. If you’d asked me then if Hull could go all the way to
the Premier League, I would have said, ‘Not beyond the bounds of
possibility, very close but not beyond’. But I never thought it would
happen.”
Hull City won three promotions in five years. Adam Pearson, a former director
at Leeds United, bought the club in 2001 and over the following six years
the team were improved and the club was put on a sound financial footing.
Having seen how massive debt crippled and then destroyed a fine Leeds United
team, Pearson was determined things would be different at Hull.
He took the team to the Championship but felt he didn’t have the financial
resources for the Premier League. After just avoiding relegation in 2006-07,
word spread that Pearson was prepared to sell. At the time, a Surrey-based
entrepreneur, Paul Duffen, was looking for a football team to run.
“I wanted something that would excite and terrify me in equal measure,” he
says. “People said running a football club just couldn’t work but I’ve
always been attracted to things that people said couldn’t be done.” With his
partner, Russell Bartlett, Duffen explored the idea of buying West Ham,
today’s visitors to the KC stadium, and then Cardiff City, but nothing
happened in either case.
Then he travelled to Hull to meet Pearson. “There was a buzz about the place,”
he says. “The attraction of Hull was the potential. It was clear that this
club could get much bigger. The city and surrounding area had a big
population, the stadium was magnificent and it was a very well-run football
club. We needed to buy the club and then have £5m or £6m; that figure would
allow us to walk into the casino and play for the prize of a Premier League
place. The danger was that you wouldn’t get promotion and would have to
invest another £6m the following season in the hope that you did. The
Championship is a graveyard financially, much tougher than the Premier
League or Leagues One and Two. But the challenge appealed to me.”
It is believed that Duffen and Bartlett paid £12m for the club and then
invested almost £6m in the team, which won promotion in the chairman’s first
season. “We have not bought the football club but the business that runs the
club,” Duffen says. “A football club is an emotional piece of intellectual
property that belongs to the fans. You can’t buy that. What happened with
Wimbledon was rape and pillage.
“I have been involved in running businesses for 25 years and I love being
involved with teams of people, extended families, that achieve things
together, but this is actually the first thing in my life that really
matters. This has the potential to change the frame of mind of half a
million people, and that’s incredible.”
Success on the football field can change a community’s sense of itself.
Without a top-flight team, Hull was known mostly for its failings and it
seemed easy to understand those failings when the city hadn’t produced a
football team worthy of the name. “Before the football team got into the
Premier League, you couldn’t get a national journalist to cross the Humber
Bridge unless there was a bad story to tell from Hull,” says Carl Minns, the
current leader of Hull council. “Now lots of people want to know about Hull
and we are telling them we are the city with the fastest-falling crime rate,
the city that has had £1bn worth of investment, most of it from the private
sector, in the last 12 months. Our museums get more visitors than York’s and
once people come to Hull, their perception of the city changes.
“We didn’t have anyone to tell until the team became successful. You can’t buy
the benefit to a city that comes in the headline, ‘Arsenal 1 Hull City 2’.
Every country in the world sees that and they make the connection: Hull and
success. You can’t buy that, you just can’t buy that.”
PHIL BROWN had the kind of football career you would have missed had you not
been a fan of Hartlepool, Halifax, Bolton or Blackpool during his seasons at
those clubs. Tough, committed, he was the sort of player who gave journeymen
a good name. He served his time in management under Sam Allardyce at Bolton
and when the chance came to be his own boss at Derby County, he took it.
He lasted eight months before being sacked. “Horrible word isn’t it, sacked?”
he says. “It has an impact on your confidence, your self-esteem. It was
tough. There were real black moments. I thought I had betrayed my family,
leaving the security I had at Bolton to pursue a career in management. I was
turned down by Bournemouth, Wycombe and Carlisle. I was seriously
considering a job outside of football. I was then accepted as a coach at
Hull City and the rest is history.”
Soon after Brown joined, manager Phil Parkinson was sacked. After a short
spell as caretaker, Brown got his second shot. So far, the achievement has
transcended the wildest expectations. If promotion to the Premier League was
a surprise, Hull City’s 14-point haul from the first seven games of the
season has been astonishing. Their
Premier League side bears but a passing resemblance to the team that earned
promotion at Wembley last May.
“That is the toughest part,” says Myhill. “You remember the guys from last
season who are now not in the team and you feel for them. We are where we
are because of them and from the current team, only Ian Ashbee, Andrew
Dawson and myself have been here for all of the journey. For the other lads,
it’s hard. Football is cruel.”
The team has been significantly improved and though it may not maintain its
current position, there is every chance Hull City can establish itself in
the Premier League. There is another table Hull people like: of the 20 teams
in the top league, their club has the least debt. Duffen says: “On matchday
I wanted every one of our supporters to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m a
Hull City fan, and today I’m going to a Premier League game’.”
ON AN artificial five-a-side pitch on the edge of the sprawling council
estates at Bransholme in Hull, teams of 13-year-old boys take it in turns to
outdo each other. Training is organised by grass-roots coaches. Those who
compile league tables never mention the people who run programmes in
Bransholme. Neither do they explain how more coaches and better facilities
wouldn’t go astray around here.
You pick six of the boys at random; Dean Park, Max Walsh, Brian Colley, Ashley
Hughes, Kieran Selway and Marcus Farley. Four of them say everyone thinks
Hull is a bad place but they like it. Four of them support Manchester
United, one supports Liverpool and there is a lone Hull City fan. But all of
them say they are proud of what Hull have done and how they are thinking of
switching allegiance to their home club. “Beating Arsenal and Spurs was a
dream for anyone from around here,” says the Hull fan, Selway. “That felt
really good.”
In a city that has had too little to feel good about, the football club has
become a beacon of light.
ON TV TODAY
Hull City v West Ham, Match of the Day 2, 11.20pm
