Hardest decision I’ve taken in football - quitting Hull City, says Nigel Adkins

There have been moments for optimism in East Yorkshire this season, but the shadow cast by the club’s owners never disappears for long. The relationship between the club and its owners is broken beyiond repair.

With its historical love of rugby league, football is always fighting for attention by the banks of the Humber, but January’s FA Cup tie with Chelsea showed there are enough people in the city who want to get behind their football club.

For the first time in three years the KCOM Stadium was sold out, but by the time of the last match there before the coronavirus outbreak, 24,109 had become 16,178, swelled by a packed away end and a large number of Leeds United fans in the home sections.

For many, the bonds were broken in the early years of the Allams’ ownership by the ham-fisted attempts to rename the club as Hull Tigers. The relationship with the city council has been frosty too, the latter refusing to sell the KCOM Stadium to them “as we [the council] want to ensure that public assets are maintained for all teams and clubs and for people who enjoy sport”.

In November Assem and Ehab Allam, owner and vice-chairman respectively, tried to rebuild bridges, returning to the KCOM for a match after more than four years away. That olive branch, nor a team which went into 2020 pushing for the play-offs, have reversed the downward trend in gates which started before their decade in charge, but – the odd promotion-inspired blip apart – has continued.

With attendances so low, Hull are probably one of the clubs who need to come to an agreement with their players over wages during the coronavirus pandemic, but a lack of trust in the Allams appears to be hindering that too.

The players have been asked to make a 20 per cent “salary sacrifice” and whilst their coaches have signed up, they are taking their time.

The obstinacy of the Professional Footballers’ Association cannot be helping, but it has not stopped other clubs coming to an agreement. What makes it uncomfortable for Hull’s players to sign up is the knowledge the Tigers banked £18m for Jarrod Bowen in January, too late to spend any of it on a replacement. Hull’s annual wage bill for 2018-19 was £24.8m.

One of the PFA’s problems with their members being asked to forgo pay is the suspicion it will only benefit club owners like the Allams.

Having led the team to an admirable 13th position on a tight budget last season, it was a blow when Adkins walked out, particularly as he waited so close to the start of pre-season to do so. The problem, he says, was he just could not get the assurances he needed.

“I loved my time up there,” said Adkins, a popular figure on the terraces. “I wanted to stay. We contemplated buying a house in Beverley.

“It’s still the biggest and hardest decision I’ve had to make in football because I wanted to stay.

“It was such a big, big shame. However, you’ve got to make decisions in life.”

There were talks over a new contract at the start of last summer, but Adkins wanted protection if the Allams did finally succeed in selling the club, as they have been trying to since at least 2017.

“I wanted to stay, the owners knew that,” he said. “I sat there twice with my lawyer and he even said ‘Do you not understand? He wants to stay.’

“The previous summer the buzzword had been sustainability so I knew where we were going. I’d had conversations with Assem and Ehab so I knew what they wanted to do. They wanted to sell the football club.

“I still wanted to be there so I needed to know how we’d get through the situation.

“I’ve been at clubs before when new owners come in. The first thing they do is change the manager.

“I was looking to buy a house but it could’ve been a case of losing one game and you’re gone.”

If Adkins did not specifically use the word “trust”, the last Hull manager to win promotion to the Premier League did. Days before the Tigers’ last top-flight campaign was due to kick off, Steve Bruce resigned.
“I genuinely thought at that time that the trust between myself and Ehab had evaporated,” reflected Bruce later.

“The one thing you need at any football club is that stability and trust between a manager and a chief exec or technical director. That relationship has to be watertight and you have to sing off the same hymn sheet.

“It was fairly obvious for the sake of the club that I needed to walk away.”

Rightly or wrongly it is hard to imagine the suspicions of Hull’s owners, from former managers to their stay-away fans and the players, will ever go away until they do. Until then, prolonged success will be impossible.