Hull City owner Acun Ilicali is standing in the living room of his home on the banks of the River Humber, explaining how, in a move which reflects his outlook on most things in life, he has taken a radical approach to the property.
‘Here, there was a glass structure that served no purpose,’ he says. ‘And here there were walls. They all had to go. We’re renting the place but told the owners that we would only take it if they let us knock all this down.’
The outcome is a vast living area, dominated by a plasma screen showing the latest series of Survivor, one of the many reality TV shows produced by Ilicali which generated the wealth that enabled him to buy Hull four years ago. It’s shot in the Dominican Republic, from where the 56-year-old arrived 36 hours earlier – via Slovenia, where he watched Maribor, a club he also owns, draw a top-of-the table clash 3-3.
He’ll be here long enough to watch the home games against Watford and Bristol City before heading home to Istanbul, then returning to Hull for the FA Cup fourth-round tie against Chelsea on Friday which will bring Liam Rosenior, the manager Ilicali sacked 20 months ago, back to East Yorkshire.
Daily Mail Sport is here at Ilicali’s home in rural Ferriby at the start of a day with him, witnessing up close his quest to take Hull back to the Premier League, and discovering that he is a man in a hurry.
He bought Hull rather than Derby County, Cardiff City or Swansea City – which he says were also for sale when he was looking for a club four years back – after falling in love with the serenity of what he saw when his private jet touched down at Humberside Airport.
We are here at Hull City owner Acun Ilicali’s home in rural Ferriby, south of the city, at the start of a day with him, witnessing up close his quest to take his club back to the Premier League
Ilicali explains how he told the owners of his rented house outside Hull that he would only take the place if he could knock some walls down
‘I saw everywhere green, of course,’ he says. ‘England, green country. It made me feel good. And then I saw the Humber Bridge – completely the same as the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. Such green, green, green. It is psychological therapy for me.’
But he is a man who seemingly seeks no peace and who, until last June, was also vice-president overseeing football operations in the Turkish bearpit of Fenerbahce, a role he ultimately left because of the interference of club president Sadettin Saran.
He doesn’t conceal his frustration at the way things worked out at his beloved boyhood club but at least it means he no longer has to arrive incognito in Hull. ‘I would have to disguise being here because Fenerbahce fans expected me to be there,’ he says.
The groceries on the kitchen counter remain unpacked, a fruitful transfer window closed 12 hours earlier with Lewis Koumas and Toby Collyer’s arrival underlining Hull’s strong links with Liverpool and Manchester United and good, creative football agents. But all the talk is turning to Chelsea and Rosenior – the manager sacked by Ilicali, to general astonishment, after the club finished one place and three points outside the play-offs in 2024.
Ilicali is characteristically adamant that he was right to fire a coach whose onward journey to Chelsea suggests he must have some qualities. ‘Yes, he was surprised when I told him, but no, I don’t have regrets about it,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to go to the Premier League with Liam’s style of football.’
His self-assurance is that of someone who considers himself a football obsessive, steeped in the English game from the days as a teenage boy in 1980s Istanbul when he truanted from school to see Turkey lose 8-0 to Bobby Robson’s England and had his face beamed across national TV when interviewed by a reporter. ‘John Barnes destroyed us and I said the Turkey coach must be sacked,’ Ilicali relates. ‘And 40million people watched me! Including all my teachers!’
He secured his first job, as a football TV reporter, by demonstrating his knowledge and became closer to the players of Besiktas than some of the club’s executives. He was so tight with the club’s Nigerian contingent, including one-time Everton man Daniel Amokachi, that he made films from that country.
He reels off the aspects of 1990s British football he adored – ‘Ian Wright and Mark Bright for Crystal Palace, Stanley Collymore, the beautiful quality of the jerseys, Paul Gascoigne, the 1990 England World Cup song (World in Motion)… “catch me if you can ’cause I’m the England man”.’
He reels off the aspects of 1990s British football he adored – ‘Ian Wright and Mark Bright for Crystal Palace, Stanley Collymore, Paul Gascoigne, the 1990 England World Cup song’
‘I can spend £120million for a club and risk that money. If I lose this money, I will not be sad. But if I am not successful, I will feel very sad’
And it was because of all this that he wanted to plough a slice of the multi-millions he made as an reality TV mogul – the ‘Turkish Simon Cowell’ – into his ambition of owing a Premier League club.
Hull were languishing in the Championship at the time, fans draining away from a club not remotely competitive in a division which is football’s Wild West – full of red ink and near suicidal wage-to-turnover ratios. He was intent on reversing all that.
‘You can always be defensive in life,’ he says, in his extremely rapid English. ‘But if you are focused on success – if you don’t care about money – then you can come here and spend £120m for a club and risk that money. If I lose this money, I will not be sad. But if I am not successful, I will feel very sad.
‘Ten years after going into the TV business as a reporter I owned my own TV company and a TV station to screen my shows, because I was bold and I didn’t fear risk. I’ve only been here four years, so let’s see where we go.’
And since he brings the investment and, as he sees it, expertise in Turkey’s relatively untapped player market, as well as football contacts across Europe, he feels he has been entitled to dispense with five managers in four years, including Rosenior.
It had started out so well between the two of them in 2022. Ilicali had been impressed by how the Derby side managed by Wayne Rooney, with Rosenior as his influential assistant, had played in a 3-1 win against Hull that February. When it came to replacing manager Shota Arveladze, Ilicali asked his staff to put him on a call with Rosenior.
He interviewed him from Los Angeles, where he was with his family, and their 90-minute Zoom call left him impressed. ‘I saw a young coach with a big passion,’ he says. ‘He was a football maniac, who’d already decided to be a coach when he was playing. It was a Guardiola-style he came with. Always taking control of the ball, position football. ‘I said to my staff, “Go for him. This is the guy”.’
Rosenior’s positive outlook struck him, too. A motivational message in the washroom of llicali’s house states, ‘Happy Mind, Happy Life’. He likes positivity. But Ilicali says he felt that Hull’s style of football became too predictable – dull and rather suffocating – and that Rosenior didn’t take account of the fact that some players were not at a high-enough technical level to pass through teams.
‘I bought the club because I want success, yes?’ he says. ‘But success with entertaining football – and we were not seeing that. Liam’s philosophy was also based on a football style for me that can only be done with very high-quality players.
‘I bought the club because I want success, yes?’ Ilicali says. ‘But success with entertaining football – and we were not seeing that with Liam’
‘Liam’s philosophy was based on a football style for me that can only be done with very high-quality players,’ adds Ilicali
‘If you want to break the other team’s press by passing, everybody has to be very technical. At Hull City, how can we manage to beat teams that way who have good players, too? It doesn’t work. You end up with all the control – 70 per cent possession – without one goalscoring position.
‘So how can I change Liam? I can call Liam and say, “I don’t want that football style, please don’t do that, do this”, which is ridiculous. So instead of changing his philosophy, I changed him. Let him have this philosophy at other clubs and be successful there.
‘I don’t say that he won’t be successful. But I do say that I prefer losing 3-2 to drawing 0-0. Lose 3-2 and it means that next day you will win 4-2, 3-1. But if you are 0-0, 1-0, that means that you are not getting goalscoring positions enough. For me, clean sheets mean nothing. I don’t care about clean sheets. There is not even a Turkish translation for “clean sheets”. We don’t even have the word for it!’
The team recorded only three goalless draws in Rosenior’s last season and were the league’s ninth-highest scorers. There were no demands from fans for him to be dismissed and many say the injury to Liam Delap, with no obvious replacement, was why Hull missed the play-offs. Some Hull insiders retort that Rosenior missed out despite a strong squad.
Ilicali’s disastrous subsequent managerial hires – Tim Walters and Ruben Selles – made it hard for many fans to accept the decision last season, when Hull’s relegation fight went to the last day, and the owner’s name was no longer sung at the MKM Stadium. Ilicali puts last season’s subsequent struggles down to his all-consuming role at Fenerbahce.
‘This made too heavy pressure on me and I had to quit and give all focus to Hull City,’ he says. ‘That’s a rule in life. If you have a restaurant but don’t visit the restaurant, it’s not easy to make it successful.’
We’re about to hit the road to visit his football establishment. The stadium is 15 minutes away with Ilicali driving there in his new Rolls-Royce which he’s had custom-fitted with Hull’s amber trim. His wife Cagla is heading in the opposite direction for an afternoon in neighbouring Beverley, with its minster and cobbled streets.
Ilicali has had his new Rolls-Royce custom-fitted with Hull’s amber trim
Ilicali pauses briefly at his office, just inside the stadium, where he sacked Rosenior
He pauses briefly at his office, just inside the stadium, where he sacked Rosenior, before striding upstairs and along corridors, past images of Phil Brown and the club’s glorious first Premier League season of 2008-09, to the chairman’s lounge. He gazes out on the arena to which fans flooded back when he arrived with far greater ambition than his unpopular predecessors, the Allam family.
The club have lost money in each of the past four years, with wages tripling to the seventh-highest in the Championship, the wages at 142 per cent of turnover, and an operating loss of £42m offset by player sales. They have been through a two-window transfer embargo after late payment of money to Aston Villa over Louie Barry’s loan – the result of a misunderstanding about those costs not being wrapped into the ongoing financial arrangements between the two clubs, sources say.
‘I agree, it is risky,’ Ilicali says. ‘You have to take the biggest risks. That’s true. But also, unfortunately, it’s not a very fair system. Teams coming down with £200million parachute money when we have a limit of spending of, say, £25m. It’s not easy to fix that.
‘You have to sell some players at a profit to balance the spending, of course. But the EFL give you permission to make a loss of £40m over three years – and if you lose that £40m, it will make you hundreds of millions in future if you get promoted.’
You really cannot knock the ambition and aspiration. It’s infectious. He is highly likeable and has put the spring back in the step of this place.
Since he’s been even more dynamic in the entertainment business than Cowell – whom he’s met three times and took advice from on when launching the Turkish Britain’s Got Talent – it’s tempting to think that he could bring some of the same film-making to Hull that has funded Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s journey up the leagues at Championship play-off rivals Wrexham.
‘No,’ Ilicali says. ‘Those guys are American heavyweights so they can make what they want. The American economy is 50 times bigger than Turkey. If I was American, I could do three times more.
‘The secret of great TV is making shows that women watch. How many will want to watch a Hull City TV series? I don’t know.’
At the club’s training ground Ilicali strides into the team restaurant with a jocular conversation with the players
Hull City’s manager Sergej Jakirović (second right) with his coaching staff at the club’s training ground
His commercial vision includes trying to turn more children into lifelong Hull fans, with memberships at £4 per month for juniors aged 2-10, and he frequently references Leicester City as a side who ‘showed things are not impossible’.
But we are speaking in the week in which Leicester’s points deduction has demonstrated how journeys to the Premier League under foreign ownership can sour.
We’re back on the road, heading through the rush-hour traffic to Hull’s modest training ground in rural Cottingham, where Ilicali strides into the team restaurant and into jocular conversation with the players, who are eating chicken, potatoes and broccoli before driving to the stadium for the match with Watford which could take them second in the table.
He meets the club’s Bosnian manager Sergej Jakirović who, against all expectation, has taken Hull from relegation prospects to promotion candidates.
He’d noticed the way Jakirović had done the same at Turkish top-flight side Kayserispor, after success in the Bosnian and Croatian leagues.
‘I saw he was successful with teams that dominate and a team at risk of relegation, with possession football and counter-attacking football,’ says Ilicali. ‘He wasn’t devoted to one style.’
It’s 6pm when we leave the training ground, early enough to call in at the Botanic pub, as Ilicali often does, en route to the stadium. There’s no fanfare about his arrival in a place where supporters are gathering.
He drinks a coke at the bar with landlord Shaun Fitzgerald, while Mrs Ilicali, who is back with us, speaks to fans.
It’s 6pm on match day and Ilicali visits the Botanic pub, as he often does, en route to the stadium
Ilicali mingles with supporters but there’s no fanfare about his arrival. He drinks a Coke at the bar with the landlord
And poses for pictures with young supporters. His commercial vision includes trying to turn more children into lifelong Hull fans, with memberships at £4 per month for juniors aged 2-10
Almost everyone here seems to have experienced the largesse of Ilicali, who flies groups of fans out to Turkey each winter at his own expense on a jet (Hull City livery again) as part of his attempts to introduce them to his country and engender a sense of community.
Fitzgerald feels that Ilicali’s ‘personality’ as much as his money, has put the club back on the map. ‘We’re seeing energy again and he’s dragging the club along, taking it up,’ he says.
It’s a bitterly cold night at the stadium and the warmth of the club shop is welcome. Behind Ilicali, who is assessing the club’s merchandise – now manufactured in Turkey – Rosenior pops up on the TV screens, as Sky Sports interview him before Chelsea’s League Cup semi-final second leg against Arsenal.
Watford have arrived here without a manager so there’s general optimism about a fifth consecutive Hull win. There’s immediate evidence of Hull’s prowess in the loan market – a necessity during the transfer embargo – as Yu Hirakawa, newly arrived from Bristol City, threatens.
But Watford are physical, hard to break down in relentless rain and a frustrated rendition of ‘come on City’ strikes up. A moribund game concludes 0-0 – that very scoreline that the Hull owner hates.
‘Watford are a strong side. Physical players. One of the better we’ve played,’ he reflects at the end.
Four days later, there will be another setback in the push for automatic promotion – a 3-2 home defeat to Bristol City in a match twice delayed by the presence of a squirrel on the pitch.
More proof of the unremitting madness and unpredictability of the Championship. Ilicali is home at his place near the river by midnight, looking forward now, he says, to welcoming Rosenior, an individual who evidently bears no grudge for his sacking.
The owner watches his Hull side take on Watford from his box in the chairman’s lounge. The match finishes goalless, the scoreline he so detests
‘Liam called me when we were in big crisis last season,’ Ilicali says ‘He told me, “My heart is with you.” He has a good heart. I always felt he had a good heart’
‘Liam called me a few weeks ago and when we were in big crisis last season, he told me, “My heart is with you,”’ the owner relates. ‘He has a good heart. I always felt he had a good heart.’
Defeating Chelsea would be vindication for that decision Ilicali took, though reaching the Premier League is the definitive way to demonstrate that Hull have upgraded on Rosenior.
‘Of course, real success would be reaching the Premier League,’ he says. ‘And after the Premier League, go to Europe. This is not something impossible.
‘If you make everything correct and have full-focus concentration, there is a way to represent England in European competitions with Hull City. This is our aim.’