The spendthrift Tigers have bet everything on staying up, a risk their prudent rivals refused to take
Adam Pearson’s voice turned wistful. “Burnley are a very well run club,” said Hull City’s chairman. “They’ve managed their budget very cleverly and very sensibly.”
It was mid-March and Pearson, who had just put his manager, Phil Brown, on gardening leave, replacing him with Iain Dowie, was playing down grim warnings from Deloitte, Hull’s auditors. The accountancy firm was predicting relegation would create a £21m shortfall but Hull’s chairman, charged with re-balancing the books after his predecessor Paul Duffen’s abrupt winter departure, denied his club faced financial calamity.
One win, one draw, four defeats and several long nights spent poring over assorted sets of complex accounts later, Pearson has changed his tune and spent much of this week issuing scary prophecies of impending austerity at the KC Stadium. “Whether we survive in the Premier League or not the stark reality is that some very difficult days like ahead due to the financial situation,” he said today. It certainly does not help that Hull’s seven recognised strikers have, as Dowie keeps reminding everyone, managed to score nine goals between them all season. Or that those forwards collectively command £200,000 a week.
Pearson will not care to reflect that, across the Pennines in Burnley, no player earns more than £15,000 a week and the past few days have seen architects busily finalising plans for a £15m redevelopment of Turf Moor. To be completed in time for the 2011-12 season it will incorporate an upmarket hotel and is forecast to generate a minimum £1m annual profit.
Like Hull, Burnley are in severe peril of relegation and if Pearson privately wonders whether he was right to opt for Dowie, Barry Kilby, his east Lancashire counterpart, arguably has cause to regret appointing Brian Laws as the replacement for the Bolton-bound Owen Coyle in January. Should West Ham beat Wigan at Upton Park tomorrow a home defeat against Liverpool on Sunday will relegate Burnley. Similarly, a West Ham victory combined with Sunderland winning at the KC today would leave Hull, whose goal difference is far inferior to Gianfranco Zola’s team, effectively consigned to the Championship.
After that the similarities end. “We won’t bet the ranch on staying up,” said Kilby last year. “I don’t want a disaster on my watch.” True to his word, Burnley’s chairman fixed the club’s weekly individual wage ceiling at £15,000 – by far the Premier League’s lowest. Over at the KC Stadium Pearson was absorbing the ramifications of Duffen’s decision to spend almost £40m of the club’s near £50m turnover on player remuneration.
Jimmy Bullard commands £45,000 per week and, under the terms of the three-and-a-half years remaining on his contract, is entitled to continue receiving that sum whichever division Hull play in. While Pearson may succeed in selling other higher earners such as Stephen Hunton this summer, Bullard’s appalling injury record dictates he will almost certainly be staying put.
Although at first glance Hull’s last published set of accounts looked reasonably healthy with £4.6m of bank debt, the club’s loan arrangements mean it has effectively mortgaged itself to the hilt, borrowing heavily against advanced Premier League income. Sources indicate the full extent of Hull’s liabilities is at least £25m.
While Pearson denied suggestions yesterday that the club had already received £10m of next season’s £16m parachute payment to be awarded by the Premier League in the event of relegation, it is not impossible that Russell Bartlett, the owner, might try to avoid the growing likelihood of Hull being placed in administration next season by asking for the advance of such parachute payments. Alternatively, he may attempt to renegotiate repayment arrangements with creditors.
“Of course the future’s very tricky, this club desperately needs to stay in the Premier League,” said Pearson, whose attack on Duffen’s regime in the match programme for last Wednesday’s 2-0 defeat against Aston Villa is understood to have severely strained his bond with Bartlett.
Another relationship at the KC, between Dowie and Amr Zaki, the temperamental Egypt striker Brown borrowed from Zamalek in January but who has failed to score a single goal, ended in acrimony today. Dowie told the recently injured Zaki he lacked acceptable fitness levels, his contract was terminated and the club would happily book him on the next available flight home to Cairo. Under the terms of the loan Hull had been paying the Egyptian’s wages in full.
It was the sort of arrangement Burnley would never have even contemplated. As Laws said last week: “If we go down, we won’t look back in anger.” If only Pearson could say the same.
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