An imposing set of black, remotely operated gates make the main entrance to Hull City’s training ground seem a formidable prospect. But the complex is set in the midst of suburban houses, with a lot of available upstairs windows, so is hardly spy-proof, and the club have decided they have better things to spend their money on than security guards patrolling the streets, looking for people doing suspicious things with cameras.
‘I think that sending two security guys to look around all the streets and the houses and the windows would just be a lot of attention that’s pointed in the wrong direction,’ says the club’s American director of football Jared Dublin, as the players who have spent most of this week not knowing which team they will be facing are put through their paces ahead of Saturday’s play-off final.
Hull are something of the forgotten club amid the raging controversy about Southampton’s cheating, which puts Middlesbrough into the final instead, though being overlooked is a predicament they’re well accustomed to here. Hull is a city of many exquisite gems, yet even one of its most famous sons, the poet Philip Larkin, called it ‘a dreary dump’.
When the season kicked off nine months back, the football club and their obscure, newly appointed Bosnian manager Sergej Jakirovic, were many people’s tip for the drop. They were hit with a two-window EFL transfer embargo just a month before the season began.
But if opposition interns armed with iPhones were allowable in football, then Hull would actually be a far more interesting club to spy on, given that they defied that setback and made a spectacular mockery of the data in the process. StatsPerform figures show Hull’s ‘expected goals differential’ – a measure of how many goals they would have been expected to score, minus how many they would have been expected to concede – was worse than every Championship side bar relegated Sheffield Wednesday this season.
Yet here they stand, potentially 90 minutes from the Premier League. ‘We’re certainly not the data darlings,’ Dublin admits. ‘And we seem to have been the busters of all the betting odds.’
Hull City were tireless in their pursuit of striker Oli McBurnie – and it has paid off handsomely
When the season kicked off nine months back, Hull and their obscure, newly appointed Bosnian manager Sergej Jakirovic, were many people’s tip for the drop
That embargo, imposed on the club for what they felt was a misunderstanding over a late payment to Aston Villa, left them with what Dublin describes as a ‘chip on our shoulder’. A resolution, as he puts it now, that: ‘We’re going to show them. We’re going to find a way, even with two hands tied behind our back. We’re going to fight.’ And they did.
Though the club could only bring in free agents or do loan deals with no fees or options to buy, they were already two months into the process of recruiting Oli McBurnie, the striker whose contract at Las Palmas, in Spain’s second tier, was running down. Dublin’s previous working relationship with the 29-year-old at Sheffield United, in the Premier League season which saw the Blades finish ninth under Chris Wilder, helped persuade him to join anyway.
Hull’s owner Acun Ilicali told Daily Mail Sport in February that McBurnie was ‘a gift from God’. To Dublin, a member of the Blades’ recruitment team back then, he was simply the new signing who rocked up in the canteen in a pink Stone Island tracksuit. ‘We thought, “That’s a centre forward!”’ he remembers. There were three months of such relentless messaging as Dublin tried to recruit McBurnie to Hull last spring that both individuals’ wives joked that there was a third person in the relationship. A tally of 17 goals and eight assists has made the Yorkshireman a cult figure on Humberside.
Other signings, like the hugely popular Joe Gelhardt on loan from Leeds and Amir Hadziahmetovic, a quiet but effective operator in midfield, also demonstrated that a transfer embargo can actually have benefits. ‘It’s part of the fuel,’ Dublin says. ‘It was like only being able to look at two aisles at Tesco but, if anything, it just narrows your focus. You’re not distracted by, “Here’s this player on deadline day who’s available for two million because of his parent club signing somebody else”.’
The American’s own route to Hull has also rather defied convention. He was a Berkeley graduate working in the venture capital and start-ups team at Google, living the tech life in San Francisco, before packing all that up to satisfy a desire to work in European football, studying business at Liverpool University before joining Sheffield United.
There are subsequently pockets of Google ethos in Hull’s little training ground. These include Hull City’s version of the ’20 per cent project’, dreamt up by Google’s Larry Page, who felt that a fifth of his employees’ working week should be spent in the company of people who are not in their own department, because coffee-machine and water-cooler conversations might spark ideas.
No one is suggesting that McBurnie and Gelhardt’s goals output is directly enhanced by conversations with Dave from accounts, but the cross-disciplinary interactions are evident at the Cottingham complex, which is no ordinary football place.
You would imagine that Dublin’s US tech background would make data key to Hull’s 12-month journey from relegation contenders to play-off finalists, and his MBA dissertation on an analytics approach to recruitment. Phil Brown, the first manager to steer Hull to the Premier League via the play-offs, was fascinated with Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s bestseller about the overachievement of baseball’s Oakland Athletics under metrics king Billy Beane. But Dublin, like the irrepressible Ilicali, feels that too much data obscures the vital human component, which over-performing Hull consider fundamental to reaching this weekend’s final.
‘There are things that data will never capture,’ he says. ‘We always want to get a live view because they’re not just players with event-driven data. They’re humans. They’re people. They have family lives.’
Hull’s owner Acun Ilicali (left), manager Sergej Jakirovic (centre) and sporting director Jared Dublin have transformed the club
‘There are things that data will never capture,’ Dublin says. ‘They’re not just players with event-driven data. They’re humans. They’re people. They have family lives’
Key to the process of bringing the best out of them has been Jakirovic’s assistant coach Dean Holden, who had been working with Turkish side Adana Demirspor before bringing his substantial Championship experience, and a capacity to know what make players tick, to the Balkan-dominated backroom team.
Out on the training ground on Tuesday, Holden is involved in an ‘attack and defend’ exercise in which a system of lines marked around the penalty area stipulate the place from which crosses and shots are most likely to yield goals.
‘If you decide to make a cross from here, by making an extra pass, the chances of scoring from that assist can go up five-fold,’ Holden explains, sketching a method which has its roots in some work Sean Dyche undertook years ago. The areas where Hull’s players are most encouraged to cross or shoot from are known as ‘The Pep Zone’ and ‘The Golden Zone’ and it’s clear that endless study of Guardiola’s method has helped inform Holden’s ideas.
‘When David Silva was playing, they would make a chance here and he can almost take a shot,’ Holden continues, still sketching. ‘But he doesn’t – he has to get to the Pep Zone first.’
Holden might be known as the biggest tea drinker in the Hull setup – he’ll get through up to 15 brews a day and is even partial to the organic Yorkshire Tea his wife enthuses about – but how Hull can optimize scoring opportunities is clearly his biggest obsession. There is a subtle difference between ‘xG cumulative’ – lots of low chance shots which all accumulate – and ones Hull create, which are generally better chances but less frequent.
All of which explains why Hull are such data busters. Equipped with the pace of Liam Miller and Mo Belloumi, who both run at 10 metres per second (22.4mph), the excellent delivery of both those players and left back Ryan Giles, allied to McBurnie and Gelhardt’s excellent finishing, they have established an immensely effective counter-attacking system – precise enough to ensure that the opportunities they create on the breakaway are big ones.
Boro created fractionally more big chances than them this season – 107 to Hull’s 103. But Hull ranked joint-third for xG per shot, behind only Sheffield United and Southampton, while Middlesbrough, whose big chances were not as big, ranked 16th. ‘We have killers in our front three or four,’ Dublin says. ‘That’s allowed us to ride a few waves in terms of riding our luck. When there’s a moment for us to put a crooked number on the scoreboard, we often do so, and that’s a big thing – because the game is about moments.’
The 1-0 win at Boro in late December was typical. Darko Gyabi converted a great opportunity, brilliantly supplied by Kyle Joseph from the ‘Pep Zone’ after 11 minutes, and then withstood a battery of chances.
So now, there is a fervent belief that they can return to the Premier League after an absence of nine years and take what would be a £200million golden ticket, factoring in future parachute payments. Dublin has already been researching what Hull would be up against in the Premier League, attending the Brentford v Crystal Palace game last Sunday.
There is a fervent belief that Hull can return to the Premier League after an absence of nine years and take what would be a £200million golden ticket
‘We have killers in our front three or four (including Lewis Koumas above),’ Dublin says. ‘That’s allowed us to ride a few waves in terms of riding our luck’
Among the fans, few want to talk about legal reprisals. ‘Litigation doesn’t sit right with me,’ says one. Another says: ‘Let’s just get on with the game’
At close quarters, the greater physical challenge is the most striking difference. ‘You see animals, physical animals, physical specimens,’ he says. ‘Obviously set-pieces will be a huge focus for us and it’s a question of “how can we bridge that gap, because we don’t have the money?”’
That golden Premier League season during his time at Bramall Lane, when the team finished ninth, must have given him good clues as to how you survive if promoted there? ‘That’s a bit of a secret sauce, I’ll be honest,’ Dublin says. ‘But there’s a confidence that can grow when you reach the Premier League. The first month and the realisation of how fast the Premier League is, how athletic it is, how “killer” it is, is shocking. Feeling you can survive there builds confidence.’
Of course, no one saw this denouement being steeped in controversy. When we meet on Tuesday, Dublin, Holden and all the staff are still utterly convinced they will face Southampton. Senior figures at the club have spoken to lawyers and in impromptu interviews on Thursday, Ilicali said he believes Hull have a case to be granted automatic promotion.
But out across Hull, you’ll find few wanting to talk about legal reprisals. ‘Litigation doesn’t sit right with me,’ says one fan. Another, at Hepworth’s Arcade, one of the city’s hidden jewels, says: ‘Let’s get on with the game and if we don’t win, then we won’t have deserved to.’
You suspect that most who gather around the training ground coffee machine and water cooler are wishing the legal talk away, too. ‘We focus until we’re told otherwise, and then we’ll see what happens after that,’ Dublin says. ‘But we don’t want any excuses. We don’t want to be walking away from Saturday thinking, “Oh well, without this or that we might have won it”. That’s not what’s brought us to this moment.’
