How much Acun Ilicali bought Hull City for as Tigers sale debated | OneFootball

The costs of relegation will be substantial, should Hull City be relegated this weekend - but how much did Acun Ilicali buy the club for?

Hull City travel to Portsmouth on Sunday lunchtime needing at least a point to have a chance of avoiding relegation from the Championship, and this is prompting speculation over whether the club's owner, Acun Ilicali, might be tempted to sell the club after three years.

The costs of relegation from the Championship are nowhere near as great as they are from the Premier League, but they can still be considerable. But how much did Ilicali pay for the club in the first place, how much has been lost since then, and what might be the costs of failing to stay up this weekend?

Acun Ilicali's arrival at the MKM Stadium in January 2022 was warmly greeted by supporters after years of conflict under Hull's previous owners, the Allam family, who took the club into the top flight for only the second time in their history in 2016 but who also enraged supporters with their unilateral decision to rebrand the club as "Hull Tigers" or "Hull City Tigers".

Ilicali's reign has been a mixed one to this stage. The Turkish media mogul has long been extremely popular among certain supporters and his investment into the playing squad cannot be contested, but concerns over the club's strategy and recruitment have both been raised this season.

The decision to sack Liam Rosenior after narrowly missing out on a play-off finish last season was an unpopular one, too, and one which has spectacularly backfired ever since.

Meanwhile, Football League World's resident City fan pundit, Ryan Frankish, is in favour of Ilicali but has expressed doubts about whether he will want to continue owning the club if relegation to League One is sealed on Saturday afternoon.

With that in mind, FLW has taken a look at how much Ilicali's purchase of the club was reportedly worth.

The costs don't end when the sale of a club is completed

Ilicali, who runs global production company Acun Medya, was reported by the Daily Mail to have paid £30m for Hull when he purchased it. But the costs didn't stop there. In pursuit of a place in the Premier League and with the added complication of parachute payments distorting income across the division, the majority of Championship clubs run at a substantial loss, with spending on wages alone out-stripping income.

This requires owners to ultimately fund those losses, though this wasn't always the case with Hull City.

The first set of published accounts following the takeover saw the club make a pre-tax profit of £13.9m, a reflection of the fact that the Allams, for all their many faults, had left the club in a reasonably good financial position.

The same could not be said for the following season, when the club posted losses of £5.3m and a wage bill increase of 86%. And things deteriorated still further when the accounts for the 2023/24 season were published at the end of last year. Losses had increased to £18.8m and the wage bill had spiraled by another 25%.

Relegation from the Championship is expensive

The losses felt when a club falls from the Premier League to the Championship are well known, but those incurred as a result of dropping from the Championship into League One can also have an extremely negative effect. The exact numbers will vary from specific club to specific, but there is a big drop-off in broadcasting revenue between these two divisions.

Wales Online recently explained this in relation to Cardiff City's now confirmed relegation, saying that the difference between the two divisions is that clubs receive "between £9.5m and £12.5m" in the Championship, and just "£2m to £2.4m" in the lower of the two.

That may not sound like a lot in comparison with the tens of millions of pounds that seem to be thrown around like confetti in the Premier League, but at this level it really does count. Furthermore, such losses come in addition to other losses, such as a reduction in the value of commercial deals and sponsorship deals, as well as lower match-day revenues.

Tensions at the MKM Stadium may be starting to rise again

There are certain signs that all is not well behind the scenes at a football club, and a failure to pay players on time is definitely a potential red flag.

Yet this is exactly what has happened this week at Hull, with reports that wages have been delayed.

This could have just been a temporary embarrassment for the club, but when coupled with the possibility of imminent relegation, the potential for alarm bells to start ringing is clear.

Ilicali needs to decide whether to stick or twist

Acun Ilicali is an extremely wealthy man and can afford to fund such losses, but the confirmation of wages being paid late at the end of April, just a few days before such an important game as their trip to Fratton Park on Sunday, is hardly the sort of news that fans will have been wanting to hear. The players need to be completely focused on the task at hand.

And all of this leaves Ilicali with something of a dilemma.

The financial losses are only likely to get worse, and the honeymoon that followed his arrival at Hull City is certainly over.

Selling the club would be an easy way out for him, but to do so without making a massive loss overall would be very difficult. The club are tenants at the MKM Stadium, which significantly lowers their market value, while relegation would only depress that value still further.