‘The Premier League is not the only target for our beautiful club’

The interview is set up at two hours’ notice, prior engagements tossed out the window as diaries are scrambled to make it work.

Acun Ilicali, the charismatic media mogul who is also the owner of high-flying Championship side Hull City, is a busy man. His schedule, he explains, is “like something out of science fiction” as he juggles the demands of running Turkey’s biggest media company with starring in some of the shows his company produces. His workdays never end before midnight.

“With me, everything has to be at short notice,” he says by way of an opening gambit.

He’s not wrong. On Tuesday Ilicali chartered his private Bombardier jet to visit a club in Europe that he hopes will become part of a multi-club network run by his company Acun Medya.

That purchase is “very close”, he says, and will be followed by a third club – most likely based in Africa – which will form a production line of the best talent to benefit Hull, who will sit at the top of the structure and have ambitions of becoming an established Premier League club.

Later in the interview he glances at his phone. We’ve been chatting for around 40 minutes and in that time he’s collected 105 unanswered WhatsApp messages and “100 of them are about business”.

So, the question is: just what motivated him to add a football club jostling for position in one of the most competitive leagues in the world to his commitments?

“Do you remember Michael Jordan, when he finished his basketball career and he started playing baseball?” he asks i over a Zoom call from his office in Istanbul.

“Everyone was shocked. Well, my situation is very similar – in the media business I came to a point where I’d achieved everything I was dreaming of. I went from zero to hero.

“We’re the number one channel in Turkey, the number one Turkish streaming platform, we are the most successful international production company from Turkey. Now I feel like I’m starting a new business from zero and I cannot explain how exciting this is for me.

“I’m living my time of life like I started my media business. I feel the same happy days, I’m happy with small wins now, with small successes I’m very happy.

“The target is the same as it was in media. To make history, to write football history and the best way to do it is in England because no-one can debate the Premier League is top of the world. It’s the NBA of football. That’s why I want to show my skills in British football.”

It is easy to be cynical about the motivation of outsiders investing in English football clubs, but Ilicali insists return on his investment is simply not being considered. Instead Ilicali talks more like a supporter, of the burden of shouldering a city’s expectations, of creating a front foot team fans want to watch and of “making people happy”.

Ilicali had a list of five English clubs he wanted to buy but says he immediately fell in love with Hull, the first club he visited, who were locked in an unhappy union with previous owners the Allam family.

We hear much about the stream of sorry custodians who have run down some of the country’s most cherished lower league clubs but less about those, like Ilicali, who arrive with good intentions, ready to burnish reputations and rebuild.

“Nothing is based on financial calculations,” he says. “It is like when I bought my private plane. I asked my pilot about buying it and he said to me ‘Acun, if you’re calculating the money don’t buy a private jet’. It’s the same with a football club, don’t think about money.

“Any financial calculation won’t make you happy but a private jet changes your life and a football club is the same. In any calculation you cannot put down on paper that you’ll make money. It’s a passion. A jet is a luxury and a football club is the same. It gives you a happiness money can’t buy.

“For me there’s zero calculation about money. That doesn’t mean we don’t think or we’re not reasonable with money, though. And by the way, it’s going much more positively (financially) than we thought it would.”

In an era of private equity firms and nation states acquiring clubs those words feel jarring, but Ilicali has backed up those warm words with financial and emotional investment.

He estimates he’ll attend 30-35 games this season, fitting trips in between filming Survivor and Turkey’s Got Talent in the Dominican Republic and Istanbul. And he is certainly hands on, occupying a hybrid role of owner and co-director of football and spending at least an hour a day in meetings about club matters.

Over the summer he spent six weeks working on a marquee deal to sign Aston Villa’s rising star Jaden Philogene, persuading the player to commit while ironing out the logistics of a complicated transfer.

“It felt like running an obstacle course. It was like running 1,500m over water, over hurdles – every day there was a new problem that made me tired,” he says.

“The hardest point has been transferring talents to the team. I have been involved with Fenerbahce in Turkey for the last five or six years, I’ve been very close with the president.

“With Fenerbahce, if they want a player they buy him. Here you want a player and he has eight or nine more options and they may be better than yours. But when it succeeds it is worth it. Seeing Jaden in the team at Hull and performing well, I’m so proud.”

It is approaching two years since he completed his protracted takeover of the Tigers. The bulk of year one was spent staving off relegation to League One – “a very dangerous league,” Ilicali says – but a turning point arrived with the appointment of manager Liam Rosenior 12 months ago.

Over a Zoom interview from Los Angeles he was impressed by Rosenior’s clear vision for how Hull should play, of the work that had gone into preparing for his coaching career and of a commitment to play attractive, attacking football.

“Everything we talked about with him, everything we dreamed of, everything we planned has begun to happen,” he says.

“If you asked me to summarise everything that’s happened in the last year in one word it would be ‘progress’.”

His supporters seem to agree. The club’s average attendance has soared from around 12,000 when Ilicali took over to in excess of 21,000 this season, a combination of affordable tickets and engaging the fanbase paying dividends.

“I’m very proud of this. The beautiful people of Hull show love to me every time I go to the stadium and this love and this belief will take us higher and higher,” he says.

“And also a lot of praise has to go to Liam for creating a team that people want to watch.”

They currently sit eighth in an ultra-competitive Championship, well poised for a tilt at the play-offs, but their aim is to build a stable club rather than engage in a race to the top.

“The Premier League is not the only target for a beautiful club like ours,” he says.

“We don’t know if we’ll be happy with the Premier League, sometimes you get there by chance or luck and you’re not ready. You just get relegated straight away and it becomes a nightmare, which has already happened to this club.

“We are to always think about being better and better. That can take you to top six, top eight or top 10 in this league. Top six would be very good for us and it’s a big possibility for us. We will see, if we’re there we will deserve it. If we don’t do it, we’re not ready for it.”

In the summer Hull delayed their transfer business to get the right players and recruitment was good. Ilicali confirms there will be further investment in the New Year but it will be targeted.

“January will not be a very, very hard period,” he says. “We are focused on making two transfers, maybe three at most. When it’s less numbers, it’s easier to get them because this time we will have more options.

“We will try our best to add some players to the team but I’m very satisfied with the quality of the team.”

Wider investment in the training ground and projects around the stadium is also in the works but it is Ilicali’s plan for a multi-club model that is intriguing.

“My business is a media production company but I want to make production of young football talent and try to get the best talents as much as I can,” he explains.

“I want to make a greater, 360-degree football operation. We’re very close to buying another club.

“On Tuesday morning I flew somewhere for a meeting and to try and buy a club that will be very useful to us to test all the good talents that we are finding all around the club.

“My team have the power to bring all the best talents in the world but how can I bring three strikers to Hull for example? It’s impossible. So that is why you have another club.”

When Ilicali first moved for Hull, he was dubbed the “Turkish Simon Cowell” on account of his presence as a judge on Turkey’s Got Talent. It’s a moniker he’s comfortable with – he knows and likes Cowell – but there’s no wish to emulate him as the pantomime villain.

“You have to understand how much we care about Hull City,” he says.

“It is small details. We moved the away fans in the stadium because I wanted our fans behind my goalkeeper for 90 minutes.

“When there were problems with trains for away fans we supported them by putting on travel. I was a fan, I was going to stadiums, I was sleeping in front of stadiums as a kid. I know how it feels to be a fan. That’s what I came from.

“My aim is to make people happy. I will never do something if people aren’t happy. When I was (previously) a TV reporter I was the best reporter but that was because my boss made me happy all the time.

“I was a crazy reporter. I could make the best news, all of Turkey was watching my news before I made my own show but that has stuck with me, being a good boss, a good person.

“My aim is to be there for all of my players. I don’t want to mention his name but one of my players stayed in my house for 15 days. I was not there so I gave my house to him while he was trying to find another house. I gave my plane to another player one time.

“This type of thing, when you touch people and it’s coming from your heart they feel more and more close to you. I can say they perform more.

“I lost my parents a long time ago but what they taught me is to make people happy because when you do this, they make you happy. That is my aim in life.”