With the gap between the Championship and the Premier League getting wider with each passing season, newly promoted teams are finding it harder and harder to conjure up enough points to maintain their place in England’s top league. In fact, in every season except 2001–02 at least one Premier League newcomer has been relegated back to the Football League.
Founded in 1904, Hull City will, for the first time in their history participate in the top tier of English football and are clearly intent on staying there. Led by their superb young manager Phil Brown, The Tigers are making quite a statement with their constant activity in the transfer market. Having already signed three quality players in George Boateng, Geovanni and Bernard Mendy, they have been linked with a whole host of other players that will improve on their current squad: Peter Halmosi, Christian Vieri, Stelios Giannakapoulos, Seyi Olofinjana, Emile Mpenza, David Nugent, Michael Dawson, Ricardo Rocha (loan), Scott Carson and Delron Buckley. Realizing they currently do not have the squad to cut it in the Premiership, Hull are rightly wasting no time in building a capable squad for their new campaign.
Too often is the case where newly promoted teams fail to add any significant quality to the team and are later made to pay for this, an example of this would be last years Derby County, who upon promotion through the playoffs, failed to make any real effort in the off-season to sign players of Premiership ability. Only in January, where they were all but down, did they make a last-ditch attempt of rescuing their dying season by signing a few ‘decent’ players, such as Robbie Savage, Hossam Ghaly and Laurent Robert but it was too little too late for the Rams.
Hull City are clearly a club that do not want to leave things to chance and are proving to be an exciting proposition in this year’s pre-season with their ambitious approach, one can only respect manager Phil Brown and chairman Paul Duffen for this.