Hull City / The Athletic: A thread

What an absolute bunch of clowns at that club. The fans deserve better.

End of thread.

Ok, no, not end of thread.

To me, this is the greatest football club cock-up since Chesterfield's raffle. I can't just leave it there.

The sheer size and scope of this unmitigated disaster leaves me standing in awe. Let's have a look at the whole situation.

Firstly, the Athletic have every right to chase up a story of this nature and followed good practice in affording Hull the opportunity to quote.

Hull benefit from the news cycle, the rumour mill and the gossip column. Most of the time this works in a club's favour.

The response (before we even get to the redactions) was childish.

The Athletic afforded Hull 3 days to comment. This is plenty of time. Hull as an organisation WORKS WEEKENDS.

Their executives work weekends. Their media team works weekends.

I have no idea why they decided to publish either the enquiry or the response. Sometimes, yes you can get ahead of a story and manage it carefully.

This wasn't one of those times.

Now I obviously don't know how accurate the Athletic's claims are. But the enquiry seemed well researched and heavy on specifics. It seems like the journalist has spent plenty of time trying to get their facts straight.

This document was not cobbled together in ten minutes.

And then we arrive at.... The redactions. Oh boy.

Hull are major English sporting institution with thousands and thousands of fans.

Publishing a "redacted" document like that is just asking for trouble. And in those circumstances, if you're going to publish a document like that, you best have it watertight.

You best have typed it up again yourself, by hand. Then printed it out and photocopied it. Then uploaded again using the worst scanner in the office. THEN it may be secure.

To be so cavalier with the private financial details of your emoyees (whether the Athletic got them correct or not) is unforgivable. It's also probably a massive GDPR breach.

But what I personally find most offensive is that the club went through some lengths to protect the privacy of their own employees, such privacy was not afforded to Geoff Bielby, the Chair of the Supporters Trust.

For daring to speak about the club, Geoff unwittingly finds himself in the centre of a major national sporting story.

How low, just how fucking low, do you have to stoop to do this to your own supporters? Shameful.

It's another dismal entry in the already huge chronicle of the Allam's terrible ownership of Hull City.

I feel for the fans, truly I do.

End of thread, for real this time.