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hull 1000x500Burnley kick off a third Premier League season for the club tomorrow with a home game against Swansea City. Unfortunately the close season has met with a high level of negativity due to the inability to get new signings over the line, but spare a thought for the supporters of Hull City this morning who remain at war with their owners.

Things haven’t been too good at the KC between them for some time and relations between the supporters and the Allam family are now at an all time low.

It all seemed to start with owner Assem Allam wanting to drop the name City from the club’s name and replace it with Tigers. It might seem trivial to some, and Tigers is their nickname, but a club name is a club name and I would fight tooth and nail if anyone came in trying to change ours.

That battle was won and the club remains as Hull City but the next stunt was to scrap season tickets and replace them with a membership scheme. When I first saw this, to be honest, I couldn’t see much difference but later learned that concessions for young and old were removed and some supporters lost their seats, for many the seats they’d had since the stadium was built.

That’s another one I could never be happy with. I’m just about to embark on my 21st season in the same seat at the Turf, a seat I’ve held since the opening of the Longside stand in 1996, and, for good measure, this will be my last adult season ticket so I don’t want any concession removing stunt coming in at Burnley.

Despite all this, they won promotion back to the Premier League, a fifth season in the top flight for them out of the last nine seasons, but worse was to follow when manager Steve Bruce said he’d had enough of Assem’s son Ehab who is now running the club and promptly walked out. One day before the first game he has not been replaced with former Claret Micky Phelan still in temporary charge.

Their opening day game is against champions Leicester at home and in front of the television cameras. A day for celebration you might think, but not so as tomorrow will see big demonstrations from the Hull fans both before and during the game.

A spokesman said: “The aim of what we’re encouraging now is to highlight for the TV cameras how upset City fans are, and bring attention to the various issues we have with the Allams’ ownership of the club, such as the detestable pricing out of children, seniors and the disabled from attending matches, forced seat moves and the ongoing obsession at the club with eradicating any reference to the word ‘City’.”

An ‘Allam Out’ march before the game will be followed by a demonstration outside. Thousands of red cards and placards with the simple word ‘NO’ have been produced and fans are asked to display them as the teams come out.

There will also be a chant of ‘City Till I Die’ starting after 19 minutes and 4 seconds, a reference to the founding of the club in 1904.

What an absolute mess – we saw something on a similar scale at Charlton on the last day of last season.

We really should be careful what we wish for. We are still very much Burnley Football Club and we still get to choose our seat with seniors and kids getting reduced prices. As much as we might not be totally happy with how things have gone this summer, we still have one hell of a lot to be thankful for.

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