The Tigers want to bring the academy to the MKM Stadium site
Hull City’s hopes of developing the MKM Stadium site remain under discussion, with the club set to hold another pre-application planning meeting in mid-October in the hope of making significant progress.
Sporting Director Jared Dublin says the ambition remains to construct an academy site at the club’s stadium and hopes major steps forward can be taken before Christmas.
As it stands, the ball remains firmly in the club’s court over formalising plans and generating the finance that would see their plans come to fruition.
City bosses will host an informal discussion with planning officers to discuss the viability of the project. From there, the club must decide to move forward with formal planning permission, which would then become public.
Currently, the club’s academy operates out of Bishop Burton College, a shared facility, but Dublin hopes progress will be made in the next few weeks.
“We have a pre-planning meeting in November, which I think will tell us our next steps, so until then, we’re still waiting for the feedback on our pitch and what it looks like,” Dublin told Hull Live.
“The ambition, I’ll be totally honest, is to bring the academy to the stadium; that is the idea. If we can deliver upon that within our financial means, that’s what we want to do and go from three sites to two, that’d be great. Whether or not there’s a further development, time will tell.
“We have a long way to go, but we want to improve that element for the academy. Richard (Naylor) and the boys have been fantastic with regards to delivering players for Sergej, such as Nathan Tinsdale and Stan Ashbee, and obviously Brownie (Pharrel Brown) in pre-season had a fantastic spell and showed the fans hopefully what they can expect to see from him if his progression continues.
“We want to do better by them in terms of a facility standpoint, and that will take investment, but we’ll see where the council and the pre-planning process take us.”
Where the money comes from to improve the infrastructure is the key question fans have been asking, and Dublin says it would be a combination of Acun Ilicali’s reserves and sponsorship.
“Part of it will be sponsorship, you have academies that are sponsored by external companies all the time. Part of that comes from the owner and, obviously, his funding. He’s put in quite a bit of money before my time into this club, and he continues to back the club in its progression.
“He’s made it clear that he wants this to happen as well, so it’s about putting together the right pieces of the puzzle, financially speaking, to make that happen, but getting the green light for what we’re looking to do in terms of the pitches and the infrastructure marries up for the council.”
City also continue to make improvements to the first team training site at Cottingham, with a flurry of changes made in recent months to make it more accommodating for players.
“Oh, it’s gonna continue,” he said of the training ground improvements. “I think at the end of last season, the big thing that I walked away and spoke to Joe Clutterbuck and Sam Vale, who’s head of operations, is we want the players to come back and feel different.
“We just didn’t want the same, so something as small as the reception or painting when the players walk in or even the astro. It was a small thing, but I was just a pain about the astros.
“I said astro the bit in between the containers so they can do a bit of futsal or do a bit of tech ball or whatever they want to do, and make it feel more like a training ground. I think we’ve accomplished that.
“What they’ve done, and credit to Mustafa (Yokes) and the chairman for the players’ lounge, is a fantastic setup. It’s beautiful, and to make this a more homely training ground environment, not just home because of the people, but because of the infrastructure itself, feels a bit more of an elite performance environment.
“We’ve invested in the racks in the gym to improve that for actual performance. Things that people don’t see but the players saw, and the last bit was redoing the dressing room at the stadium.
“It was a big thing that when I came into post, it was we’ve got to find a way to do it and find the timing to do it, so when the players came back, they didn’t even know what was happening, so they can feel that we’re backing them to the hilt or at least to the best of our ability.”
You can listen to the full interview with Jared Dublin right here
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