Steve Bruce’s future as Hull City boss is in doubt despite the club winning promotion
On Saturday the fact that Hull defeated Sheffield Wednesday 1-0 in the Championship play-off was slightly overshadowed by the Champions League final.
However, the game was a massive one and the Tigers will be playing Premier League once again next season.
Despite the fact that boss Steve Bruce led the side from Humberside to promotion his position is under-threat. New investors reported to be from the USA are set to buy the club and it seems Bruce fears the worse for his future.
New owners means new broom
Bruce seems very glum on his future and told the Daily Mail: ‘If there is a takeover then I’ll need to know about it because a takeover usually means a new broom,
‘I don’t know if I am staying. I’ll have a conversation with the owner. I still haven’t 100-per-cent decided.
‘I’m weary. It’s been long and difficult for many, many reasons. But I’ll sit down with the powers that be and see where the club wants to go, and see what it wants to do. I’ve got to make sure that we’re equipped, and then we’ll see.’
Bruce is a decent manager
Steve Bruce is not everybody’s cup of tea when it comes to managers. He is regarded by most as a good solid English boss. Flamboyant former-Blackpool boss Ian Holloway recently claimed that Bruce should have been in the running for the Manchester United job. I think Ollie should lay off the drugs.
It was a slight over exaggeration to say that Bruce deserves to manage United, but he has mostly done a good job wherever he has managed. He has won promotion to the Premier League four times, twice with the Tigers, so he is not a terrible boss.
Unfortunately the Tigers were also relegated under the former-Birmingham boss. He spent quite a bit of money comparatively speaking when we are talking about Hull, who are not a club who traditionally have spent big, simply because they have not usually had the resources to do so.
Bruce did guide the Tigers to an immediate return to the top-flight, albeit it through the play-offs. They were in the picture for automatic promotion for a good while, but a poor run of form saw them drop to fourth in the table towards the end of the campaign.
It is hard to see Bruce as anything other than a bottom half of the table Premier League boss, because that’s where his team occupy most their time. His teams never seem to challenge at the top end of the top-flight table and that will always go against him.
Offers some stability for the future
Hull has been a club in flux since the arrival of current owner Assem Allam. Bruce is probably the only person at the club that has given it a touch of stability. The Tigers need some stability as they head back into the Premier League.
They are currently one of the favourites to go down, but if anybody fancies a flutter on the Tigers repeating Leicester’s feat of winning the title they are odds of just 1500/1!
More likely City will be fighting for their lives at the other end of the top-flight table next season. Bruce already has the experience of being relegated with the club and will not want a repeat of that next season.
However, it seems like Bruce has already accepted that he will not have a chance to manage Hull in the Premier League next season. Maybe the new investors will realise that Bruce has been the only thing that has kept Hull steady in recent years.
The Tigers may have been relegated under the former-United centre-back, but he kept together the vast majority of the team that were relegated and made it back to the top-flight from a very difficult league.
He deserves credit for the club winning promotion this season, but maybe Hull’s owners will want to move the club in a different direction. If Bruce does leave Hull this summer there will be no shortage of offers for the experienced boss, whether he will be managing in the top-flight next season remains to be seen though.
Will Steve Bruce be managing Hull next season?
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