At Huddersfield Town’s training ground this summer, the club’s local-born chairman, Dean Hoyle, said it was important to him to tackle the Premier League the Yorkshire way. Asked what that meant, he replied: “By not spending any money.” He laughed to show he was joking; then he ensured the club’s actions showed what he really meant.
Huddersfield, absent from the top flight for 45 years, have prepared for the Premier League about as well as any club could. It turns out that not spending any money meant spending an unprecedented amount, more than £30m in a summer when Huddersfield have broken their transfer record four times. It also meant much more than that. Because while money has helped, it has not been the driver of Huddersfield’s rise.
The club have never forked out such sums but even those outlays are modest in comparison to those of most rivals in the Premier League, just as last season’s spending was paltry relative to that of many Championship opponents. Huddersfield’s success is, above all, a footballing and human triumph, a reward for intelligence, talent and wholesome solidarity. Corny as that may sound in an era of club-branded ketchup and £100m, transfers, Huddersfield are showcasing the value of certain intangible assets.
From Hoyle to David Wagner, to the manager’s backroom staff, to the players and to the fans, everyone at Huddersfield seems in sync. “Here I can be exactly the man I am as a person and a manager,” said Wagner after signing a new contract in July despite interest from grander clubs. “I know it is not like that everywhere.” Rafael Benítez would agree.
The contrast in the moods at Huddersfield and at the club they host on Sunday, Newcastle United, is stark. The clubs came up together but if both survive this season it will, in one case, be thanks to a powerful synergy, in the other despite internal dysfunctions.
The contrast starts with the clubs’ owners. Hoyle and his Newcastle counterpart, Mike Ashley, are English, in their 50s and successful businessmen, but they differ in most of the things that matter to their clubs’ fans. Above all, they differ in their contributions to their clubs’ culture, the bonds between the people who go there to work or to worship.
Newcastle still play in front of 52,000 supporters every home game but many of them complain about being treated like gullible customers. There will be no such grumbling from the nearly 24,000 Huddersfield supporters who will help fill the John Smith’s Stadium, especially not from the 4,400 of them whose season tickets for this campaign cost £100, Hoyle having honoured a promise he made to diehards seven years ago, when Huddersfield were bandwagon-free.
Even two seasons ago, before the transformative arrival of Wagner, Huddersfield’s ground was seldom more than half-full. This summer, by contrast, the club sold the highest number of season tickets in their history (20,192) and could have sold more but instead decided to keep seats available for general sale so that as many other fans as possible can attend at least one match this season (mind you, a quirky effect of Huddersfield’s promotion is that their capacity is lower this season because of alterations the club have had to make to meet Premier League requirements, 300 seats having been sacrificed to make room for a gantry that can fit 32 cameras crews rather than six).
Hoyle’s attitude is informed by being a fan himself thanks, as it happens, to a Geordie. One of the first people he rang after his team achieved promotion by beating Reading at Wembley in May was Mick Buxton, the Corbridge native who was manager of Huddersfield at the end of the 1978-79 season, when a 12-year-old Hoyle attended his first match at the club’s old Leeds Road ground. Huddersfield were in the old Fourth Division but Buxton guided them to the third tier the following year with a swashbuckling style and laid the foundation for the club’s eventual return to the top flight, eight years after Hoyle had used some of the riches earned from a greetings card business to buy his boyhood club.
“In years to come people will say their idol is Wagner but for me it was Mick Buxton,” said Hoyle. “I rung him up and I said: ‘Mick, thank you very much.’ He said: ‘Why, what have I done?’ And I said: ‘If it wasn’t for you getting me hooked in ’79, I would never have had the best day of my life [at Wembley].’ For a Geordie he was quite touched.”
No matter what fans have thought about Hoyle’s decisions during his ownership, no one has doubted he has Huddersfield’s best interests at heart. Ashley’s motivations at Newcastle, meanwhile, remain a riddle 10 years after he bought the club.
Huddersfield fans have always been able to find out what is going through Hoyle’s mind simply be asking him: the chairman holds regular Q&A sessions with supporters, most recently on Thursday at the club’s training ground. Ashley used to fraternise with Newcastle fans in the early days of his reign, swigging drinks with them in the town and appearing, at least once, on the terraces. But those days are long gone and now his communication has been almost entirely cut off, not only with fans but also with the media.
Curiously, he rarely even speaks to his manager. Benítez, who, unlike Wagner, believes his squad is far from complete and feels shortchanged in terms of transfer funds, has had one face-to-face conversation with his chairman this year.
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