Check out the Premier League odds for the upcoming season, and it’s clear that expectations for Hull City’s first season back in the top flight in a decade aren’t lofty. Some things never change.

Just ask Phil Brown, the manager who took them into the Premier League for the first time in the club’s history back in 2008-09 and somehow managed to keep them there.

“I think we were 20-1 on to go straight back down,” he tells The i Paper.

“Surviving in the Premier League, finishing 17th, that was a bigger achievement than getting promoted, absolutely no doubt about that.”

Hull’s unlikely act of escapology owed much, if not everything, to the Tigers starting the season like a train. Brown’s side won six of their first nine matches, a run which included victories against Arsenal at the Emirates, Tottenham and Newcastle, and were almost halfway towards safety before the clocks had gone back.

Fast forward to 2026 and Brown believes that the approach that served his side so well after promotion back then looks to have been replicated by Sergej Jakirovic this summer.

“If you go out and bring in almost an entirely new squad, what message does that send to the players who got you up in the first place?” says Brown.

“You’re almost saying thanks for that, but you’re not good enough to keep us up. That’s a real slap in the face for them.

“I remember with Dean Marney, he was the lad we had in the Championship from Spurs and had an engine to die for, he could run like the wind. But he used to tighten up every so often.

“We had to work on him hard, and he was one of the ones who benefited when I came out with six games to go in the Championship season and said, ‘listen, everyone of you in this changing room will get an opportunity in the Premier League, don’t fear it’.

“I was never going to bring in 20 players. So everyone relaxed a little, and Dean Marney benefited from that. Ian Ashby, our club captain, was fearing whether I’d keep him on as captain at the highest level, but I kept him on right the way through, I wasn’t going to take that away.

“I think it’s a manager’s responsibility to stay with what you’ve got and help them improve. Any player who does come in has to improve on what you’ve already got.”

Although Hull have been active in the transfer market, it has been a case of evolution rather than revolution at the MKM Stadium.

How the Tigers should play

And Brown believes that one of the key men behind their promotion, Oli McBurnie, will be as crucial for Hull in the Premier League as he was in the Championship.

“I don’t want them to just get sucked into everybody playing this wonderful possession-based football,” he says.

“I’d like to see them get it forward to McBurnie, crash and burn if that’s what it takes and see what happens.

“To survive in the Premier League you don’t just need good players, you need an identity and I believe this Hull side has one. I think you saw that in the play-offs. They didn’t even know who they were playing 48 hours before the final [because of Southampton’s Spygate], was it Saints or Middlesbrough?

“Jakirovic and his coaching team would have had to completely change their plans because of Spygate. But they didn’t complain, they got on with it and they won the game. That kind of mentality will serve them very well this season.”

Despite Hull’s whirlwind start back in 2008-09, it wasn’t a victory that persuaded Brown that his side could upset the odds. It was a comprehensive defeat.

A rude awakening

“The biggest factor in keeping us grounded was a 5-1 home defeat to Wigan (Hull’s third game in the Premier League),” says Brown.

“Emile Heskey and Amr Zaki, who was an Egyptian international, just destroyed us, they made us look like a Championship team. That was the rude awakening we needed.

“We had won our first game against Fulham, which made us feel we belonged at the table. Then we drew with Blackburn under Paul Ince. That home defeat to Wigan calmed everybody down.

“We had a win, a draw and a defeat to take stock of, and we talked long and hard afterwards, the reality was we were good enough, we’d shown that against Fulham, we’d shown resilience against Blackburn, and we’d shown that if we weren’t at 100 per cent then we were going to get our arses kicked.”

If Hull do stay up and Jakirovic is still in charge come May, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a repeat of what we witnessed on the final day 17 years ago, when Brown serenaded the home fans on the pitch as the club clung to their top flight status in finishing 17th.

“My mum always said that if someone hands you a microphone, there’s only one thing you can do, belt out a tune,” he says.

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“She had a troop back in the day, there were nine girls who used to get together and do a song and dance routine.

“I used to be part of it. They would perform and me and my mates would go around the working men’s clubs with a bedsheet, people would be lobbing coins into it.”

Having entered the world of the monied Premier League elite, the bedsheet will be unnecessary this season. Whether they can collect enough points to stay up, only time will tell.