“I had a feeling I’d be back here one day,” Liam Rosenior said at his unveiling as Hull City’s head coach in November 2022. Five happy years in East Yorkshire as a player had planted that seed, but the circumstances of his latest return do not feel nearly as predestined.

Less than two years after he was sacked as Hull boss in the spring of 2024, Rosenior will be back at the MKM Stadium as Chelsea manager in tonight’s FA Cup fourth-round tie.

Being shown one door has led him to others and to opportunities he could not have envisaged so soon after a juddering personal setback. Hull’s impatience has turned out to have been to Rosenior’s enormous benefit, allowing him to join the BlueCo stable at Strasbourg in 2024 and then on to Chelsea last month. He heads back to the club he holds dearest as a new face among Europe’s coaching elite.

It has left Hull supporters reevaluating their time spent together. Progress was clear, but it was not enough for Acun Ilicali, the club’s Turkish owner, who abruptly opted for change when missing out on the Championship play-offs in 2023-24.

“I was pretty horrified to see him go,” says Andy Dalton, season-ticket holder and former editor of the fanzine Amber Nectar.

“It felt so wildly disproportionate. Here was a man who’d served the club with distinction as a player and had a family connection to Hull. He’d done a good job, and it wasn’t a season that deserved that. To rip everything up was a terrible decision, and I still think it was a terrible decision now.”

With both parties moving on, Rosenior to Chelsea and Hull to fourth in the Championship, there is the expectation of a warm reception from a sold-out crowd this evening.

Rosenior, the player, was a full-back who made 161 appearances for Hull, including in the 2014 FA Cup final and as captain in the Europa League the following year.

The attachment, though, was stronger. Supporters would sing “His Nanna’s from Hull”, owing to the fact that his grandmother, Cath, was a season-ticker holder who would take a young Rosenior to Boothferry Park during school holidays. She had moved north from London to work as a social worker in the 1980s and died in 2021. Her coffin was draped in a Hull scarf and was laid to rest three miles from the club’s training ground in Cottingham.

Rosenior playing for Hull in the FA Cup final in 2014 (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

She had missed her grandson becoming manager by almost exactly a year and did not see what amounted to a homecoming as head coach. Rosenior had been selected ahead of Rob Edwards and entrusted with what had been his first full-time job on the touchline.

Rosenior’s record over 78 games at Hull was impressive, if not flawless. As a managerial novice, he took control of a team that was in 21st place in the Championship and fearing relegation to League One after the disastrous reign of Shota Arveladze. Only six of Rosenior’s first 28 Championship games were lost as Hull eventually finished 15th, closer to the top six than the relegation places.

The 2023-24 season, his only full campaign in charge, promised to deliver even more. “Does anyone think it is unrealistic when I say we can be champions this year?” he told his players in a pre-season address captured by the club’s media team. “Tell me I’m crazy and that we can’t do it, but we can.”

Rosenior was popular with supporters and players alike, with the latter universally buying into both his tactical approaches and human touches. “They loved him from minute one, all of the players,” said one source close to a player, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships.

With a squad that included Liam Delap, loaned from Manchester City, Rosenior’s Hull were an unexpected inclusion in the promotion race after three quarters of the campaign. A 2-1 win away to Southampton in late February had them in the top six and thinking big on the back of a big-spending transfer window that had seen them loan Fabio Carvalho, Anass Zaroury, and Ryan Giles, as well as signing playmaker Abdulkadir Omur and goalkeeper Ivor Pandur.

That ambitious January, though, did not deliver the desired improvement when it mattered most. Just three wins came from the last 13 games, and a 1-0 loss away to Plymouth Argyle on the season’s final day surrendered the last faint hope of a play-off place.

It was during that run-in that Hull’s board grew restless with Rosenior’s tactics. There was a damaging run of six home games without a victory. The owner, as reported by the BBC, would say that the head coach’s patient, methodical style had not matched up with the “attacking” football he wanted.

A very clear disagreement was Rosenior’s insistence that Ryan Allsop would remain his goalkeeper. The pair had worked together at Derby County, and his strengths with the ball at his feet were considered a must for Rosenior’s style. Mistakes, though, had racked up and sources with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, say Ilicali had privately called for Pandur, now the club’s No 1, to be given his opportunity.

Allsop eventually left in the same summer as Rosenior, with Ilicali lamenting the goalkeeper’s form during a fans’ forum, as reported by the Hull Daily Mail, that followed the change of manager. Allsop later called his position “untenable”, as reported by the Birmingham Mail, without Rosenior.

The reality is that Ilicali had expected a top-six finish after all the backing he had provided in the January window. There had been clear advancement under Rosenior, but seventh was as good as nowhere in the owner’s eyes. The fact that Rosenior had been shortlisted for the Championship manager of the year at the EFL Awards meant nothing. Nor did the three-year contract he had signed six months before his sacking.

“This has been the most difficult decision I have had to make as the chairman of this wonderful football club,” said Ilicali in a club statement confirming Rosenior’s sacking. “I have to remove personal sentiment from these moments and ensure the long-term vision of the club is at the centre of my thinking.”

And there was the essence of his decision that had others within the club pushing back in vain.

“Our visions for the future are not aligned,” added Ilicali, who had already courted the German coach Tim Walter.

The successor’s philosophy? High-pressing and risk-tolerant football. It was an intense style that didn’t work (or last): Walter was sacked in November. Rosenior, by then, was rebuilding with Strasbourg. His team beat Paris Saint-Germain on the same weekend Hull were avoiding relegation to League One on the final day of last season under Ruben Selles.

“It’s impossible to escape the football we played at the time,” says Dalton, reflecting on Rosenior’s tenure. “It divided opinion then and still does, very much in these parts. That was ultimately part of the reason why the chairman let him go.

“I had no issue with that intent to do interesting and clever things on a football pitch, but when it doesn’t go your way, passing it around for an opening that doesn’t come, it can feel a little bit pedestrian and frustrating. All a bit bloodless. Rosenior getting the Chelsea job has opened up the old debates.”

Rosenior has said tonight’s game will serve as a family reunion at the MKM Stadium and that might well extend to the figure who handed him a first managerial role three and a half years ago.

The bond between Ilicali and Rosenior could hardly have been stronger for much of their time together. The day after Hull had drawn at home to Sunderland in December 2022, Rosenior and his wife, Erika, were flown from Humberside Airport to Doha on Ilicali’s private jet to watch the World Cup final between Argentina and France at the Lusail Stadium. Ilicali, wearing an Argentina tracksuit top, uploaded a selfie of the group to his Instagram page and its 14 million followers.

Rosenior routinely made no secret of his affection for Ilicali. “He’s one in a million,” he said in an interview with The Athletic in 2023. “He has a gift of being able to make people feel good about themselves.”

Rosenior (right) and Ilicali (middle) during his time as head coach (Orhan Cicek/Anadolu via Getty Images)

At least publicly, there has been no subsequent animosity. Rosenior praised the “passion, energy and determination” of those who had sacked him in his first words released through the League Managers’ Association (LMA), while Ilicali still counts Rosenior as a close friend.

Chelsea’s head coach did not bite ahead of this game either. In his press conference earlier this week, he said, “If it wasn’t for Hull and Acun in particular giving me that opportunity, which I’m really thankful for, I wouldn’t be in this situation now.”

Hull will forever be part of Rosenior’s story, as he will of theirs.

“You’ll get a majority who think he did a good job,” adds Dalton. “Where there might be dissent, perhaps rightly, is that he could’ve done a slightly better job. We missed out on the play-offs by one place and three points. It was a narrow miss, but you don’t get an awful lot for a narrow miss in football.”

Rosenior, it turned out, got plenty 20 months later with the Chelsea job.