Hull City owner Acun Ilicali's Tim Walter Championship target assessed

Acun Ilicali was coy over his target for new boss Tim Walter when asked on Tuesday as the pair met the media together for the first time at the MKM Stadium.

Ilicali suggested a top 10 finish would be a good achievement for the new German head coach which led to one or two raised eyebrows both in the media suite and from those watching further afield.

After all, Liam Rosenior was sacked having guided City to seventh in the Championship, missing out on the play-offs by just three points and a much weaker goal difference.

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On the face of it, to tell a new manager his target is only finishing in the top 10 after the previous manager lost his job for finishing seventh seems a bizarre approach, but there's a method behind Ilicali's reasoning, while behind the scenes, everybody knows Premier League football is the ultimate goal.

As we sit here now on June 6, City's squad is threadbare and wouldn't finish inside the top 10. In fact, it would struggle to finish inside the top 14 or 15 and at this stage, Ilicali does not know what players Walter will have at his disposal by the time the transfer window closes at 11pm on August 31, none of us does.

City have targets, they'll already be in discussions with some of them but there will be others that will not be confirmed until the final knocking of the window, as we saw last year with Jaden Philogene and Tyler Morton.

Walter knows he needs eight, nine, 10 or maybe more additions over the course of the next three months if City are to be considered genuine challengers, and those players must be of a standard which enables the Tigers to play the football he wants, but ultimately winning football.

Given the gaping holes in City's squad following the departures of Fabio Carvalho, Liam Delap, Noah Ohio, Anass Zaroury, Tyler Morton and Ryan Giles, plus Greg Docherty, Adama Traore, Cyrus Christie, Aaron Connolly and Billy Sharp, Ilicali is not going to place demands on the new manager just yet.

There's also the very realistic possibility that City will lose Jacob Greaves to a club in the Premier League and while that will swell his coffers a little, it'll also create another problem for the former Stuttgart and Hamburg chief, one that he will need to be planning for.

Make no mistake about it, come September 1, Ilicali, Tan Kesler and Walter will expect to have a squad they believe will be good enough to mount a challenge, and then, the owner's targets may sound a little different.