Marco Silva declined to commit his future to Hull City and intends to meet the club’s owners this week for talks after a heavy defeat at Crystal Palace condemned his team to relegation back to the Championship after one chaotic year among the elite.
Silva is understood to have signed a six-month deal in January, with an option he could trigger to extend his stay by a further 12 months, and he may now opt to pursue his career elsewhere. He will meet members of the board before Sunday’s visit of Tottenham Hotspur to the Kcom Stadium and will elaborate on the reasons for the team’s demotion back to the second tier before seeing “what is best first for the future of the club and also for my career as well”.
“It’s not the moment to talk about my situation, to talk about the future of the manager,” he said after Palace eased to a 4-0 success which preserved their own status, along with that of Swansea City. “I respect too much the club and these fans, who have been amazing since I came here. It’s the moment to speak to the chairman and the board. The club needs to understand what they need to do differently in the future, and we’ll do that next.
“I will talk to the board and the chairman first, talking inside the walls of the club. But for me it’s easy to see what the club needs to do differently. They started to lose [our way] in pre-season when we were making our preparation. We tried to do many things in January but it’s not good to be signing six or seven players in January and losing two [Jake Livermore and Robert Snodgrass] in the market. You should be doing that in June, in pre-season.
“You need to prepare better. So we’ll analyse it and talk in the next few days. We’ll see [if I will be manager next season]. I have enjoyed these four months in the Premier League. That was one target I had in my career and we tried to do our best. Now it’s time to be calm and see what is best first for the future of the club and also for my career as well. But this is not a good day for us. It is a sad day for the club and our fans. They didn’t deserve what’s happened this season.”
A summer of turmoil following the team’s success in the play-offs a year ago undermined their preparations for the new campaign, with Steve Bruce departing and Mike Phelan’s bright start in charge quickly fizzling out. Silva arrived in January and, while securing some eye-catching home results, the Portuguese has gleaned only two points from nine away fixtures. “Marco Silva has done a fantastic job since he came in,” Michael Dawson said. “We were in a bad situation and he has done remarkably well to give us half a chance. But we just came up short. The boys in the dressing room and the staff are all very disappointed, so we have to pick ourselves up. We know what to do in the Championship.”
Palace’s victory was greeted with relief at Swansea City, whose win at relegated Sunderland on Saturday had eased them four points clear of the cut-off. The Welsh club’s players were due to gather at Fernando Llorente’s house to watch Hull’s match at Selhurst Park, and can now plan for another top-flight campaign under Paul Clement.
“The pressure has been on us but we’ve delivered in the last four games,” said the Swansea goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski, whose team had gleaned 10 points in that period while Hull lost four of their last six matches. “We’d been behind Hull for long periods so it’s been the perfect time to put our best run of the season together. We’ve worked hard and never lost belief and thankfully we’ve come up with good performances when they were most needed.
“A lot of people had written Swansea off when Paul Clement arrived but we’ve turned a corner since his arrival. Before that it could quite easily have been us in Sunderland’s position. The manager has given us confidence. You can clearly see whey he has been at such massive clubs as Real Madrid. That has rubbed off on him. He has delivered all the right messages and we have responded on the pitch. He deserved all the credit for his brave decisions.”