Hull City: West Brom and West Ham's January 2020 raid proved costly | OneFootball

Hull City lost Jarrod Bowen and Kamil Grosicki in January 2020 and they were eventually relegated

The 2019/20 season certainly won't be remembered fondly by Hull City supporters, but it's easy to forget that it actually started quite well for the Tigers.

On January 2nd, after 26 games, Hull sat in ninth place in the Championship table, just two points off the play-offs with 20 games to play, and it looked like the Tigers were in contention for a play-off place.

However, as supporters will be all too aware of, Hull would win just one Championship game from that date onwards and would suffer relegation to League One for the first time in 16 years, and while it may raise eyebrows to see a side fall apart like that, the cause was pretty obvious.

January transfer deadline day in 2020 is certainly a day that Hull supporters would like to forget, and the events that took place that day would eventually condemn the Tigers to the bottom of the Championship and relegation to League One.

West Ham and West Brom's January 2020 raid proved costly for Hull City

Jarrod Bowen and Kamil Grosicki had been standout performers for Hull City during the opening months of the 2019/20 season, Bowen particularly as he registered 16 goals and six assists in 29 Championship appearances.

West Ham completed a £20m plus deal to bring Bowen to the Premier League, and while it was always going to be hard to replace his goal involvements, losing Grosicki on the same day just made matters worse.

Polish international Grosicki had scored seven goals and registered four assists during the first half of the Championship campaign, doing enough to attract the interest of promotion-chasing West Brom, and the Baggies forked out £800,000 to bring him to the Hawthorns on deadline day.

Losing your two best players in one transfer window is bad enough, let alone on deadline day when you've got no time to reinvest the money you've received, and it immediately put Hull on the backfoot.

Still, while you'd expect Hull to be unable to replicate their form from the first half of the season, nobody would have expected them to get relegated, but the losses of Bowen and Grosicki in one window proved too much for them to handle.

In hindsight, if Hull were going to sell their two best players, they should have done it at the start of the window, so they had time to replace them adequately and with money to spend, they could have done, but leaving it so late meant that they had no time to replace the goals that Bowen and Grosicki provided, and they soon slipped down the table.

The second half of Hull City's 2019/20 campaign was truly awful

After Bowen and Grosicki departed, Hull picked up just six points from their remaining 15 games, a truly awful return with 45 points on offer during that time.

It's worth noting that there were no managerial changes during the 2019/20 season either, so their downfall can be purely attributed to Bowen and Grosicki leaving, and it was remarkable just how worse they were after they left.

One win and three draws were all Hull picked up after the January transfer window had shut, and the Tigers finished bottom of the league with just 45 points and a goal difference of -30.

An 8-0 loss to Wigan Athletic, who were also relegated that season, proved the worst result of the lot, and the Hull side that finished the season was a shell of the side that started the campaign.

West Ham and West Brom signing Bowen and Grosicki condemned Hull to League One, and the January 2020 raid will be remembered for all the wrong reasons by Tigers supporters.