Few fixtures in English football illustrate the gap between an established heavyweight and a club of smaller means as plainly as Chelsea against Hull City. The two have crossed paths for well over a century, in old Second Division battles, in a League Cup tie, in several Premier League campaigns and in a run of FA Cup meetings that Hull have never managed to win. The pattern is lopsided, but the story around the results is richer than the scoreline summaries suggest.
This page sets out the record between the clubs, the matches that matter most in the sequence, and the context that gives those numbers their shape.
A fixture older than you might think
The relationship begins at the very start of Chelsea’s existence. Chelsea were formed in 1905 and admitted straight into the Football League Second Division, and Hull City, founded the year before, were among their earliest league opponents. The sides met in that 1905-06 season, with Chelsea recording a 5-1 home win at Stamford Bridge, a result in which the early Blues forward Jimmy Windridge helped himself to a hat-trick. Hull answered emphatically in the return, taking a 4-3 win on their own patch. For a brief moment in Edwardian football, this was a competitive, high-scoring fixture between two ambitious newcomers.
That early parity did not last. Chelsea climbed into the First Division and stayed, broadly, among the country’s bigger clubs, while Hull spent most of the twentieth century in the lower divisions. The handful of Hull wins in the overall record belong overwhelmingly to those distant Second Division days rather than to any modern meeting.
The all-time head-to-head
Across all competitions, match archives record close to half a century of meetings, and the balance tilts heavily toward west London. Chelsea hold a commanding lead in wins and an even larger one in goals, a reflection of how rarely the two clubs have shared a division on equal footing.
| All competitions (per match archives) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total meetings | Around 49 |
| Chelsea wins | 35 |
| Draws | 10 |
| Hull City wins | 4 |
| Chelsea goals | 97 |
| Hull City goals | 28 |
Precise totals vary slightly between archives depending on how friendlies and wartime games are counted, but every reputable record tells the same story: Chelsea have won roughly seven of every ten meetings and have conceded fewer than one goal a game across the series.
4Hull City wins in the entire head-to-headThe Premier League era
The modern chapter opened when Hull reached the top flight for the first time in 2008, and it is here that most readers will remember the fixture. Across their Premier League spells (2008-10, 2013-15 and 2016-17), Hull failed to beat Chelsea, a run of defeats and draws that underlined the difference in resources between the clubs.
The 2013-14 season set the tone. On the opening weekend, with Jose Mourinho back in charge at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea beat Hull 2-0, with Oscar among the scorers. The return at the KC Stadium in January 2014 produced another 2-0 away win, Eden Hazard and Fernando Torres on the mark. A year later the pattern repeated: Chelsea won 2-0 at home in December 2014 during their title-winning campaign, then edged a more open contest 3-2 on the road in March 2015, Hazard, Diego Costa and Loic Remy supplying the goals.
Hull’s final Premier League season, 2016-17, brought two more defeats. In October 2016 Chelsea won 2-0 at the KCOM Stadium, Willian and Diego Costa striking within six second-half minutes to steady a side that had just lost momentum. The reverse fixture at Stamford Bridge in January 2017 ended the same way on the scoreboard, another Chelsea win, but it is remembered for reasons that had nothing to do with the result.
The night Ryan Mason’s career ended
The meeting of 22 January 2017 at Stamford Bridge is the most sobering entry in the series. Hull midfielder Ryan Mason, a summer signing from Tottenham, clashed heads with Chelsea defender Gary Cahill in an aerial challenge. Mason was treated on the pitch for several minutes, given oxygen and taken to hospital, where he was found to have fractured his skull and underwent surgery.
He never played competitively again. In February 2018, on medical advice from neurosurgeons, Mason retired from professional football at the age of 26. The incident became a reference point in the sport’s wider conversation about head injuries and concussion protocols, and it remains the detail most closely associated with this fixture in the public memory. Chelsea won the match 2-0, but the football was long since secondary.
Chelsea’s grip on the FA Cup ties
The cup meetings have been no kinder to Hull. Chelsea have come through every FA Cup tie the clubs have contested, several of them stretching to replays in earlier decades. The most recent example came on 16 February 2018, when Championship-side Hull visited Stamford Bridge in the fifth round. Chelsea won 4-0 and booked a place in the quarter-finals, with Willian scoring twice and Pedro and Olivier Giroud also on the scoresheet. Willian’s opener arrived inside the first two minutes, setting the tone for a comfortable evening.
That tie fit the broader shape of the rivalry: Hull competitive in spells, organised and willing, but ultimately outclassed by a squad operating several tiers above them in budget and depth. A single League Cup meeting over the years has produced the same outcome, another Chelsea win.
A timeline of notable meetings
| Date | Competition | Result | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 1905 | Second Division | Chelsea 5-1 Hull City | Among the clubs’ first meetings; Windridge hat-trick |
| Aug 2013 | Premier League | Chelsea 2-0 Hull City | Opening day of Mourinho’s second spell |
| Mar 2015 | Premier League | Hull City 2-3 Chelsea | Hazard, Costa and Remy in the title season |
| Oct 2016 | Premier League | Hull City 0-2 Chelsea | Willian and Costa in six second-half minutes |
| Jan 2017 | Premier League | Chelsea 2-0 Hull City | Ryan Mason suffers career-ending skull fracture |
| Feb 2018 | FA Cup fifth round | Chelsea 4-0 Hull City | Willian brace sends Chelsea to the last eight |
What the numbers tell us
Strip the series back to its essentials and it is a study in mismatched trajectories. Two clubs born within a year of each other started level, trading five- and four-goal results in 1905-06, and then diverged almost completely. Chelsea became a fixture in the top flight and, eventually, a trophy-laden force at home and in Europe. Hull built a proud but intermittent top-flight story, reaching the Premier League three times and an FA Cup final once, yet never finding the formula to beat this particular opponent in the modern game.
The head-to-head, then, is less a rivalry than a measuring stick. For Chelsea it is a reliable source of points and goals; for Hull it is a recurring reminder of the distance between a well-resourced London club and a resilient outsider from the Humber. The single detail that outlasts every scoreline is not a goal at all, but the night in January 2017 that turned a routine win into a landmark in football’s reckoning with head injuries. In a fixture defined by one-sided results, that is the moment that genuinely endures.
