Coventry City's warning to the EPL

We’ve come to that time of year again, when the English Premier League’s PR machine is in full swing, gearing up for the upcoming season.

The media is filled with tales of transfer targets attracting fees to dwarf most countries’ GDP. Clubs have undertaken pre-season friendlies in far-off places (including our very own shores) that serve more as money-spinning marketing exercises than for conditioning players and getting them match-fit.

But while this goes on, for those that follow English clubs outside of the Premier League, the season has already gotten underway.

This weekend saw the start of the Football League’s 2013-14 season, with 72 clubs beginning their long haul to May. Their fans may carry ambitious hopes of promotion, or may just want to see their home town club avoid relegation. There’ll be many with pragmatic hopes of their club cementing their position in the league and showing some improvement on previous years’ standings.

But while the media concerns itself with whatever obscene bid is currently being tabled for Luis Suarez, or where Wayne Rooney will eventually end up, the plight of a club that, until relatively recently, competed amongst the giants, is getting a lot less coverage.

Like Leeds United and (until recently) Manchester City, Coventry City’s predicament serves as a warning to the clubs that might think the Premier League’s riches are bottomless; and a timely reminder, as we witness the start of a new season, to fans who consider a year without a trophy to be a failure.

The Sky Blues have just started this season in England’s third tier – League One, their lowest position for 50 years. They have no home, are operating under a League-enforced transfer embargo, have been given a 10-point deduction, and face the very real prospect of liquidation.

While never considered one of the giants of the world game, Coventry City have spent a large part of their history punching above their weight. Until 2001 they were a Premier League club, having spent 34 consecutive years in England’s top flight – at the time a sequence bettered only by Arsenal and Everton.

In 1987 they won the FA Cup, beating a much more fancied Tottenham side in the process. They were the first English club to have an all-seater stadium, the since demolished Highfield Road, and raised eyebrows in the 1970s when they launched a still-iconic, although rarely emulated, brown away kit.

They were also one of the first clubs to propose the idea of adding a sponsor’s name to their own, becoming Coventry Talbot if they were allowed to do so. Happily the FA put a stop to that idea.

In their day City had on their books some well-known, big money internationals. Dion Dublin, Robbie Keane, Gary McAllister, Phil Babb, Craig Bellamy, the USA’s Cobi Jones… they all pulled on the Sky Blue shirt at one time or another.

The media spotlight was never far away from Coventry’s Highfield Road stadium: their long-term goal-keeper, the Swedish international Magnus Hedman, was regularly lauded by the UK’s tabloid press for being married to arguably the best looking WAG in European football (trite, I know, but it shows how much attention the club had); while an horrific accident to defender David Busst at Old Trafford, from one of the most innocuous challenges ever committed, made headlines all over the world.

Now, after a decade or so of bad management, poor decisions, and the general mistreatment of what had been a very successfully-run club, the Sky Blues are staring into the abyss.

Some years ago, and with the compact Highfield Road stadium beginning to look its age, the club decided to build a new home.

Highfield Road was, in many ways, an archetypal old-fashioned English stadium. It was close enough to the city centre for most fans to walk to games, its floodlights loomed over the surrounding terraced housing and narrow streets, and was certainly large enough for its purpose.

It was only when City played the likes of Liverpool or Man Utd that the club could guarantee a sell out crowd of around 23,000 here.

When the club’s board announced plans to build a large, state-of-the-art stadium, almost twice the size of Highfield Road, there were mutterings of dissent and disbelief from fans and observers.

If City couldn’t fill their current home, what hope had they of filling this new one?

The new stadium, to be mostly paid for and subsequently owned by the local council, was to be one of the cornerstones of England’s bid for the 2006 World Cup.

When that bid failed the plans were scaled back, but not scaled back enough.

Instead, City were to move to an off-the-peg 35,000 seater stadium – eventually to be named The Ricoh Arena, a stadium still way too big for its purpose – on the outskirts of the city.

While the plans for the new stadium were being finalised, and the existing one sold to a property developer, City’s fortunes on the field took a dive.

Having been perennial escape artists for some years, only avoiding relegation on the final day of the season in many cases, the club, then under the stewardship of the current Scottish national team manager Gordon Strachan, finally dropped out of the EPL.

With a massive reduction in TV earnings, and a huge drop in crowds thanks to the loss of lucrative visits from the league’s most popular clubs, Coventry faced uncertain times.

What compounded the issue further was an ensuing conflict between the club and the stadium owners.

The politics and economics to this are complex, but it appears that ACL (the organisation that represents the council and the other owners of the stadium) and the club’s previous owners negotiated a rental agreement way in excess of what the club could afford: £1.3 million a year.

In December 2012 the club’s owners – the faceless SISU Capital, a group that has been hugely unpopular with the fans – announced that they could no longer pay this amount.

The club continued to play the rest of the season at the Ricoh, while rent went unpaid. With no money to attract new players, or to retain existing ones, the Sky Blues form dipped further as they were relegated from the Championship to League One.

And so we come to the start of the new season: the High Court has issued a winding-up order to Coventry City FC for the unpaid rent, and with this in place the League have had to stop the club from transfer dealings, and apply a 10 point deduction.

Meanwhile, ACL have offered to sign a Company Voluntary Arrangement, thereby preventing the Sky Blues from going out of business, if the club agree to rent of a much more realistic £150,000 a year, but commit to a minimum 10 year lease at the Ricoh.

The club’s fans appear to want this, and it’s in the best interests of ACL, but…

The club’s new owners, Otium Entertainment Group (basically SISU by another name), have announced that they won’t return to the Ricoh.

Instead they’re proposing to either build yet another stadium, or ground-share somewhere else.

It should be noted that Coventry currently has no other suitably-sized stadium – the next largest in the city is the home of Coventry RFC, the local rugby club, and has a capacity of only 4000.

In the meantime the club will play home games at Northampton Town’s Sixfields Stadium, 50km away from Coventry.

The club’s fans, many of whom can recall trips to Old Trafford, Anfield, Highbury and the like, now not only face the realities of life in England’s third tier – City’s opening match was away to Crawley Town – but also have to contend with being constantly on the road for the foreseeable future too.

The club having to play “home” games away from the city itself, and in a tiny, although well-presented, stadium that is also home to one of their local rivals.

Meanwhile, a white elephant sits in the city itself, unlikely to find a significant tenant, and now only used for the occasional concert or sporting event.

It’s a messy and sorry position for the club and its fans, and one that doesn’t appear to have a ready resolution, not while the main protagonists are at a stalemate.

The fans meanwhile, have not been silent in this. Action has been taken to boycott “home” games at the Sixfields, while the match at Crawley was interrupted by a protest. A number of fan groups have also been set up to take action against SISU and attempt to force a move back to the Ricoh Arena.

Some fans have even begun to look at setting up a new club, similar to that which Wimbledon supporters did when their club was re-located to Milton Keynes; and, more recently, Darlington fans did when their club went out of business.

These are difficult times for Coventry City FC, but the city, and the club’s, crest incorporates a Phoenix – a symbol of the city’s reconstruction following WWII.

To get through this, the city, the club, and the fans are going to need to invoke the spirit of the Phoenix again.