Coventry City Supporters: Sold Down The River by The Football League

A Pathetic Abdication

“Real football, real fans.” The words sit atop the Football League’s website, a hollow slogan on the day it ratified Coventry City’s move to Sixfields, the home of Northampton Town. The League’s board expressed “deep regret” that the club’s owners could not reconcile differences with Arena Coventry Limited, the operators of the Ricoh Arena. It was a statement framed as if the League were a helpless bystander, rather than the ultimate authority on the competition it governs.

Its next sentence revealed the true priority. “With the new season less than four weeks away, the Board required certainty as to where the Club would play its matches.” The fixture list, it seems, carries more weight than the presence of League football in a city that has hosted it since 1919. The message is clear: do what you want to a club, move it where you like, as long as the administrative calendar is not disturbed.

The Business of SISU

The club’s owners, SISU, have acted exactly as one might expect from a company rooted in the more ruthless end of neo-capitalism. They have agitated for a move away from the Ricoh Arena despite the long-standing and well-known objections of the club’s own supporters. They have pursued a business plan that appears to have gone anything but to plan, culminating in this forced relocation thirty-five miles away.

Now they will hope enough supporters make the seventy-mile round trip twenty-three times next season to keep this withered husk of a club alive. The Football League, for its part, has been utterly browbeaten. It exists to uphold a different set of values from a hedge fund, yet it has failed to do so. In a contest between the interests of its members’ supporters and the demands of an owner, it has sided with the owner. All SISU did was act to type; the League, however, abandoned its own supposed principles.

An Empty Gesture

The League has made a feeble attempt to hold SISU to account for an eventual return to Coventry. “Otium will also be required to provide a Performance Bond of £1m with The Football League as an assurance of the club’s commitment to return to the Coventry area,” the statement declared. This sum would be a trifling expense should a new stadium materialise and the club actually come back. It is hardly a meaningful guarantee.

More telling is a subtle change in language elsewhere in the announcement. An earlier condition of a three-year time limit for the club to return to Coventry seems to have been quietly jettisoned. The statement now refers to “an initial period of three seasons” for the ground-share, a linguistic shift that could prove significant in the years to come. For a club in its 130th year, the future has never been so uncertain.

Northampton, let us be clear, is not in the same part of England as Coventry.

As it approaches its one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary, the Football League should be hanging its head in shame. An organisation’s reputation is not forged in the humdrum, everyday decisions, but in the major challenges that test its purpose. Presented with an opportunity to stand for supporters and assert its authority, it instead chose the path of least resistance. It has effectively allowed a company to place a club into administration, buy it back, and then uproot it to another town weeks later. Supporters of all seventy-two member clubs should take note. They may think this does not concern them, but Coventry City fans once thought the same.