Stung again — spare a thought for homeless Coventry City as Wasps row rumbles on
Rod Liddle
It is 18 years since Coventry City last played in the Premier League, during which time they have come close to extinction, played in the lowest tier for the first time since 1959 and generally had a fairly awful time of it.
Last season gave fans a few reasons for optimism — manager Mark Robins had assembled a decent squad and a late run took them close to a place in the League One playoffs. But now, this. For the second time in the past 18 years, the Sky Blues are without a home of their own and will be playing next season’s home fixtures at St Andrew’s, in Birmingham, 21 miles away.
The club’s owners, the London hedge fund SISU, have failed to strike a deal with Wasps rugby union team, who play at — and own — the Ricoh Arena. Back in 2013-14 City played their home games at Sixfields stadium, home of Northampton Town, more than 32 miles distant. They had hoped those bad old days were gone. The decision to play at St Andrew’s was again a last-ditch attempt to prevent the club being expelled from the Football League on account of having nowhere to play.
A spokesman for SISU said “we are incredibly disappointed and frustrated” that no deal could be struck over the Ricoh Arena. Not as frustrated as the EFL — which agreed to the ground share with Birmingham City only with great reluctance — or, of course, the benighted fans. Last season Coventry City were the fifth best supported club in League One, with an average home attendance of 12,362, an improvement on the previous season’s average of 9,255. They will be very lucky to achieve half of that number next season: their average home league attendance while playing at Northampton’s ground was scarcely over 2,000.
The problems are myriad and complex. A long-standing row over the sale of the Ricoh Arena to Wasps rumbles on and is coming before the European Commission. City believe the ground was grossly undervalued when it was sold, to the tune of about £28m. But that is only the half of it.
Wasps are, on the face of it, an extremely successful rugby union club. They finished eighth in the Gallagher Premiership last season with an average attendance of 17,975 — a figure beaten only by Leicester Tigers. But their financial position is far more perilous than that of Coventry City and, frankly, they will be fortunate if they are in existence by the this time next year. Their debts, for a rugby club, are astonishing — £55.8m at the latest count after their pre-tax losses last season more than doubled to £9.7m.
The total owed to their Irish owner Derek Richardson, who six years ago rescued them from bankruptcy at the last minute, rose to £18.6m, which some estimate to be at least a third of the chap’s worth.
Worse still, Wasps now face a serious inquiry into alleged financial shenanigans, involving suggestions of grossly overstated profits, a breach of covenants regarding bonds and effectively lying about a million quid or so which Wasps marked down as capital revenue when actually it was another bung from the uniquely generous Richardson.
Meanwhile, hanging over them is the legal action that insists they got the Ricoh on the cheap. If I were a Wasps fan I would be looking at the relatively stable Coventry City with a degree of envy: City’s latest losses were less than £2m, which is around about what you might expect for a decent sized club in the third tier.
The Sky Blues supporters are, of course, beside themselves with fury that they will not be able to watch their team play in their home city and have been apt to blame the owners, as is so often the case.
This seems to me a bit harsh. Without the intervention of the hedge fund monkeys, Coventry City would not exist at all and SISU have put an awful lot of money into the club, without seeing very much in the way of a return.
Again one is tempted to ask why they have done this, but as they are all financial experts I suppose they must know what they are doing.
League One is rapidly becoming a sanctum of the lost and the dispossessed, given the travails of poor Bolton Wanderers.
There was a time, fairly recently, when Coventry City had the longest unbroken spell in the top tier of any club, Arsenal and Everton excepted — 34 years of pleasant over-achievement that included a memorable FA Cup final win over Tottenham Hotspur in 1987, participation in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup and a two-legged tie against Bayern Munich, and a top-six finish. And that delightful goal off a free kick scored by Ernie Hunt after Willie Carr’s illegal flick-up, which we all tried to copy in the playground.
Sentimentalists such as me, then, rather hope that Coventry’s problems come to an end very quickly. There is the suggestion now that City’s owners may attempt to build a new ground somewhere in the environs of Coventry. In which case, what on earth will happen to the Ricoh Arena if Wasps go bust? Or even if they don’t? It seems a little bit profligate in these straitened times.
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Always a Wasp