Sky Blues are dreaming of a home win
RICOH DEAL OFFERS HOPE
COVENTRY return to action tonight with an extra incentive to beat the drop after securing a new lease to return home next season.
Mark Robins’ 20th-placed side are battling for Championship survival after taking four points from their past three games.
Their efforts are impressive as they play away every week with ‘home’ games at Birmingham.
But Coventry will return to the Ricoh Arena in August after ending one of the bitterest feuds in UK sport.
The club signed a new 10-year lease with rugby union landlords Wasps last week after 12 months of talks, with Sky Blues officials hoping they could regularly attract 17,000 fans in the second tier if they stay up.
That includes away fans and a record number of season-ticket holders starved of action due to Covid and exile in Birmingham. And the opportunity for extra revenue under the new lease is enhanced as City will pocket a much bigger percentage of match-day takings. It is a major difference to when Coventry relocated to Northampton in 2013 and more recently to St Andrew’s after failing to agree a new lease with Wasps. But West Midlands mayor Andy Street stepped in to mediate peace talks and end the stand-off between Coventry’s hedge-fund owners Sisu and Wasps.
The talks were supposed to be in person in Birmingham but moved online. Joy Seppala, the director of Sisu and Coventry City owner, was present on a Zoom call with Irish millionaire Derek Richardson, the Wasps owner, to start the process. Wasps, mindful of a £35million bond to be repaid next year, and with a creaking balance sheet, including a £5m loss in the second half of 2019, wanted extra income.
Sisu had exhausted all possible domestic legal action, complaining that Coventry City Council had undervalued the Ricoh by £27m when they sold it to the rugby club.
There could still be a sting in the tail for Wasps after Sisu made a 2019 complaint to the European Commission. Sisu felt the sale constituted unfair state aid but the paperwork remains gathering dust in Brussels, where there is a backlog of cases following Covid, and action seems unlikely after Brexit.
So with the complaint ‘parked’ and with a will at the top to get a new lease, Sky Blues chief executive Dave Boddy and his Wasps counterpart Stephen Vaughan got motoring.
The football club still plan to build and own a ground at the University of Warwick, and the new Ricoh lease includes a break clause after seven years.