Inside the bold Doug King call that could send Coventry City back to the Premier League | OneFootball

Coventry City were mainstays of the Premier League for almost 35 years, and they could be returning there thanks to a big call made by Doug King.

Coventry City's ascent to the top of the Championship is an example of how one bold decision can completely change the fortunes of a football club.

In essence, to successfully run a football club means taking a series of calculated gambles and hoping that they pay off. And for the owner of a club, there is sometimes no bigger gamble than changing the manager.

Sacking a manager is two gambles rolled into one. Firstly, you have make the call that the person that you hired is no longer the right person to take your club forward. This is one of the game's great unknowables. Team form can ebb and flow, and there's always a possibility that a team in a slump could turn things around with a little patience, but there's no way of knowing whether this would have worked once you've pulled that trigger.

And the second gamble is who you decide should replace them with. There's no perfect science to this. Managers who look as though they should be a perfect fit for a club can spectacularly flop. Managers who don't look like they should be a good fit can succeed beyond anyone's wildest expectations, and there's no way of knowing which it will be until you've made that decision and it's too late to backtrack.

In the case of Coventry City, the success of Frank Lampard the club's manager has been one of the most startling of 2025. But it took a big call to get him to the club, and it wasn't necessarily one that was very popular at the time.

Mark Robins had Coventry City legacy prior to Sky Blues exit

By the start of November 2024, Coventry City were starting to look as though they were stuck in a rut. Struggling in the Championship, a team that had reached an FA Cup semi-final, only getting beaten by Manchester United after a penalty shootout, and had performed creditably enough in the League the previous season were one of a clutch of clubs looking nervously over their shoulder at the relegation places.

When the Sky Blues lost 2-1 at home to Derby County on the 6th November 2024 they were one of six clubs tied on 15 points, with the lowest-placed of these, Plymouth Argyle, in the bottom three. The club's owner Doug King made a huge call, and sacked Mark Robins.

It was a huge shock. Mark Robins wasn't just any Coventry City manager. Appointed in March 2017, he'd led them to a trophy less than a month into his time with the club when they beat Oxford United to win the Football League Trophy. Unable to keep them in League One at the end of the 2016-17 season, he took them straight back up from League Two via the play-offs at the first attempt, and then back to the Championship two years later.

The second tier had been a challenge, but they'd reached the play-offs in 2022-23 and then reached the FA Cup semi-final the following year. Even though they'd had a slow start to the 2024-25 season, Robins had transformed the club's fortunes and was the longest-serving manager in the Championship at the time. The fans still loved him. To a great extent, he was Mister Coventry City.

It took three weeks to make a decision over who should replace him, and during that period King had to face a huge amount of flak from stunned Coventry fans. He admitted that he had no plan for the future and no immediate successor lined up to replace Robins, telling the BBC that: "Sometimes a tough decision has to be made. I like Mark Robins. And we've had good times together - but it had to be made."

He also confirmed that the decision had been a while in the making, stretching back to the previous season, when relations between him and Robins had soured after the former manager told him that "he could no longer work with [then-assistant manager] Adi Viveash."

When the announcement of Robins' successor was made three weeks later, there was a degree of consternation. Mark Robins' replacement would be the former Derby County, Chelsea and Everton manager Frank Lampard. With relegation very much a possibility, it was another huge gamble from Doug King.

Doug King's November 2024 gamble has so far paid off magnificently

The decision to hire Frank Lampard was greeted with surprise. Lampard may have been an England and Chelsea great, but his career in management hadn't been auspiciously successful. He'd had two periods at Chelsea without notable success, while his time at Everton had ended with him getting sack and almost resulted in the team getting relegated from the Premier League for the first time in 70 years.

His only previous Championship experience had come at Derby County, where he'd failed to get them into the Premier League despite the massive spending of the Mel Morris years.

And initially, it didn't seem that there had been much improvement. By the end of the first Saturday of the new year, when they were beaten 2-1 at Norwich City by two stoppage-goals, they were still only in 15th place in the Championship, albeit by this time six points above the relegation places.

But the FA Cup Third Round break seemed to have a transformative effect on the team. Automatic promotion was already beyond them, but a play-off place wasn't and Coventry went after it in style, winning nine of their next ten games to lift themselves to 5th place in the table. The play-off place was duly delivered, and the Sky Blues were only beaten in the semi-finals by a 122nd minute goal for Sunderland in the semi-finals scored by Dan Ballard.

It was a heartbreaking way to end the season, but Coventry had got their momentum back and they've carried it into this season. Playing open, expansive football, they've raced ten points clear at the top of the Championship, scoring an incredible 50 goals in just 18 matches.

They've put four goals past Middlesbrough and Millwall, who are currently second and third in the table. They put five past Derby County and Sheffield Wednesday, and seven past Queens Park Rangers. They have been without question the standout team of the 2025-26 season across the entire EFL so far.

A lot of people may have to eat a lot of humble pie over Doug King's big gamble, come the end of this season. Criticism of his time at Everton was harsh, when it's clear that the club were a complete basket case behind the scenes at the time. Chelsea can be unmanageable at times, even if they've won plenty of silverware over the years.

And Derby County's near-misses came under the weight of knowing that the club's financial position demanded Premier League football, rather than just hoping for it. The full extent of the folly of Mel Morris - a club owner who took a huge gamble himself but ending up losing it all - became clear with the financial crisis that followed.

Doug King had been the owner of Coventry City for less than two years when he made this decision. It was a huge call, and supporters who'd had their fingers burnt repeatedly by the club's previous owners might easily have turned against him had Mark Robins' successor been a failure.

With more than half a season yet to play, there's still plenty of scope for things to go wrong. That's the very nature of the Championship, and especially with the 2025-26 season having so far been fairly unpredictable. But for now, there are few signs of anything other than both of these huge calls having been enormous successes, even though there'll be no payout until the end of the season.

Plenty of things could go wrong before then, but for now the skies are definitely blue over the CBS Arena, and Coventry City fans have many reasons to be grateful to the owner of their club for having held his nerve and making that huge decision in November 2024.