Fresh claim made on 'embarrassing' Coventry City, Sisu situation | OneFootball

For 15 years, Coventry City were owned by a hedge fund, and FLW's fan pundit sees no reason to ever want them back near their club again.

This article is part of Football League World's 'Terrace Talk' series, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more...

For a decade and a half, Coventry City were owned by the hedge fund Sisu, and now that they've been under new ownership for three years, FLW's Sky Blues fan pundit Chris Deez couldn't have been happier to have seen the back of them.

A 2-0 home defeat to Ipswich Town notwithstanding, it's fair to say that 2025 has been an extremely good year for the club. The Sky Blues are eight points clear at the top of the Championship table, and could be set to return to the Premier League following an absence of a quarter of a century.

But it hasn't been so long since things weren't going so well for the Sky Blues. For 15 years, they were owned by a hedge fund called Sisu, and under their ownership the club often seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, falling from the Championship to League Two and even finding themselves playing their home matches - and on more than one occasion - outside Coventry because of disputes regarding the CBS Arena.

"Complete disdain and hatred" - Coventry fans have no reason to regret Sisu departure

It's now been three years since Sisu sold up to Doug King, so Football League World have spoken to our Coventry fan pundit Chris Deez to get his assessment of their ownership of the club, and he didn't hold back: "It's very difficult to look back on Sisu's time owning Coventry City with anything other than complete disdain and hatred."

Chris is loath to give credit for the small high spots that did manifest themselves under their ownership: "Sure, there were some high points. Bringing Mark Robins back to the club and everything he achieved over the following 7-8 years was incredible. It was a masterstroke, bringing him back. But he was here before under Sisu and he left. He saw the signs. I don't know what it was that tempted him and convinced him to come back, but I'm glad that he did, and I'm glad that he made that decision."

And he's happy to give credit to Robins for making a success of his time at the club, even though it was under extremely difficult circumstances: "They backed him somewhat, financially. He brought in a lot of players in his time. He wasn't given a ton of money to spend, and he brought in a lot of loans, some very, very good loans. But it's really hard to see past all of the low points, no matter how good Mark Robins' time here was."

Chris is highly critical of Sisu, with the issues that surrounded the club's stadium in the forefront of his memories of their ownership: "They took us out of the city on a number of occasions to go and play our home games in other towns and cities, and in other stadiums. It was embarrassing. It was possibly the most difficult time ever to be a Coventry fan, constantly in and out of the courts with the council and with the London Wasps, when they came and took over the stadium.

But the issues that he has with their ownership was about more than just that: "They almost never showed their faces. They incredibly rarely spoke to the fans, did fans forums, or anything like that. We never got any answers. We never got to answer any questions. They acted like they had nothing but disdain for the club and its fans. They turned down really good bids for the club. Preston Haskell was on the verge of buying the club and then they messed that all up, somehow. They sold the club to themselves at one point to bypass some ownership rules."

Chris explains that, even though they've been gone from the club for three years, what they served up is still used against them to this day: "No matter what good came from Mark Robins and the players on the pitch, it was constantly overshadowed by Sisu turning us into laughing stocks, more of a laughing stock than we'd ever been before. Even this season, when we're breaking records and we're flying through the league and looking almost certain to be in the Premier League next season, we still get comments all over social media, people taking the mick, talking about how we played our home games at Birmingham and Northampton, and didn't own our stadium from X amount of years."

Wrangles over stadium ownership and rent led to a lost decade for Coventry City

Now that they sit on top of the Championship, it can be easy to forget how far Coventry City fell under their previous ownership. When they were relegated into League Two in 2017, it was the first time they'd fallen that far since the 1958-59 season.

The return of Mark Robins dug the club out of that hole. Robins had first arrived at the club in September 2012, but his spell was brief, with the manager leaving the club in March 2013 to take up the manager's job at Huddersfield Town. He returned in March 2017, and less than a month later the club won the Football League Trophy by beating Oxford United, but he was unable to keep the team in League One.

The club's stay in the EFL's basement division only lasted one season, though; after finishing 6th in the table, they were promoted back by beating Exeter City in the play-off final at Wembley, and two years later Robins steered them back to the Championship after they won the Covid-truncated 2019-20 League One title.

But if Sisu's time as the owners of Coventry City was defined by anything, it was by the interminable wranglings over the club's stadium, which was then known as The Ricoh Arena. The stadium was built as a replacement for Highfield Road, which the club left in 2005, but the Sky Blues didn't own it. Instead, the stadium was owned and operated by Arena Coventry Limited (ACL), with the club as tenants. ACL was owned jointly by Coventry City Council and the Alan Edward Higgs Charity.

Disputes over rent and ownership of the new stadium had a deleterious effect on the club. In March 2013, they were forced into administration after a winding-up petition was brought against the club over the non-payment of rent. The club ended up leaving The Ricoh Arena to play 34 miles from Coventry at Northampton Town's Sixfields before returning in 2014.

But even then, the problems continued, and the club left the stadium again in 2019, this time playing for two years at Birmingham City's St Andrew's Stadium. The Arena had been sold to the rugby union club Wasps at the end of 2014, with a dispute over a new contract at the heart of the departure, the second time around.

The sale of the club to Doug King in December 2022 and January 2023 finally put an end to these constant disruptions and disputes. Wasps had ended up in administration themselves, losing ownership of The Arena to Mike Ashley's Frasers Group in 2022, and ended up folding altogether. At the start of this season it was confirmed that King had bought the stadium and reunited it with the club.

Now back in the Championship, Coventry City are back where they were when Sisu took ownership of the club in the first place. Under King's ownership, the club are getting back to their potential again. The Sky Blues were a top-flight team for 34 years uninterrupted from 1967 to 2001, and although staying at that level was something of anomaly, they're looking good for a return at the end of this season. It's all a long way removed from the years when the club didn't even play in their home city.