‘Don’t let it drag you down now’: How Coventry won back their soul on tortured journey to the Premier League | OneFootball

It’s two hours before kick-off against Sheffield Wednesday, and the eight-minute train from Coventry city centre to the CBS Arena is teeming with sky blue shirts. There are hundreds packed on – men and women, friends and family, octogenarians and young kids – although there are really only two types of Coventry fan: those old enough to have watched the 1987 FA Cup final, and those who’ve been told about it so much they feel like they did.

They step off the train into a flush of cold air under the South Stand. It is telling that the stadium is out here, tucked by the M6 and a big Tesco on the outskirts of town. Highfield Road was Coventry’s home for 106 years and it sat among terraced houses like a stitch in the fabric of the city. By contrast the Ricoh Arena, as it was known, was on the periphery, standing as a monument to Coventry’s plight.

Yet slowly, gradually, this stadium has become home. They’ve made new memories and now the Premier League is in sight, after 25 years away. On that emotional day in 2001 when relegation was confirmed, one fan held up a famous sign which read: “We’ll be back.” It has taken a quarter of a century, a journey that almost destroyed the club, but Coventry are almost at their destination.

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Coventry supporters walk to the CBS Arena, the ground that for years encapsulated their uneasy relationship with the club (Getty Images)

Every time Coventry play, a flag goes up in Oslo.

Jorg Nannestad fell in love with English football watching on Norwegian TV in the 1970s. When he was eight, his mum went to a store selling Admiral sportswear and bought him a Coventry shirt “because she liked the colour,” he says.

Jorg has seen them play everywhere from Highfield Road to Wembley (“I’ve been to Leyton Orient away, Bristol City, Plymouth…” he lists with a chuckle) but when he’s in Oslo, he pulls on the shirt and sends a sky blue flag up the pole that hangs over his front porch, much to the bemusement of his neighbours.

He is president of Coventry’s Scandinavian Supporters Club, whose 300-strong membership spans from Denmark to the Arctic circle. It is a reminder of English football’s pull, and of Coventry’s significant place in the story.

Jorg caught the end of Jimmy Hill’s swashbuckling 1960s side. He watched the 1987 Cup final on TV and enjoyed the 90s era of Peter Ndlovu, Mustapha Hadji and Darren Huckerby. But he describes what followed in grave tones: “The black years,” he calls them.

The Ricoh Arena was meant to open in 2001 with 45,000 seats and a retractable roof, ready to host 2006 World Cup games and secure Coventry’s future as a Premier League club. It finally opened in 2005 with 32,500 seats, no roof, no World Cup and debts which brought the club to its knees.

Coventry sold everything: star players, Highfield Road, even their 50 per cent share in the Ricoh, to pay for the cost of building it. On the brink of extermination in 2007, the club were bought by Sisu, a Mayfair-based hedge fund which specialised in “distressed debt”.

What followed over the next 16 years was a masterclass in mismanagement which led to administration, docked points, two relegations, fan boycotts, angry pitch invasions and the team exiled from their own city, twice. Most EFL clubs have endured some turmoil, but few have been through quite as much as Coventry.

What was the lowest point of Sisu’s disastrous reign? Perhaps it was 2012, when Sisu’s attempts to play hard ball with the council over rent lost Coventry their home. It led the club to groundshare with Northampton Town at Sixfields, a stadium 30 miles down the M1, and saw attendances plummet to less than 2,000.

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Coventry City fans protest prior to a 'home' match at Sixfields Stadium, Northampton while down in League One in 2013 (Getty Images)

Perhaps it was when Wasps Rugby Club bought the Ricoh in 2014. One Coventry staff member recalls arriving at the ground each matchday to find Wasps branding plastered all over the stadium, and so began the painstaking process of replacing each piece. Even then, Coventry fans would pull down seats only to see the Wasps logo emblazoned on them.

By now Sisu had stripped back budgets to leave the club in a state of decline. There had been little effort to understand that this was a century old institution, a cultural artefact to be preserved, not just a business to be squeezed dry. The squad was threadbare, and in 2017 Coventry were relegated to League Two.

In 2017, two crucial things happened. The first was the return of Mark Robins as manager, who would have a transformative effect over the next seven years. “He saved our football club,” says James Darlaston of That Cov Pod. “We were probably going to go either extinct or down to the National League in front of a handful of fans if Robins didn’t come in and do what he did.”

The second was the EFL Trophy final that summer, then called the Checkatrade Trophy. Wembley is normally half empty for the occasion, but on that April day Coventry fans descended on the capital to see Robins’ team beat Oxford United. They made up most of the 74,434 attendance, the highest for an EFL Trophy final since the 1980s.

Coventry were still heading down to League Two that summer, but the Checkatrade final won new fans and shone a light in the darkness.

Besides, League Two had its perks. “All these little grounds, like Newport, Forest Green Rovers,” says James. “You could rock up on the day, you didn’t have to worry about getting a ticket.”

“I loved it,” adds That Cov Pod host Simon Lillibury. “I lived in Manchester and it was very much, ‘I’m a Coventry fan – yeah, we’re s***, who cares? It’s the team I support and I’m going to Accrington next week’.”

Stadium disputes forced another groundshare at St Andrew’s in Birmingham. But on the field, Robins and his assistant Adi Viveash led a steady climb back to League One in 2018 and then the Championship in 2020.

“There was a whole generation of kids growing up who just fell out of love with the football club, or didn’t ever support the football club,” says Simon. “You'd see people walk around the city in United, Arsenal, Liverpool shirts. And this is the main thing Mark Robins did: it was just Cov shirts absolutely everywhere. People decided they could fall in love with the club again.”

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Guided at first by Mark Robbins, trips to Wembley and a journey through the divisions helped Coventry fans learn how to love the club again (The FA via Getty Images)

There was no magic pill, no billionaire benefactor. Instead Coventry’s rise was built step by step, piece by piece. In the Championship the club’s head of recruitment, Chris Badlan, oversaw smart signings from small European markets such as Viktor Gyokeres and Gustavo Hamer, who later departed for profit.

Sisu took a back seat and finally sold up in 2023, to local businessman Doug King.

King’s decision to sack Robins and appoint Frank Lampard was a gamble, but he has taken the team to the brink of the Premier League, even if this drab 0-0 draw with Wednesday delays the achievement. On his first day in charge, Lampard called everyone to the gym – players, staff, chefs, cleaners – and told them to start believing the sky is the limit for Coventry City.

Off the pitch, King has set about trying to make Coventry a self-sustaining business. Key to his plan was owning the CBS Arena, and two decades after it was opened, Coventry finally bought back their own stadium last summer. Now giant images of current stars and past heroes are draped around the ground. Stadium bars stay open after games and DJs play on the concourses.

“Credit to Doug King,” says James. “He’s dragged the club into the 21st century.”

Coventry’s rise has played out to The Enemy song “We Live and Die in These Towns”, which blares before and after every game and is belted out by every supporter together. The band are Coventry fans and performed the song live before a league match earlier this season.

The song is written about living in the city, but the lyrics hit what it is to be a lifelong football supporter. The melancholy, the resilience, the gallows humour: it captures the entire Coventry experience. “Don’t let it drag you down now” could have been written for the fans who never gave up hope.

“It encapsulates Coventry people,” says season-ticket holder Paul Barnes. “We are sometimes quite dour, we have a certain sense of humour.”

There is a poignancy too. “It strikes a cord,” says Paul Armstrong, who runs Coundon Supporters Club. “A lot of fans I know have died [since the Premier League].” Plenty of Coventry’s stars of the 1960s and 70s have been lost too, including legendary manager Jimmy Hill, who died in 2015.

The song has become Coventry’s modern-day anthem – or “hymn”, as Jorg puts it, and really what is a football ground if not a place of worship and tested faith? The moment before kick-off when the lights dim and the trumpets kick in is genuinely spine-tingling, and it is another part of why the CBS Arena has new meaning. After 20 years, the stadium has soul.

“We have a song called ‘Take Me Home Highfield Road’, and it used to be like a real desire, a want to go back there because CBS was half full, or we were playing in Birmingham, or we were playing in Northampton,” says Simon. “Now the CBS feels like the ground we thought we were going to get in 2005 when we moved in. We’ve been through all this rubbish to get here, but now it feels properly like home, and I don’t think any fans would swap it.”