Why Arsenal fans are supporting Coventry City tonight

Anyway, Coventry is older than Arsenal by three years, and are now owned by Sisu, a hedge fund which uses money from unnamed sources that reach it via the Cayman Islands.

Sisu moved Coventry to Northampton Town’s ground (the nearest league club to me by chance) following a dispute with Coventry City council, which built and owns the Ricoh Arena, which is modern, well-equipped, holds 32,000 and is well-positioned at the edge of the city.

Their manager is Steven Pressley who is a great Wenger fan, and who speaks out against financial doping – indeed he was doing it on BBC Radio Five Live this morning.

But he is working with academy players and the like, and playing in front of crowds under 2,000.  Yet until a few years back Coventry were in the same league as Arsenal.  It shows what can happen if you change ownership and get that change all wrong.

But Coventry do still get away support – the game against MK Dons in Milton Keynes saw around 7000 fans turn up – so I imagine they have taken most of their allocation for tonight’s game.

The owners of the Ricoh ground has offered Coventry City use of the ground in return just for the costs of the match days themselves, but Sisu have turned that down instead demanding that the council must sell Sisu the freehold ownership of the ground – some reports suggest for as little as around £4m.   It cost the taxpayer over £100m to build, and one can’t help concluding (although of course I fully admit I am not in possession of all the facts) that Coventry City FC is an irrelevance in all this.  Sisu (it seems to me, but it is just my opinion) want the Ricoh Arena on the cheap.

The Football League don’t come of this at all well, in that they have done nothing to support or rescue Coventry City, holding a view that might be expressed as “it is hardly our fault if a club goes to the wall – happened before, it will happen again”.  Indeed the League has been letting clubs failed since about the 5th year of the competition.  Accrington were, I think, the first league club to go to the wall, although it has been back in many other guises since.

It seems that the losses being made by Coventry are being paid by the Caymen Islands trust fund and run about £3m a year which is nothing if the owners do get a property in Coventry at about £100m under its value.

In March 2012 Sisu defaulted on its rent on the Ricoh, which put the Arena owners in a financial spot, and the council moved in.  Sisu sued the council for reasons that escape me, and lost on the simple grounds that they hadn’t paid the rent.  The stadium owners sued Sisu for £600,000 and then put the club into administration.  Sisu then bought the club back from the administrators.

According to the Guardian, Tim Fisher, who is Sisu’s chief exec said, “Sisu is a distressed debt fund and therefore batters people in court.”

Sisu then obtained the right for a judicial review, which may still be going on, I’m not sure on this point, and despite the offer of the stadium at match day costs, moved Coventry City to Northampton. The Football League caved in as they always do.

Sisu say they will now build their own stadium in Coventry, and that they are well on the way to doing so, but Freedom of Information enquiries show that there is no such project underway and that enquiries for available land seem to have come to nothing – but here again of course there may be activity I am not aware of.

During the course of all this Sisu sent a legal warning to a fans’ group the Sky Blue Trust over a link to an article in the Guardian on the fans’s trust web site.  (Not the article mind – just a link to the article).

The owners of Coventry claim the article contains “a number of material inaccuracies and distortions and may potentially be defamatory” and that the club has “written a thorough response to the article which we sent to the newspaper asking for a correction.”

That article is still there, and there is no mention on the Guardian page to suggest that it feels anything is wrong.  Obviously I have not been doing my own personal research with Sisu on this, but as always with articles such as this relying on commentaries in the press – including of course the Guardian article.   Obviously if Sisu would like to write a piece correcting what they perceive as any errors here, I will of course publish it in full, without comment.

So there we are.  Of course I don’t know who is right and who is wrong here, although football and the supporters of Coventry are the losers.  The tragedy is obvious – a club that has done well, given the size of its fan base and the number of rival clubs close by, has been moved out of its ground to another ground a distance away against the will of the fans.

It is a warning to all of us, as to what can happen to a club if things go wrong after a new owner gets hold of a club.

Now back to RED Action and AISA…

As for AISA, their website is here    Unrelated to today’s issues, but still part of AISA, is the AISA Arsenal History Society, which is the bit I run.