Coventry City's 'disastrous mistake' in sale of Highfield Road

[dutchman]

Former chairman admits blunder in new book on Sky Blues troubles since leaving their old home

Selling Highfield Road and leasing it back was a “disastrous mistake”, according to one of the men who was instrumental in moving Coventry City from its traditional home to the Ricoh Arena.

The old ground was sold by the club in 1999 as it struggled with huge debts ahead of the proposed move the new stadium.

And former chairman and Coventry MP Geoffrey Robinson says that, looking back, it was handled badly by the then board who took a “gamble that everybody decided to go for”.

The claim comes in a book released last week, ‘A Club Without A Home’ which chronicles the history of the Ricoh Arena project and the club’s subsequent fall from grace. It also reveals stories from those caught in the eye of the storm.

The book has been written by Telegraph chief reporter Simon Gilbert and over the next week we will be exclusively serialising some of its contents.

In 1998, the club successfully applied for planning permission to demolish Highfield Road and build a new stadium at the gasworks site. But, as costs for the mammoth project increased, the club’s board decided to sell Highfield Road for around £4million in 1999 and lease the ground back.

This was a pivotal moment, and one which Geoffrey Robinson later described as ‘a disastrous mistake’.

He said: ‘We sold Highfield Road outright in order to do it.

‘The whole thing, as it turned out with hindsight, was a disastrous mistake for the club. It needn’t have been. The original deal was great.

‘Looking back, I think we should have got to the point where we had the money before we sold Highfield Road.’

He added: ‘We got a good price. It was the whole board’s decision to sell.

‘It was a big decision and a gamble that everybody decided to go for. Football was in one of its big upward swings.

‘If you wanted to stay in the Premier League, you needed your own modern stadium.’

Catastrophe struck on 5 May 2001 – a day many Sky Blues fans will look back on as the single biggest moment in the club’s post-war history. The club was relegated from the Premier League. With relegation came a dramatic drop in income. It marked a downturn in the club’s fortunes which many will argue continues today.

But the biggest implication at the time was that Coventry City’s financial troubles were severely worsened. This hugely undermined the club’s ability to continue with the new stadium project. Reports at the time suggest the club suffered debts in the region of £60million, including bank loans and loans from board members.

Geoffrey Robinson said: ‘We had failed. We always threw everything at staying up.

‘You can’t blame any of the club’s debts on the stadium, I don’t think. They were big already and the stadium didn’t give us the lift we needed.

‘To stay in the Premier League is a real big art. We gambled on staying up, and we failed.’

The book is available in most major bookshops and online from Amazon here.

[rebbonk]

Many said it at the time!