Amid the euphoria of Wasps’ triumphant debut at the Ricoh Arena on Sunday – a 48-16 victory over London Irish watched by 28,524 people, the highest Premiership rugby crowd at a club ground in history – there was a sadness too, for the overshadowed tenant, Coventry City.
The arena complex was built for the football club nine years ago, so they could do what Wasps now will: run a year-round business including hotel, conferences and events, to finance the expensive business of professional sport. Yet after the dire, litigious conduct of the owner, the Mayfair hedge fund Sisu, which is still continuing, Coventry City will never do that, and the club’s long-term future has been dealt a fundamental blow.
The club now occupy the home purpose-built for them merely as a short-term, matchdays-only tenant of Wasps, with an option for a further two years which they are now seeking to extend. While Wasps worked to overcome the resentment of many supporters at the move from High Wycombe, and to captivate plenty of the near-30,000 crowd to attend, Coventry City on Saturday played out a 1-1 draw against Fleetwood Town in front of a gate recorded as 10,254. City are 17th in League One.
“It was dire, particularly when compared with the Wasps match which really was a fantastic sporting occasion,” said Jan Mokrzycki, of the Coventry City supporters’ Sky Blue Trust. “We all remember our club playing at Wembley, winning the FA Cup in 1987, playing Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal every season, and now the future is questionable, and the fans are struggling for hope. Very few of our members believe Sisu really intend to build a new stadium, and we urge them to enter as favourable a partnership as possible with Wasps.”
City’s chief executive, Tim Fisher, insists they do not regret failing to buy the Ricoh, saying they could not agree to taking it on, as Wasps have done, not only for £5.4m but with the council’s £14m loan on the stadium still to pay. Fisher acknowledged the widespread scepticism at Sisu’s claim it will build a new stadium but said the company has recently made “giant strides” towards completing on land “on the outskirts of Coventry”, at a location yet to be revealed. Fisher said Sisu is not “playing a game” but genuinely planning to build the stadium, while enabling commercial development that will make it financially viable and produce year-round income.
“The scepticism is misplaced,” Fisher said. “We are moving the club to a self-sustaining model and are looking to grow, in a new stadium where we will have our own matchday and non-matchday revenues.”
Sisu took over in 2007 with the club in financial difficulties but still in the Championship. The club had the right to buy back the 50% share of the Ricoh’s operator, Arena Coventry Ltd, which a local charity bought after the club spent the proceeds of selling its old ground at Highfield Road. Spending investors’ money that the Sisu chief executive, Joy Seppala, has said included endowment funds for US universities, Sisu burned through millions in club losses in a failed effort to hit the Premier League jackpot by winning promotion.
In the resounding defeat in June of a high court action Sisu brought against Coventry City council, ACL and the Alan Edward Higgs charity alleging that the council’s £14.4m loan to ACL was illegal, Mr Justice Hickinbottom traced the sorry history. He noted that in April 2012, after “the football club had been seriously mismanaged”, negotiations to buy the charity’s 50% share of ACL had failed. Renegotiation of the £1m rent which all parties agreed was necessary also failed, after which Sisu and the club went on a “rent strike”.
The intention behind Sisu’s and the club’s withholding of the rent that was legally owed for playing at the Ricoh was, Hickinbottom ruled, to make ACL “weak and commercially vulnerable” so that Sisu could buy a share in ACL on the cheap. “It is undoubtedly the case that [Sisu’s] strategy was dependent upon buying into the arena cheaply,” the judge ruled.
Yet this effort to “distress” ACL was unsuccessful, because the council and the charity dug in.
It is remarkable to think, now Wasps have breathed life back into the Ricoh, that only last season Sisu vacated the place completely, saying no deal could be done and playing instead at Northampton in front of crowds occasionally dipping below 2,000.
The club returned in September after the fans’ overwhelming rejection of the Northampton move but still promised they intended to build their own stadium, which would leave the Ricoh tenantless. So ACL sold to Wasps, for £5.4m, with £2.7m going to each of the charity and the council, and with the £14m council loan intact.
Sisu has instigated another legal action over that loan, to support its petition in the court of appeal for leave to appeal Hickinbottom’s decision. So litigation continues, along with promises of a new stadium sometime for the falling Sky Blues, while Wasps saw the Ricoh Arena for the opportunity it represents and dived in.
