A Mess In Sky Blue

A sense of perspective is often what lends to the theory of a crisis.

If a team has been unilaterally successful, then a crisis is simply going a year without a trophy or the Champions League. This sense of hype is what leads to several trillion "Arsenal are in a crisis" articles.

But crisis station changes the further down the league system, where the trouble is of getting success and more the point of the club staying alive to experience anything.

For a few years, the league's crisis club has been Portsmouth, but with the South Coast seemingly in some degree of order, the big crisis club has to fall somewhere else. And indeed, it lies some 140 miles up the road from Pompey in Coventry City FC.

It's easy to feel some sympathy for the older generation of CCFC supporters, who, in the mid-90s, supported a team that was a byword for Premier League stability until their relegation in 2001.

But the last few years have seen the club disintegrate in spectacular fashion, and has hit new lows by moving away to a smaller ground some 40 minutes away.

Indeed, it all falls back to when the club almost collapsed during the construction of the Ricoh Arena, and had to have the stadium construction supported by Coventry City Council.

Fans debate the point of the move from Highfield Road - their ground for 106 years - to the Ricoh in 2005, where they moved to a stadium just 10,000 bigger at a time when they simply didn't need to. It only really would have been beneficial if Coventry City were still a Premier League club.

The club was (just) saved from administration in 2007 by an American hedge fund called SISU, but that 'saving' has turned out to be the opposite of history, as the club now finds itself in administration and now homeless following a dispute with the people who run the stadium.

The Ricoh Arena has gone down as a white elephant amongst Sky Blues supporters. Animosity even reached the point that some fans were devastated that a reported fire at the venue in May was just pyrotechnic testing by Muse ahead of a concert at the stadium.

At the same time, it is still in the city of Coventry. Which is infinitely preferable to the idea of having to leave the city to watch their team ply their trade.

Northampton Town's ground - their new home - is a significantly smaller venue unlikely to fit the demands of a full Ricoh crowd. However, as the venue is closer to selling out for concerts than it is for Sky Blues games, and a number of fans are unlikely to follow the team, the newly enlarged 10,000 stadium should manage. But it is an unholy mess that Coventry are even in such a position.

Even more remarkable - and downright idiotic - is the idea that Coventry's owners SISU should be allowed to buy the club back out of administration. In any logical world, the fact the owners have screwed the club up means they shouldn't be allowed back in, even in the disguise of a subsidiary or a new company.

Naturally, a SISU subsidiary called Otium Entertainment featuring three ex-SISU directors has bought the club and pushed through the relocation, as well as plans for a new stadium.

The Football League duly approved - reluctantly, but they still approved it - their move to share Sixfields with Northampton. This means a 32 mile move, removing the club from the community to a town where they will be more interested in the matters of their own team or simply hoping to see Coventry beat MK Dons. Unless MPs and supporter unrest can force an alternative, this paradigm looks like what things will be like for the next three seasons.

Quite exactly what the point of SISU building a new stadium when there already is a stadium where it would be cheaper just to pay the venue rent, and how much cash is in the owners to do anything, is a good series of question. It is also a series of questions they seem unwilling to answer, leaving helpless fans unstuck.

The dysfunctional mess of the last few years has spat out a pretty awful composition. The club now lies a broken, tattered mess run by irresponsible and gutless owners who do not have a clue what they are doing.

Where this leads is anyone's guess. It's too early to speculate about the idea Coventry may follow the lead of Wimbledon and move away, while it seems more and more unlikely they'll bury the hatchet with ACL and move back into the Ricoh Arena. But unless things improve, its likely the club could well fall out of existence altogether.

For a club that has been around for over 125 years, that really would be the real tragedy of this whole sorry fiasco.