‘A Club Without A Home’: First-Hand Experiences From The Exile Of Coventry City

In early May 2013, the rumblings of upheaval could be heard at Coventry City. It was then that the club announced that a contingency plan had been put in place for the coming season, with the aim of finding a venue for home games ahead of the 2013/14 campaign. Though various ideas were mooted, it was eventually decided that Coventry would play at Northampton Town's Sixfields Stadium. The Sky Blues were to be uprooted from their home town, and banished to a ground around 35 miles away.

The cause of this catastrophe was a bitter rent row over the Ricoh Arena, home to Coventry since 2005. There had been a near-total breakdown in relations between Sisu, the hedge fund which owns the club, and Arena Coventry Limited, the company that owned the Ricoh and which was, in turn, owned by Coventry City Council and the Higgs Charity. While both sides were quick to allocate blame to the other, the cold, hard reality was that the club was about to be separated from its supporters, and exiled from the city whose name it bore. The impasse between Sisu and Arena Coventry Limited looked to be immovable, and so the team sloped off to Northampton, downcast, displaced, and at perhaps their lowest ebb.

Unsurprisingly, the decision to move the club to Northampton was fiercely opposed by Coventry fans. It deepened the considerable resentment felt towards Sisu, who had also put the club into administration and, accordingly, incurred a 10-point penalty for the team ahead of the start of their League One campaign. This came only one full season after their relegation from the Championship, and turned what was otherwise a difficult situation into a full-blown footballing crisis. Soon enough, supporter groups were calling for the owners to sell up, while protests and matchday boycotts became regular occurrences.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Coventry began their 2013/14 campaign, in the face of dwindling crowds and fan unrest. All the while, their plight was being covered in close detail by the local press, including the hawkish Coventry Telegraph. With a considerable number of Sky Blues fans in the office, the Telegraph's reporters had a close personal interest in telling the story of Coventry in exile. One of those reporters was Simon Gilbert, who has now written a book about the experience, titled 'A Club Without A Home'.

Speaking about the current problems at Coventry City, Simon also discussed his time covering the club's spell in the wilderness, away from Coventry. "The reason I decided to write the book in the first place was that I felt this was such an important period in the club's history, and arguably the darkest period, certainly post-war," he told VICE Sports. "Likewise, we need to document this stuff. The bad times need to be documented because, otherwise, how are we meant to learn from the past?"

These were certainly bad times for Coventry, not helped by the very real prospect of relegation to League Two come the end of the season. While the team initially adapted well to life at Sixfields, they suffered a major mid-season slump, and went on to flirt with the drop for the latter part of the campaign. Meanwhile, the anguish of the supporters only became more profound as the season went on, with negotiations on a return to the Ricoh progressing at what seemed like a glacial pace. Witnessing this anguish first-hand was another motivating factor for Simon, and 'A Club Without A Home' attempts to chronicle Coventry fans' fight to return their club to its rightful place.

"When I would ask Coventry fans how it felt to see the team leave the city, the most common answer would be that it was like having a death in the family," Simon explained. "It was a genuinely traumatic experience for the fans. This wasn't just a case of 'Ah, well, the football club has only moved a few miles down the road'. This was devastating for some people. I had grown men in tears on the phone to me, telling me that they didn't know what they were going to do with their Saturdays anymore. They wanted to go and support their team, but they couldn't support them, as they felt that what had been done to the club was so morally wrong."

The strength of feeling about Coventry's exile is infinitely apparent. "These supporters were not prepared to watch Coventry City play in a town which wasn't its birthplace – they were not prepared to watch the team outside the city which gave the club its name."

As a Coventry fan himself, Simon understands better than most the wounds inflicted on the fanbase over the course of the club's exile. "The situation had an effect on me personally, in that I was angry about what was being done to the club I'd supported since I was a youngster," he said. "It was a sad time, and a time filled with anger, but there were also moments which gave us hope. There were fan-organised protests, big marches through the city. Coventry fans would tie blue ribbons all around the place, in reference to the old 'Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree' song. The idea, taken from the song, was that you tie a ribbon to mark the moment your loved one comes home."

There was symbolic importance to these gestures, even if the fans weren't sure when the club would return. "In a way, I think that sort of stuff helped some supporters rediscover their love for the football club, while it was also a reminder of how important the club was for the people of Coventry, the fans and the city in general," said Simon.

While 'A Club Without A Home' is concerned with shedding light on a dark time for Coventry City, these individual stories of supporting the side through their exile are of equal importance. This is a tale of a disastrous spell for a football club, but also the ways in which that affected the wider community as a whole. Coventry might have managed to survive their spell at Sixfields, but the club faces a plethora of problems to this day. 'A Club Without A Home' explores the events which led up to the dire straits Coventry now find themselves in, and gives insight into one of the most turbulent situations in recent footballing history.

'A Club Without A Home' is available to pre-order, and goes on general sale on 7 October.