How Coventry got its groove back

“Alright, lads. Go to the game last night?” 

Three nods. 

“Good night?” 

Three, more rueful, nods. 

“Still going?” They nod again, then break into laughter. “No, no! We have slept.”

Wednesday morning, 11:30 am. Will, Quinn and Tom are sat outside the Earl of Mercia in Coventry city centre, the leftovers of well-earned breakfasts in front of them. Three local lads now living and working in London, they came home to watch Coventry City hammer Portsmouth 5-1 last night. The team’s promotion to the Premier League was already confirmed, but last night’s win also secured the Championship title, sparking celebrations that saw the three friends partying at the ground, along with some of the players, until 2 am. And who can blame them? They’ve had a long wait.

“I was eight when we got relegated from the Prem,” remembers Tom. “It was like, ‘Oh, we’ll be straight back up…’”  That was in May 2001, a more innocent time. Everyone had Nokia 3210s. Dido and David Gray were inescapable on the radio. George Dubya was definitely as bad as US presidents could get.

After relegation, Coventry didn’t come straight back up. The timing of their drop actually sparked a slow-burning catastrophe. They’d already sold their ground, Highfield Road, to developers to help fund a new, 90,000-seater “super-stadium” on the city’s outskirts, intended to replace Wembley as England’s national stadium.

Relegation, and the accompanying financial hit, made such grandiose plans untenable. The new ground (initially known as the Ricoh Arena, but currently the Coventry Building Society (CBS) Arena), did open in 2005. And while its capacity was “only” 31,000, it still boasted an on-site hotel and casino.

But Coventry City didn’t own any of it. They’d had to give their share to a local charity to settle a multimillion-pound debt. They became renters. From there everything declined; the next two decades would see the club evicted and relegated twice more, to the lowest tier of professional football. But more than two decades of homelessness and humiliations later, Coventry City finally repurchased their stadium in 2025, just months before ascending to the Premier League again. This is less a club that’s bounced back; more one that’s tumbled down several staircases, then dragged themselves up, step-by-step. 

It’s an endemically feel-good British underdog story, a West Midlands Full Monty or Billy Elliot, underpinned by similar class subtext and indelibly marked by the wider historical hardships Coventry has faced. Having rebuilt after the destruction wrought upon it during the Blitz (destruction so brutal the Nazis invented a verb, coventrieren, to describe it), it became home to a thriving car industry, only for that to painfully collapse during the 1970s and 1980s. Add in its reputation for being variously ugly, unfriendly and generally crap, and you get a picture of a city used to having its back against the wall. That’s why the joy feels so palpable in Coventry’s shopping precinct this morning. 

Mother-and-son duo, Ruth and Sam, are sitting by a fountain, happily chatting with passers-by. They’re identifiable as attendees of the previous night’s game thanks to the massive Coventry City flag draped around Sam. Yet again, they’re locals who’ve moved away but return regularly for the football, making the 300-mile round-trip from Poole in Dorset. “You’ll find that a lot,” Tom had told me at the Earl of Mercia. “People tend to leave. London’s only an hour away [the direct Avanti service to Euston takes 58 minutes], so it’s easy to nip back.” 

We hope you're enjoying this story about the resurgence of Coventry and its football club. This is what local journalism is for. We hold politicians to account and dig into dodgy business owners, yes. But we also just love a fantastic story.

We're not alone in that, of course. Coventry City FC's rise has been covered everywhere. But we wondered about the impact on the city, for those who've been living sky blue not just at weekends. It was a pleasure to send along Shaun to report this, and even more so to have local Coventry talent, Aaron photograph his home.

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Ruth is visibly still buzzing, in her home shirt and bucket hat. “I’ve never known anything like last night,” she beams. “We’re elated!”

And the city’s football club isn’t an anomaly — there’s a general feeling that Coventry might be about to enter a new moment in the sun.