Doug King this week realised his ambition to see Coventry City return to the Premier League – the club’s automatic promotion pretty much assured due to an impressively high goal difference.
The club owner’s next task, of course, is trying to keep the Sky Blues in the top division in a sustainable way, preferably without yo-yoing between the Championship every other season.
A club like Brentford provides a decent model of how to achieve that goal, the Bees having been a relatively stable fixture among English football’s elite for the last five years.
Owning a football club is a financial commitment with plenty of risks, but King took the plunge in 2023 and has already ploughed in what must be getting on for around the £100m mark when considering the stadium cost £50m while player and infrastructure costs have got to be around the £40m mark, not to mention the purchase of the club in the first place.
Asked if those figures are about right, the 59-year-old businessman told CoventryLive: “I don’t really talk about that but look, you can do your maths, alright.
“We report our results and you can see the loss that we made (£20m for the financial year ending in 2025). In the first year we did some player trading (selling Viktor Gyokeres and Gustavo Hamer to the tune of about £35m), we invested everything on top of that, spent a lot of money on transfers, did the infrastructure (training ground and pitch improvements) and we’ve got operating losses every year.
“So you can calculate it out. Obviously the stadium (price) is in the public domain so look, there’s an investment. Now I put it more as – apart from the operating losses that obviously are gone – we’ve invested in the longer term, in the sustainability of the football club and we’ve invested in players that we have grown in stature around their value.
“So for me, we’ve translated money and some of it has been lost, gone and forgotten and that’s what you have to do. And obviously I had to buy the club in the first place. The next phase is, how do you make it far more sustainable and be competitive?
“That’s what I want to do. I’m not in this game to fudge in FFI (Future Financial Information), muck around and try and spend all my billions that I haven’t got into it. What I’m much more interested in doing is making this a high quality Premier League football team, ultimately, that can stay there.
“But really making a great, sustainable football club that isn’t reliant forever on just billionaire-type of funding because I don’t think that is necessarily always the right approach.”
He added: “I think we’ve seen that with Matt Benham (owner) at Brentford. I mean, they’ve still put plenty of money in but they’ve converted money into player value and then they trade, and then they get a bit more sustainable.
“And at some point they may sell some equity. I think he sold some equity and they work it all out. But they do it in a proper business way rather than, ‘I’ve got a load of money’ way and let’s go and do what we want to do because I want to have a team that’s top six in the Premier League.”
The London club’s high profile sales in recent years include: Bryan Mbeumo (£65m, 2025/26 – Man Utd), Yoane Wissa (£50m, 2025/26 – Newcastle), Ivan Toney (£40m, 2024/25 – Al-Ahli), David Raya (£27m with clauses, 2023/24 – Arsenal), Ollie Watkins (£30m, 2020/21 – Aston Villa) and Said Benrahma (£30m, 2020/21 – West Ham).
“Brentford’s a different club to Coventry,” he said. “I mean, Coventry is in a fantastic position in the country. There’s a lot of history, a much larger fanbase, much more pedigree in its historical achievements. So I think it has different sort of, I would say, ceilings than a Brentford.
“No disrespect to Brentford but it’s where it is and has achieved great things coming from a low-ish standpoint in its history. Great things for them to be achieving what they’re achieving, and that tells us what can be done in football. It’s 11 against 11, right?
“But the issue is that I think this city and this gateway to the Midlands is a bit untapped. We’ve never been together as a combined unit and therefore our ability to aspire should be there.”
Bournemouth are another example of a club doing impressive things despite a limited fanbase and stadium that holds just over 11,000. The Cherries first gained promotion to the Premier League in 2015, managing to stay for five years. Two season back in the Championship was followed by promotion in 2022 and the club have stayed up ever since, and are currently 10th in the table.
“The stadium is small and getting up out of the Championship with a small stadium where a lot of your revenue is match day is incredibly difficult,” said King.
“You know, I take my hat off. It would be much better if there wasn’t a distortion of parachute payments where, even this year, we’ll see who gets promoted. It could easily be two out of three, again, who go up from parachute payments.”
Coventry have bucked that trend but Ipswich now look favourites to take the second automatic promotion spot while in-form Southampton are building up a head of steam for a determined play-off campaign – the latter two looking for a swift return.
It makes City’s achievement all the more incredible.
“Yes, I think it is,” agreed King, who has long been campaigning for a fairer distribution of broadcasting money to bring an end to the trend of parachute clubs having a major advantage over their Championship rivals every year.
Asked if he fears that he, or Coventry City, could become the victims of the change he’s trying to bring about if the club get relegated, he insisted: “I’m okay with that.
“Listen, the speed of that things move, I’m sure that having been here for three and a half years where there were discussions prior to the regulator coming in of new terms that haven’t come to fruition. The regulator is in and we’ve had some meetings with the regulator. Am I optimistic that we’re going go at high speed? Probably not, unfortunately.”
He added: “I don’t think it’s that difficult but the Football League and the Premier League have run their institutions how they’ve run them for quite a number of years, a lot of years. They couldn’t agree, for a lot of reasons, how to redeploy some of the broadcasting revenues and to handle the parachute together. They couldn’t do it, it seems.
“So therefore, there had to be somebody to come in and do it because it has to be done. And so obviously that’s where the regulator comes in.
“I want them to focus on that, on how the distribution of funds and the distortion of the parachute payments, particularly, is the critical thing. That is the critical thing. I don’t really want to be duplicating a test of whether you’re fit to do this or do that, or who’s your director.
“Yes, one or two slip through, as they do in everything where it hasn’t quite gone how they’d have hoped and everybody gets a bit distressed. But these people, even the Sheffield Wednesday owner has left a lot of money on the table. He’s not done it deliberately.
“He’s disappointing for those fans to see that that’s come to that but the issue is, businesses do fail and this is not a good business. And it isn’t a good business because of the distribution, and the distortion is making it an incredibly challenging business, especially in the Championship.”
He added: “What you’re seeing in League One today is the owners moving to try and make it a far more sustainable from League One down because they’ve also had enough of playing catch-up and huge losses, EBITDAR (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortization, and Restructuring or Rent costs).
“If you keep having loss making businesses you will attract not the right sort of people to run those businesses or to own those businesses. In my view, you’ll attract fast money and people who want to have something for whatever reason because the proper business people who want to develop the brand, develop the things, are looking at it and going, it doesn’t look good on my EBITDAR metrics, or I’m going to have to rely on huge trading.
“So they need to get a handle on that, and that’s where they need to be focussed to get a better deal, better redistribution because the spread has gone too crazy. I mean, we get a solidarity payment from the Premier League of five and a half million quid. We get broadcasting rights in the EFL of five and a half million quid, so that’s £11million quid.”
Promotion to the Premier League is said to be worth around £200m, so you can see the size of the disparity and task ahead for King and his club, Coventry City, to keep it competitive while on a financial even keel
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