Doug King’s £10-15m reality check for Coventry City fans as Red Arrows put on hold

Doug King has reminded Coventry City fans that the club, like most Championship outfits, continues to operate as a loss-making business, revealing that most clubs in the division lose between £10m and £15m a year. The Sky Blues owner insists he is striving to get to a zero-loss position, which he admits is a “massive challenge”.

The chief executive was responding to a question from a supporter during an interview on BBC morning show CWR who felt the club was “missing a trick” because it did not have the bursts of flame and fireworks that some clubs have as part of pre-match build-up. and even asked if it would be possible for the club to get The Enemy to play a short set after the huge success of the band’s now adopted pre-match anthem, ‘We’ll Live And Die In These Towns’.

“I’ve been to most of the stadiums now and you’re right, some of them are really good, Molineux was so cool, it was crazy,” King said, speaking to CWR presenter Phil Upton.

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“All these things add to the excitement and the experience. I think we’re huge anyway with our pre-match with our anthem, we’ve got flags around the fringes now. You can do whatever you want, you can have fireworks, the red arrows come if you want, but everything costs an amount of money.

“And the problem is that people shouldn’t forget that running a Championship club is a significant losing exercise. Let’s put it this way, so it’s there. It’s not like I’m sitting on piles of dollars doing everything for the club and decide to put pants on it. It’s actually a loss-making business, so we have to look at everything very carefully.”

Asked if he still subsidizes the football club, he replied: “Yes, of course. Absolute. Operating losses…” King was then interrupted and told that “there will be a point in your business plan where it’s not sustainable, right?

King replied, “Well, it depends. Obviously, my whole goal, ultimately, is to make the operational side of the business as close to zero as possible. It’s going to be a massive challenge, especially when we don’t have any support from the Premier League through the new package and that’s why the regulators need to get involved. Let’s not go there!”

He added: “What’s in our control is in our control and we’re working to grow revenue and from the increased revenue then support as strong a team as possible with operating losses that won’t cause me to have too much. many sleepless nights. “That’s the aim indeed and alongside that we can buy some players and hopefully get it right at the right times.

“But if you look at the statistics of Championship clubs, most of them are losing between £10m and £15m a year. That’s how it works, so putting fireworks in etc is great, but it’s all just more waste. I want to make it fantastic because I want the stadium full and that’s why I’ve frozen the tickets.”

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