‘It was even stranger because my skills were bringing in money. I had an excellent relationship with many business people in Coventry and Warwickshire.
‘Six weeks before I was formally kicked off the board, I had brought in a sponsorship deal with Lloyds Pharmacy for £300,000.
‘After I left the board, I was made life president and I was still allowed to go into the boardroom and sit in the directors’ box.
‘But that didn’t sit easily with me. I would rather be involved in the business aspects rather than just sitting there doing nothing.’
He added: ‘I have always tried to do my best for the club and I used my retailing skills to bring in sponsorship and investment.
‘I was very honoured to be able to help the club over the years, especially with the academy.’
The move to replace Joe Elliott was obviously not unanimously popular.
Gary Hoffman said: ‘I would say that replacing Joe Elliott with John Clarke as the ‘local representative’ was akin to replacing a Premier League player with one from Division One in terms of experience set, football knowledge and local contacts and influence.
‘I remember John promising to the board that he would bring in £500,000 of funding within six months. I left the board immediately after the promise, but my guess is none of that was delivered.’
Less than two months later, the vice-chairman decided to blow the final whistle on his relationship with Sisu and his time on the club’s board. He had become disillusioned with the change of direction in the owner’s strategy for running the club and clearly found it difficult to see eye to eye with both new and existing board members.
The tipping point was believed to be when the club agreed to loan the highly rated midfielder, academy graduate, Conor Thomas, to Liverpool with a view to a £1m move – although that never materialised and Thomas’s career subsequently stalled after a long-running battle with injuries.
Hoffman also had reservations about the financing methods being employed by Sisu and a lack of certainty over whether the wages of coaches and staff would be paid on a month-to-month basis.
In February 2011, he formally resigned from the club’s board.
He said: ‘They wanted me to leave in the end [and] it was somewhat mutual.
‘I said to them there were decisions being made on players I didn’t agree with. But the bottom line is that I felt I was being misled, along with other board members.
‘They would say one thing they were going to do in a board meeting and then do something different.
‘I said I cannot serve on a board where the owners are not being honest with the directors on the board.
‘One example was I asked if we were recruiting a chief executive and was told no. Then one of Sisu’s employees tells me they’ve issued a contract to someone.’
He added: ‘I differed on business strategy, playing approach, funding plans and areas of focus/priority.
‘Onye believed that we needed to work to create a global Sky Blue brand for sports and not just football. Whilst I applaud visionaries, I thought we should concentrate on Cheylesmore, Radford, Bedworth etc first.
‘There are still too many people born and/or living in Coventry supporting other teams. Building relationships with the local community is a key part of this. Just because you have a portfolio of businesses in China, Hong Kong and France doesn’t mean there are synergies with them.
‘It started off well with the purchase of young players with potential. It was always the intention that some be sold on in order to create funding headroom for player trading.
‘But Onye did not understand the relationship between players’ wages, potential, contract length and value to the company. Refusal to extend contracts and/or increase wages resulted in players leaving us for significantly less than they should have done, Westwood and Gunnarsson being prime examples.
‘Funding strategy was unclear and not connected to the original commitment. I argued for either a clear commitment to fund to push for the Premier League, or funding for stability; or cutting costs radically if no funding was available.
‘What we had was none of these. Rather, a ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ method. Onye would not commit to the board that next month’s wages would be paid and that we needed third-party funding.
‘He said it was to keep us on our toes. To be fair if third-party funding did not arrive, Sisu pulled a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute.
‘Too often third-party funding was arranged with exorbitant interest rates and finder fees, like funding a house mortgage on credit card debt.
‘On top of this, Onye employed brand and business consultants in pursuit of the ‘global and digital dream’, spending well over £200,000 on such fruitless efforts.
‘Meanwhile, local suppliers were kept waiting for many months for their relatively small amounts of money, which was not good for local relationships.’
As things were being shaken up behind the scenes, the team’s play-off charge had fallen off a cliff.
The Sky Blue Army’s party had turned into an epic hangover as it crashed to a premature end. Nobody could quite explain why, but there was the suggestion that Boothroyd’s direct style of play had been ‘found out’ by opposition managers.
There were also rumours that Boothroyd had lost the dressing room. A performance of ‘the worm’ dance move at the club’s Christmas party had apparently undermined his authority as a hard taskmaster.
On 14 March 2011, Boothroyd was sacked by chairman Ray Ranson after a run of poor results which saw the club win only once in 16 league games.
Coventry City’s new beginning was rapidly falling apart. The owners scrambled around to assemble a new board after Ray Ranson indicated he would stay on to steady the ship.
But the storm had not yet passed. Ranson was clearly unhappy and, in an apparently orchestrated move, he announced his resignation just minutes before a press conference was scheduled to be held to unveil Coventry City’s new-look board.
He left in March 2011, complaining that Sisu had failed to give him the tools he needed to do his job.
Reflecting on the news of Ranson’s departure, John McGuigan said: ‘With Ray leading, things were moving forward in a positive way.
‘I was therefore very surprised to receive an urgent phone call from an ACL executive to say ‘Ray has just told us he’s leaving immediately and would have nothing more to do with Sisu and CCFC.’
‘He wouldn’t say any more, but clearly there must have been a final blow-up in terms of his relationship with Sisu.
‘Obviously there was then major public and private questioning about what happened and who did what to whom, but I never found out exactly what had happened.
‘Like many others, I heard lots of speculation and rumour. Only Ray Ranson can really tell us what happened, but I assume he’d signed some confidentiality agreement with Sisu to remain silent.’
Peter Knatchbull-Hugessen said: ‘It was fine under Ray and Daniel Gidney [then ACL chief executive]. They worked together and it functioned.
‘The club got two-thirds of the way to achieving their objective of promotion and then Sisu bottled it. Joy must have realised Onye had been leading her down an expensive garden path.
‘Her taking control and taking it away from Ranson is the thing that killed it.
‘If she had taken it away from Onye and left Ranson, they could have achieved it.
‘I think, at that point, they were preparing to put the club into administration, but they wanted someone else to push them.’
Chapter Five
‘Best board ever’
IT’S March 2011 and Coventry City FC’s owners have called a flashy press conference to unveil their ‘best board ever’. But the new board hasn’t even been announced and a spanner is immediately thrown into the works as outgoing chairman Ray Ranson – who had initially agreed to stay on as an advisor – resigns just 30 minutes before the press conference is due to be held at the Ri
coh Arena.
It was obviously a deliberately orchestrated move by a clearly unhappy man, designed to cause the new owners problems.
The club was manager-less, without a chairman and seemingly without direction.
But Coventry City fans were reassured that everything would be OK and that better times lay beyond the horizon – despite the fact the club was perilously close to the relegation zone and teetering on the brink of administration.
In came Paul Clouting, a former Ipswich Town CEO, as the club’s new chief executive, and John Clarke, a board member in the 1990s and the local voice, as vice-chairman. Canadian internet expert Leonard Brody filled another position along with Ken Dulieu, who was made chairman, having previously been chairman at Southampton. Sisu man Onye Igwe also kept his position on the board.
This had already been a turbulent period for the club. In recent months, the club had got through three finance directors in Mal Brannigan, Ed Baker and John Street; two commercial directors in Nathan Kosky and Brian Phillpotts, a former commercial director at the Premier League; and a commercial manager in Jas Sodhi.
The club had also shed four other directors, including Sisu-appointed Mike Parton, who is understood to have resigned over a lack of clarity on the business plan; Walter Bosco, who was briefly put on the board by Sisu then taken off; and former vice-chairman Gary Hoffman, who publicly resigned after losing confidence in Sisu. Joe Elliott had also been forced off the board and made life president.
In addition, board secretary John Tomlinson had resigned while Onye Igwe’s personal assistant, Helen Chandler, had also quit.
In a barbed comment aimed at the owners’ handling of the club during this period, Gary Hoffman said: ‘I might be wrong, Ray might be wrong, the council might be wrong, a succession of CEOs, CFOs and commercial directors might be wrong. But it is unlikely we are all wrong.’
Former chairman Geoffrey Robinson was also clearly far from impressed at a perceived lack of progress since Sisu’s takeover.
Speaking to the Telegraph at the time of the board changes, he said: ‘It shows that people have got no confidence in them and there’s no future.
‘The people either go or they sack them because they have got no plan for the business.
‘It’s death by a thousand cuts – death by inactivity, by not spending any money and not doing anything.
‘All they have done so far is fund losses which they are responsible for creating.
‘We never had losses of this scale.’
He added: ‘The football club is a total disaster.
‘They have made a total mess of it – a disgraceful mess – and they should find a good home for the club as soon as possible, write off their losses, which they are entirely responsible for themselves, and let’s get the club back on the up.
‘With this ownership and these people, the club has no future.
‘I have grave concerns about the club because the owners have turned out to be an absolute waste of time and space.
‘The club and the city deserve better than they have produced.
‘They gave all sorts of statements about what they intended to do for the club and how they were going to get us back to the Premier League, all the usual stuff, and I believed it.
‘Of course you can’t, in those circumstances, get a written undertaking because you can’t do anything if it doesn’t come off.
‘But I am bitterly disappointed, as disappointed as any man possibly could be.’
The new board, brought in to steady the ship and instil confidence, seemed not to have the desired effect after making some bizarre public statements within the first few days of taking over.
Paul Clouting described the club as a ‘basket case’ in an interview with the Coventry Telegraph.
He said: ‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist looking from the outside to look at this business and argue that it is a bit of a basket case in the sense of it is losing money and it is not as successful as arguably a club of this stature should be.’
He added: ‘The company is haemorrhaging money so the first job was, how do we stop the club going into administration?’
There were also criticisms that the new-look board was too far removed from the club because many of them lived in other cities or countries. And Clouting did little to reassure fans that the board would offer a hands-on approach.
He said: ‘Will Leonard be at every single game? No he won’t because he has got other things to do and a life in the States.
‘Will Ken be at every game? No, because he is in Portugal.
‘Will I be at every game? Probably not. I live in Ipswich. But I am not interested in second best and I am very competitive with myself about what I do and what I don’t do, and how successful I can be, and hopefully the value I can bring to the business.’
Having demonstrated such clear commitment in his first interview as the club’s chief executive, it’s perhaps not surprising that he left the club after just seven months at the top, opting for a quieter life running a golf and country club.
Despite his infamous ‘text a sub’ suggestion in his inaugural board meeting, Leonard Brody did seem to be a popular appointment with fans in the beginning. This was not least down to his willingness to interact with fans online – although he later mysteriously disappeared from social media network Twitter when things continued on a downward trajectory.
Following his appointment to the board, he offered a scathing view about what had gone wrong under Sisu’s time in charge of the club.
He told the Coventry Telegraph: ‘In three years and £30m, where did it get you? Virtually in the same place. Somebody has to be accountable.
‘The fingers can’t be pointed at the investors. The fingers have to be pointed at the people responsible for running it. You don’t see CEOs of companies turning round and blaming their investors for lack of performance.
‘That doesn’t come from the investor, it comes from the team that was responsible for stewarding this club for the community. And the results weren’t there.
‘We mustn’t sugar-coat this. People should know the truth.
‘What you were witnessing was three years of a dispute between shareholders, people who had different visions and different ideas about where the club was and what they wanted to do.
‘The key difference here is unity. You now have the shareholders dispute resolved and a new board that is committed not only to the team but also to the community.’
But that commitment, it seems, only stretched so far, as Leonard Brody departed just eight months after joining the board citing ‘time constraints’.
One thing that did appear to be clear under the new leadership was that the focus had shifted to acquiring a stake in the Ricoh Arena as well as driving down the club’s debts.
It’s perhaps understandable that a club in such financial difficulty would desperately be searching for assets to act as security. Asked why there had been a sudden change of focus in relation to the stadium, Onye Igwe said at the time: ‘It’s a question of having a management team who could deliver on that and so far that has not happened.
‘Maybe you could say we didn’t move hard enough and fast enough to do that, but the new board recognises it as a day-one priority.’
He added: ‘We have already invested several millions of pounds and we haven’t taken anything out.
‘When we came in, we had the view of improving the way the business operates. It is clear that has not been successful but we’ve got a lot of very good ideas that, up until now, with all that’s been going on, have been lost.
‘I am convinced we’ve got the right board in place. We thought long and hard about the qualities and skills we needed and they’ve got a lot of experience and some great ideas on how we can move forward.’
While Onye Igwe might have been convinced of his own skills and his ability to take the club forward, it seems others above him were not. Just over a year later, Igwe’s departure from the club w
as confirmed – although it appeared he had not been actively involved for some time. He was also no longer listed as a director of Sisu Capital by April 2012.
But Onye Igwe lasted longer than the club’s new head of football operations – or chairman. Ken Dulieu enjoyed a brief but colourful spell as top dog after proclaiming himself as the man to rescue the club. In various press interviews, he claimed he had talked the owners out of putting the club into administration and that they were hours, if not days, away from pulling the plug.
He went on to earn the nickname ‘Orange Ken’ from supporters on account of his perma-tan look.
Highlights of his reign included arranging a pre-season training camp to Vale do Lobo in Portugal, where they trained on a pitch at the rear of the grounds to his luxury villa.
He was also pictured wearing training kit with his initials on and taking a seat on the bench during a match.
That incident ultimately led to his downfall and he resigned in December 2011 citing it as a ‘gross error of judgement’.
Just over 12 months previously, the Sky Blues faced Leeds United in front of a bumper Ricoh Arena crowd aiming to cement their place in the Championship play-offs.
But, bizarrely, he left insisting that he had turned the club around and left it in a better place despite it being in turmoil off the pitch and struggling to avoid relegation on the field.
In a strange interview with the Coventry Telegraph at the time of his departure, he said he believed the Ricoh Arena situation had progressed thanks to his background in the Northern Ireland conflict and that he was never in it for the long term
He said: ‘I used to look after security operations in Northern Ireland and it was a nightmare.
‘But, ultimately, people did start talking and resolving their differences and it is actually quite a nice place to go now.’
He added: ‘I was never going to be here long-term. My job was interim to turn the business around and we are in front of budget and turned the business around substantially, and now the building blocks are in place and we can move forward with a lot more confidence than we had in March.’
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