Coventry City missed the point of the Junior Sky Blues
Doug King learned the value of junior memberships the hard way
Friendlies are not real football matches.
Their goals aren’t goals. Their results aren’t results. They mean nothing. Beware the shyster hawking content.
Coventry City missed the point of the Junior Sky Blues
When I was a kid, I was a member of AFC Bournemouth’s Junior Cherries. I was born in Birmingham but Bournemouth were my local team from a very young age and it made more sense to join the Junior Cherries than the Junior Villans. It was, ultimately, about participation. I went to more Bournemouth games. Our local paper was the Evening Echo.
In terms of having a birthday photo in the sports pages, getting a card at Christmas, attending the odd party and being able to go out and kick a ball around with other football-mad kids, the Junior Cherries was the obvious choice. There’s no point in these clubs if you’re only partly part of something.
There was no reason at that time to suspect I’d end up living in, then near, Coventry. By the time I was thirty I supported a Coventry team but it’s entirely coincidental another junior club encounter more than two decades earlier was with Coventry City’s Junior Sky Blues.
One of my friends at primary school was another West Midlands transplant to the south coast and a big Coventry fan. Our grandmothers were friends in Ireland before our parents were born, too, which only emerged when they visited Bournemouth at the same time.
It’s a funny old game, Saint.
Thus I found myself visiting Coventry for the first time, carted up there by my friend’s family for the football. Before watching the real Sky Blues play in the Premier League at Highfield Road, we went to some playing fields that I probably know now but cannot remember, and played football with a massive group of kids in Coventry shirts.
That was a Junior Sky Blues event. How many of those fifty-odd kids were season ticket holders is impossible to know. It wasn’t relevant then and it shouldn’t matter now either.
Coventry announced in July – a couple of days before their new home kit went on sale, mind you – that membership of the Junior Sky Blues would be exclusive to season ticket holders.
I'll say it again. Membership of the Junior Sky Blues would be exclusive to season ticket holders. It was a decision of such astounding density that even the spiteful contrarianism of Twitter couldn't permeate the consensus. It takes something spectacular to unite any group of people nowadays. For that, Coventry City, I salute you.
“Junior Sky Blues memberships will be available EXCLUSIVELY for Season Ticket holders in the 2024/25 campaign!” parped the club's sales pitch.
“Purchasing a Season Ticket for the eagerly anticipated new campaign will be the only way for young Sky Blues supporters aged under 14 to become a member of the fantastic Junior Sky Blues membership for the 24/25 season.”
The next paragraph goes on to say that the Junior Sky Blues club was founded in 1970. It was part of Coventry City more than half a century before the current ownership. The triumphant tone of the announcement exposes a fundamental lack of understanding about the significance of that.
Coventry supporters have had to deal with a tsunami of shit since their relegation from the Premier League. Twice exiled and consistently put upon by shonky ownership, a destructive relationship with the local council and the invasion of a doomed rugby club, the Sky Blues needed a break when Doug King took over the club.
Their situation isn't perfect. Their stadium is owned by Mike Ashley and he's proven already that he's not above threatening to kick them out. But King's ownership quickly stabilised the club's tenure at the CBS Arena and has had a similar effect on the club as a whole.
Manager Mark Robins has flourished in what has been a more positive environment. City's resurgence on the pitch has brought supporters back to the ground, energised a city and put the team on the brink of a Premier League return. The city's reignited love for its football club is thick in the Coventry air.
But a football club is never going to be all sweetness and light. The response to the Junior Sky Blues announcement was universally negative.
It's refreshing to come across supporters willing to call out their own clubs when it's necessary, and so united was the reaction among the ranks of the Sky Blues support that it always seemed likely that the decision would be walked back in fairly short order. Sure enough, King undid it within a week.
But the club had already shown its arse. The people involved in the decision will rightly remain in the shadows, represented as they are by the owner of Coventry City, but it's fair to assume both that they were guided by numbers and numbers alone, and that they aren't former Junior Sky Blues.
Junior membership groups transcend geography, economics and access to matches. They give young supporters a way to identify with their clubs, to be a part of them, irrespective of anything beyond the fact of their membership.
By adding the season ticket layer, Coventry weren't just attempting to put membership behind a significant financial barrier. They were dismantling the entire purpose of the Junior Sky Blues. It mattered now where members live, what their backgrounds are, whether they can afford season tickets. It turned a unifier into a division.
Then, in a manner quite unusual in football in 2024, the division became the unifier. It was evidence not only of the strength of feeling but the inherent understanding among supporters as to why this was unwelcome and why it matters.
Supporters know that it’s important to attract the generation because we lived it as kids or are living it as parents. We just know. It’s instinctive.
Of all the choices our clubs make, the apparent refusal to take the path of least resistance in any given situation might be the most strange. If football clubs don’t embrace every chance they get to fill the top of the funnel without friction, they’re not going to need the funnel. Youngsters are their very best long-term bet – always have been, always will be.
It’s to Coventry and King’s credit that they recognised their mistake quickly and pulled the plug. Nobody expects the owners of their club to get everything right every time but we do want our voices to be heard and our opinions – our expertise – respected.
At Coventry that mechanism is functioning relatively well, and that’s just about all any of us can ask.
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“We’ve seen some other leagues across Europe have some of their competitive games held elsewhere. All 32 NFL teams have now played in London and all of them have had a great experience. We have some of the top baseball teams now playing in London.
“We’ve got seven Premier League clubs in London but when you look at the way the Premier League works, a lot of the revenue they receive is TV rights.
“Liverpool, the team that I support, are currently on tour in America. I think the point that the Premier League would make and some of the owners would make is, why can’t their fans in those countries benefit from a competitive game?
“The key thing for me is to make sure our fans don’t lose out. The thing we’ve learned from American football is often when the players go back to America the next game is an issue because of time zone, because of diet and so forth.”
I’ll attract a load of bots just by mentioning his name, but I have a lot of time for Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. He followed me when Twitter was just an innocent wee pup and he was my local MP.
So I don’t say this lightly: Khan stopped short of actually advocating for overseas Premier League fixtures in his recent comments on some podcast or other, but not by much. And not, in my view, by enough.
He did ask the question that’s always asked when Game 39 and its associated bastard ideas come up. Why can’t their fans in those countries benefit from a competitive game?
I don’t think that’s the right end of the question.
Salty beef extracts
St Mirren: The club built on charity playing its first European game in 37 years (i)
The thrill of stumbling across a football match while away on holiday (The Guardian)
England must not lose Gareth Southgate’s successes in the urge for revolution (The Guardian)
Girondins de Bordeaux: tombé en panne (Unexpected Delirium)
Dessert
I’m a sucker for a Mizuno football boot to a quite embarrassing degree. This is the Morelia Neo IV Beta Mugen in white, blue and gold. Utsukushii!
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