Coventry City are back in the Premier League, and the man who bankrolled the journey spent the night of their promotion at a Travelodge off the M65. Doug King, the straight-talking businessman who took control of the club and set about reversing one of English football's longer absences from the top division, was in the Ewood Park boardroom when the moment was confirmed at Blackburn. He had a tear in his eye. By the time he made it to his motorway lodgings, the soundtrack was unmistakable. "It was noisy," he told the Guardian, "because all I could hear pretty much all night was: 'We are Premier League.'" Twenty-five years of waiting, condensed into a chant through a corridor wall.
The celebrations did not stop there. After Coventry were crowned champions last month, King drank from the trophy — an opportunity he seized with some relish. "I didn't think the lid would come off," he said, "so we had to make the most of that." The largest public event came with Monday's open-top bus parade, which began on Jimmy Hill Way, a street named after the manager who first took the club into the top flight back in 1967. The symmetry was not lost on those who lined the route.
King has been effusive in his praise of the manager he appointed to oversee the push, telling the Guardian he had no doubt the appointment would succeed and that the job has gotten under his manager's skin — a telling phrase that suggests the relationship between the dugout and the boardroom has become something more than transactional. Building that kind of institutional attachment tends to matter when the harder work begins.
And the harder work is precisely what lies ahead. Promotion after a quarter-century away is one thing; consolidation in the Premier League is another entirely. Coventry will enter a division of considerable financial and technical depth, where newly promoted clubs frequently find the first season a chastening exercise in reorientation. King has spoken publicly about aiming even higher, though the immediate priority will be assembling a squad equipped to compete at the level they have now earned the right to occupy.
The club's history lends the moment genuine weight. Coventry spent the bulk of their Premier League years as survivors rather than contenders, famously avoiding relegation on the final day more than once before eventually going down in 2001. The intervening decades took them through two further relegations, a prolonged ground dispute, and genuine questions about the club's long-term stability. King's arrival changed the financial picture. Promotion, it turns out, changed everything else.