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<\/p>\nThere were Coventry City supporters in tears, others went topless, while some held up signs saying \u2018We\u2019re back.\u2019<\/p>\n
After centre-half Bobby Thomas\u2019 late equaliser away at struggling Blackburn Rovers, Coventry were finally there, sparking jubilant scenes in front of their 7,500 travelling fans.<\/p>\n
After achieving promotion, their visibly emotional manager Frank Lampard told Sky Sports: \u201cIt\u2019s a serious, serious football club. This incredible fanbase and what it means to the city, and what these players have achieved.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe came in 15 months ago, 17th in the league, Mark Robins had done an incredible job to get them back up where they were, but to go and get automatic promotion as a non-parachute team, with three games to go, those boys there, how they\u2019ve listened and trained and everything they\u2019ve done, every day, it makes me feel emotional.\u201d<\/p>\n
After a long, torturous 25-year wait, Coventry are back in the Premier League.<\/p>\n
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\n Joyous Coventry players and coaching staff celebrate their return to the Premier League (Lewis Storey\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Coventry\u2019s 34-year stay in England\u2019s top flight was ended on May 5, 2001 \u2014 and it\u2019s been quite the journey back for the club from the West Midlands.<\/p>\n
They were relegated to League One \u2014 England\u2019s third tier \u2014 in 2012 before hitting rock bottom when they dropped to League Two five years later.<\/p>\n
Under Mark Robins\u2019 steady leadership, Coventry started to work their way back. A month after he joined as manager, they won the 2017 EFL Trophy (a competition for teams from the third and fourth tiers) against Oxford United. Attended by around 43,000 Coventry supporters at Wembley, the final was seen as a pivotal moment in galvanising the fanbase, even as the club circled the drain in League One.<\/p>\n
Their faith was repaid a year later, with Coventry winning promotion back to the third tier at the first attempt via the play-offs.<\/p>\n
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\n Coventry won the EFL Trophy in front of 43,000 of their fans in 2017 (Bryn Lennon\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like everyone realised at the same time, there are a lot of people who love this club, and if it wasn\u2019t so crap all the time, maybe it could be quite nice,\u201d Joey Crone from the Coventry podcast Nii Lamptey tells The Athletic when reminiscing about the EFL Trophy final. \u201cAnd it\u2019s gradually grown since then.\u201d<\/p>\n
After gaining promotion back to the Championship in the Covid-19-disrupted 2019-20 season, they twice reached the play-offs, only to fall in heartbreaking fashion. The first attempt saw Luton Town defeat them in the final after a penalty shootout in 2023, before a dramatic 122nd-minute goal from Sunderland shattered their dreams<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n A year earlier, they almost completed an extraordinary comeback victory over Manchester United<\/a> in the FA Cup semi-final, a competition they won in 1987, when the VAR disallowed a 120th-minute \u2018goal\u2019 that was offside by the tiniest margin. It would have put them 4-3 up in a match they had been trailing 3-0. They went on to lose the penalty shootout.<\/p>\n Yet after those tough times and near misses, Coventry have at last returned to England\u2019s top tier.<\/p>\n After being held 0-0 at home to a stubborn Sheffield Wednesday last Saturday, promotion was finally sealed with a 1-1 draw at Blackburn Rovers on Friday night, in front of 7,500 ecstatic Coventry fans in the Darwen End.<\/p>\n \u201cThese boys have managed to achieve something pretty unique, absolutely special and incredible,\u201d Lampard told Sky Sports afterwards.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve fallen in love with the players, how they\u2019ve reacted, the fanbase, how they\u2019ve reacted, so it\u2019s right up for me, for what I\u2019ve achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Coventry nearly beat Manchester United in the 2024 FA Cup semi-finals (Richard Heathcote\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n For all the drama on the pitch for Coventry in the last quarter of a century, there has been plenty of turmoil off it as well.<\/p>\n Having left Highfield Road, their city-centre home of 106 years, in 2005, the club moved to the Ricoh Arena, a stadium on the city\u2019s outskirts, just off the M6.<\/p>\n Instead of ushering in a new dawn, it proved a false one<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the 2013-14 season, Coventry played their home matches at Northampton Town, 34 miles away, because of a rent dispute, while there were regular protests against former owner Sisu, a London-based hedge fund. They then spent two seasons groundsharing with Birmingham City from 2019 to 2021, following a dispute between Sisu and Wasps, the rugby union club that owned the Ricoh Arena.<\/p>\n Coventry agreed a deal to return to the Ricoh, now known as the Coventry Building Society Arena, in March 2021, on a 10-year deal with Wasps, only for the six-time Premiership Rugby champions to go into administration. Mike Ashley then took over the stadium and agreed a new five-year deal with the club. Finally, in August last year, Coventry chairman Doug King \u2014 who became the club\u2019s sole owner in January 2023 \u2014 bought the stadium from Ashley\u2019s Fraser Group.<\/p>\n King declared that a \u201cdefining day\u201d<\/a> for Coventry, and they celebrated in style, with an emphatic 7-1 victory over Queens Park Rangers at the stadium just hours after the purchase was confirmed.<\/p>\n \n Fans make their way to the Coventry Building Society Arena (Dan Mullan\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n King\u2019s other big call was replacing long-serving and popular manager Robins with Lampard in November 2024.<\/p>\n Lampard had been out of work for 18 months and arrived with a point to prove, especially after his last job, a bruising spell as Chelsea\u2019s caretaker<\/a>.<\/p>\n Before joining Coventry, Lampard\u2019s coaching career had been varied, with some notable high points, but also tough moments.<\/p>\n In his first season as a manager at Derby County, he reached the Championship play-off final, only to lose to Aston Villa. He had only 12 months of experience, but his dream job came up that summer \u2014 head coach at Chelsea, the club he served with such distinction as a player. He accepted the role and it started positively, despite a transfer ban, steering the club to Champions League qualification and the FA Cup final, where they lost to Arsenal.<\/p>\n However, he found it hard going in his second season and he was sacked in January 2021 after 19 months in charge, with Chelsea ninth in the table.<\/p>\n A year later, he was hired by Everton, winning over the fanbase with a push for Premier League survival that culminated in a joyous pitch invasion. Yet he struggled to build on his strong start<\/a> and was dismissed halfway through the next season, with Everton 19th, before that painful two-month caretaker period back at Chelsea.<\/p>\n \n Milan van Ewijk with Frank Lampard, who was appointed Coventry City head coach in November 2024 (Michael Steele\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n Coventry gave Lampard the stability he craved after operating under challenging circumstances at Chelsea and Everton. It also afforded him the chance to work away from the intense media glare<\/a> of the Premier League.<\/p>\n He arrived at Coventry \u2014 with a talented but underperforming squad who had reached the play-off final the season before \u2014 17th in the table and two points above the relegation zone.<\/p>\n Lampard brought in trusted assistants Joe Edwards and Chris Jones, with whom he had worked at his former clubs. Edwards also joined with something to prove after a difficult spell in charge of Millwall that lasted just over three months.<\/p>\n Following his first game in charge, a 2-2 draw at home against Cardiff City, Lampard told reporters<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019m here as head coach, I\u2019m not here as a celebrity.\u201d<\/p>\n Lampard quickly set about instilling belief in the players again.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you looked at the team, I don\u2019t think there was a clear identity and that can happen without confidence,\u201d he told The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019ve lost my job as well, so I understand what can happen. My job was to go: \u2018Where can we get better?\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n In that first season, Lampard\u2019s Coventry started to click at the turn of the year, winning nine matches from 10 league fixtures between the middle of January and March.<\/p>\n Having overseen an impressive revival, Coventry finished the Championship season in fifth before that late sucker punch against Sunderland in the play-off semi-final.<\/p>\n There was a determination to use last year\u2019s play-off setback as fuel this campaign.<\/p>\n Coventry\u2019s season began with a pre-season camp in Portugal, described by new signing Kaine Kesler-Hayden in a previous interview with The Athletic<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cone of the hardest I\u2019ve had\u201d, but there was also time for team bonding, with a Ryder Cup-style golf tournament<\/a> between the staff and players.<\/p>\n There was no major overhaul of the squad this summer, although captain Ben Sheaf departed for Wrexham in a \u00a36.5million ($9m) deal.<\/p>\n In came Kesler-Hayden and defender Luke Woolfenden, while goalkeeper Carl Rushworth arrived on loan from Brighton & Hove Albion. Yet the squad remained stable, with many players arriving in the summer of 2023 following the lucrative sales of Viktor Gyokeres and Gustavo Hamer that same window.<\/p>\n \n Viktor Gyokeres, now at Arsenal, left Coventry in 2023 (Richard Heathcote\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n One of Lampard\u2019s most notable achievements has been improving the tight-knit squad he inherited, with players such as winger Ephron Mason-Clark and forward Brandon Thomas-Asante, who have worked their way up the EFL pyramid, excelling under his watch. Mason-Clark, who started his career at Barnet, even had a spell on loan at Metropolitan Police FC as a teenager.<\/p>\n Coventry\u2019s players have spoken in glowing terms about Lampard\u2019s impact. \u201cHe\u2019s everything I need from a mentor,\u201d gifted midfielder Jack Rudoni told The i newspaper in March<\/a>. \u201cWe talk a lot, we work very closely in training sessions, and we talk off the pitch. You can see it in the way my game\u2019s come on.\u201d<\/p>\n Former Premier League winger Stephen Hunt, who now acts as Rushworth\u2019s agent, agreed. \u201cAll of the players have been very complimentary of Frank,\u201d he tells The Athletic. \u201cHe is a calm leader, he leads by example by not panicking, and he has a winning mentality.<\/p>\n \u201cRight from an early start, a bit like my old team at Reading 20 years ago, they have been free-scoring. If an opposition team scores, they don\u2019t panic but go and score a few more. And they have scored all types of goals, with goals shared around the team.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people were in uproar about Robins being sacked, but he just wasn\u2019t the man that was going to do this,\u201d podcaster Crone tells The Athletic. \u201cLampard has been that man. It\u2019s a machine that is powered by vibes. The players are exceptionally close to each other. Lampard has tied it all together in a way that\u2019s worked as a meaningful whole.\u201d<\/p>\n There have been efforts to improve the matchday atmosphere, with one example being The Enemy, an indie rock band from Coventry, performing their song We\u2019ll Live and Die in These Towns before the Sheffield United game in November. It was a stirring rendition of their pre-match song \u2014 which is all about sticking with your hometown, whatever its flaws \u2014 and Coventry went on to win the game 3-1. Lampard has built a strong rapport with the Coventry fans and was even invited to one supporter\u2019s wedding<\/a> before the Derby match on Good Friday.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2149633597-scaled.jpg\")
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