Coventry City board member Ken Dulieu believes that the Sky Blues must buy their share of the Ricoh Arena.
Currently, City pay rent to play at the Arena, having sold their share to the Alan Higgs Trust and this has limited the income streams available to them, which meant that the club lose around £80k a week.
This is also one issue which would appear to contradict the opinion of the chairman Ray Ranson who previously said at shareholders meetings and other events that buying all or part of the Ricoh was not his highest priority, but Mr Dulieu would appear to think the exact opposite.
"I keep saying I am the new boy and still learning but it is obviously my view that every football club should own its own stadium outright and I would hope that fans will appreciate that as well,” he said to the CT.
“Long term I think the club should move towards the ownership of the stadium. There is no doubt this is a Premiership club and the stadium is probably the best in the land. I was in awe when I came here and we have to build on what we have."
"We are very lucky to have this stadium and the council who had the initiative to put this together did a very far-sighted and ambitious thing for the whole city, and the club is a beneficiary of that and we have got to move forward with that because this is certainly a club that should be in the Premiership and I am here to try to help get them into that position.”
He continued: “Yes every football club needs to attract investment but you need that to be planned. You could throw a lot of money at the football club tomorrow morning but if you didn’t plan it in the right way it would not be sustainable.
"I have concerns for football in general because I don’t think it is particularly healthy to have so many overseas buyers. If I am perfectly honest I think we have got to invest in our own future and SISU appear to be very strong in that respect but I think we have got to bring more money in. More money will come into football because if you look at the opportunities that are abroad, we tend to have a bit of an island mentality."
“There are around about 60 million people in the UK but there are about 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.1 billion Indians, 300 million Indonesians; they all love football and at present there is only about two per cent from international sources that come into our UK game and we have got to maximise the ability to go into the world market."
“That is something that has been recognised by other owners across the world and we have got to wake up to that and become a brand and I think the stadium enables us to become a brand.”