The commodities trader who saw the sky was blue

Coventry City owner Doug King is profiled in FT Wealth, of itself something of an accolade.The 59-year-old calculates risk and reward for a living. Since graduating from Loughborough University in 1990 with a degree in mathematical engineering, he has traded everything from grain to petroleum.

 The business model of the average Championship club, however, requires another kind of risk management. Wage bills that exceed revenues. Seemingly unavoidable operating losses. Fans who feel like they own the clubs. Owners who pick up the bill until they won’t, or can’t.

When he bought Coventry, he assumed more than £36mn of net liabilities and cleared debts owed to the former owners. “I think that I bought [the club] because I felt like I could do a pretty good job of running it or handling it. I like sport, I understand business, I understand trading, so when you get into contracts with players and you’re looking at transfer agreements . . . contingencies, payment plans, he gives us that and they get that . . . For me that’s in my wheelhouse.”

But King cuts a rare figure in the upper echelons of English football, an Englishman who has recently bought a club. The game is a national obsession that unites people, but it is now dominated by wealthy foreign individuals, even private equity and sovereign wealth funds. How football got here, and where King will find himself if Coventry are promoted, is a parable of the UK today.

In 2016, King’s Singapore-based RCMA Group, a physical commodities business, invested in Yelo Enterprises, the first major oilseed rape processing plant in the UK for three decades. It employs about 80 people directly, King says, and he estimates that it supports at least another 100 jobs.

Owning the Warwickshire-based business meant that buying Coventry City, 40 minutes’ drive from the plant, was not such a leap.  Sisu Capital, the seller, had been unpopular with supporters. King bought a lossmaking club but it wasn’t burdened with “huge wage bills and crazy deals”, he told the FT. His investment case rested on fundamentals: Coventry was a one-club city, and with about 1mn people in the wider postcode area, he saw a lot of potential fans.

Football historian David Goldblatt thinks the move was ripe with opportunity: “You had to do better than the [owners] before, so I think in that regard it makes loads of sense to go and to buy into Coventry . . . Like so many post-industrial cities and towns in England, [Coventry] has been marginalised and slightly overlooked. So I think there’s a lot of potential.”

The club used to sell private boxes at the stadium for £9,000 a season; they went straight up to £20,000. “Obviously that caused an uproar from fans who thought it was extortionate but the reality is, and I always said to the fans, if you want to be successful it isn’t just me. You’re going to have to sacrifice some money as well.”

Despite those early moves, King initially failed to fix an epic flaw in the club’s business model: it did not own its stadium. UK retail tycoon Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group had beaten him to the purchase of the CBS Arena after the stadium’s former owner, Wasps Rugby, entered administration. (A court ruled that King had bid too late.) It was not until 2025 that King finally bought the stadium.

Of all the markets King has traded, there is nothing like the transfer market, where commission-hungry agents have an appetite to maximise fees and players are always on the lookout for a bigger contract at a richer club. King has focused on increasing the value of Coventry’s players.

Making a hedge fund comparison, he says Coventry’s “assets were too small” when he arrived, although he says he doesn’t look at the players as assets. According to football website Transfermarkt, Coventry’s squad was worth €66mn in 2022-23 and is about €193mn today.

Generating a 10 per cent return through player sales on a higher base of assets makes a dramatic difference when it comes to covering operating losses. And, of course, a more expensive squad stands a better chance in the Premier League.

Coventry are not consistently making money yet: the club swung to a net loss of £21.3mn in 2024-25 after player sales created an £8.7mn profit the previous financial year. Net debt jumped by two-thirds to almost £50mn, but luckily the lender is parent company CovCityCo, majority owned by King. It is an interest-free loan.