The Football League has called on the owners of League One side Coventry City "to reveal their plans for a new stadium as the club nears the end of its first season playing more than 30 miles outside Coventry," according to Simon Gilbert of the COVENTRY TELEGRAPH. League bosses "have confirmed they are still waiting for the football club to fulfil any of the commitments it made when it was permitted to take the club to Northampton’s Sixfields stadium last year." League officials "want to see evidence of the club’s plans to return to the city, and its intention to comply with the rest of the membership agreement." While refusing to be publicly drawn on a deadline, the Football League "is demanding assurances as soon as possible from the club." If the league insists on seeing evidence before the end of the '13-14 season, "it would mean revealing plans for a new stadium ahead of a judicial review of the unanimous decision by Coventry City councillors" to buy ACL’s £14M ($23M) debt with Yorkshire Bank "so that it could be repaid on more favourable terms" (COVENTRY TELEGRAPH, 3/10). In Coventry, Gilbert also wrote Ricoh Arena representatives said that "the door remains open to the club, the club’s owners say they will never return as tenants and a court has been asked to rule whether the city council was right to step in and protect the stadium when the rent row couldn’t be resolved." The football club is committed "to build its own new stadium 'in the Coventry area.'" The problem for the thousands of fans who have turned their back on Sixfields and desperately want to see their club back in the city that bears its name "is that details have been extremely thin on the ground." The club "was asked if it could prepare a planning application or would complete a land deal without contacting the statutory bodies identified by our expert." Commercial real estate provider CBRE Associate Dir of National Development Eleanor Deeley said, “The team is only contacting organizations which we feel -- based on expert advice -- to be relevant at this early stage in the whole development process." Asked when the club would be able to reveal its preferred location for a new stadium, Deeley said, "Revealing the preferred location for a new stadium would not be in the best interests of the club or in the best interests of delivering a new stadium" (COVENTRY TELEGRAPH, 3/10).
