After each matchday programme this season, we publish the regular column from the Coventry City board on our website. You can read Coventry City Chief Executive Dave Boddy's column from our game against Sheffield Wednesday below:
Good afternoon and welcome to the Coventry Building Society Arena for today’s game as we play Sheffield Wednesday in the Sky Bet Championship.
I’d like to extend our usual warm welcome to the players, staff, officials and supporters of Wednesday.
I hope that everyone had an enjoyable Christmas yesterday and, like myself, are looking forward to this Boxing Day fixture. Apart from the opening day fixture, when the fixture list is released the Boxing Day fixture is the first fixture that I look for and Boxing Day football down the years has always been something that I have looked forward to.
Supporters will have noticed for recent home games against Birmingham City and Southampton that the segregation line between away supporters and Block 13 was much smaller than previous. As we mentioned earlier in the season, we are doing a lot of work with the Arena to assess all of the possibilities for the South Stand with a view to reducing the size of the away allocation for league matches.
This will ultimately allow us to have a bigger capacity for home supporters and for home supporters to eventually sit in the South Stand alongside the away supporters.
There is still a lot of work to be done in the concourse in the South Stand to allow this to happen and for today’s game, with a 4,000 allocation to Sheffield Wednesday supporters, we are still seeing a seat kill of around 2,000 seats in the South Stand because of the concourse issues underneath this Stand.
Along with issues in getting general admission tickets onto the West Stand balcony, this reduces the available capacity for today’s game to circa 29,000. We currently estimate, at the time of writing, that today’s match will be a near sell-out.
Also as part of the work that we are looking at in the South Stand, we continue to look at the possibility of railed seating in the Arena. We will need to do further work with our Safety Advisory Group and the Sports Ground Safety Authority, at which point we will come back to supporters for their engagement.
All of this work will hopefully continue to improve the matchday experience for Sky Blues supporters, which has already come on leaps and bounds thanks to work that has been undertaken by the Football Club and the Arena. The Arena feels more like our home than ever, and I think that is contributing further to the excellent atmosphere already created by the Sky Blue Army.
Thanks for your support – enjoy the game. PUSB.
Dave
Dave Boddy
Chief Executive
Coventry City Football Club