Coventry City's owner is looking to provide the financial platform to keep the club in the Premier League

While Frank Lampard is battling to keep Coventry City in the Premier League on the field of play, Doug King is striving to improve their chances off it.

The Sky Blues’ chairman has recently revealed his hopes of doubling the club’s income from around £160-170 million to more than £300m.

King knows he has to be more proactive than merely sitting back and relying on one season’s worth of broadcast revenue and whatever parachute payments that follow.

To truly build the club – and have it in the Premier League season after season – King knows self-sufficiency is key and while things like player trading and ticket prices are levers he can pull, the biggest and most powerful is the CBS Arena itself.

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Monetising the club’s stadium, building it into a venue which is bringing in money more than 25 home matches a year, is a central tenet.

King said: “For me, it is a great asset. Everybody I look at, our competitors, would like to have that in my view. So they're building it – and I've got one. Well, I had to pay for it...but the issue is we now need to sweat it.”

It’s why he struck an agreement with venue management and entertainment company Legends Global, a ten-year £15m joint investment plan that will see the Arena’s hospitality areas transformed, improvements in the food and beverage provision and upgrades in technology and premium spaces.

The intention is to make the CBS Arena a more attractive destination for conferences, exhibitions and other events like music concerts.

“We had 500 events there last year, we want to take that to 700-800, let's say, down the line. We want the visitor numbers to grow.”

While luring those visitors to the stadium is one thing – and giving them somewhere to stay in terms of hotels another – perhaps even more important is the provision of parking and to that end, King is purchasing Car Park C from the council, in a £1.6m deal that will go directly into the Sky Blues in the Community charity and Made in Cov, at £160,000 a year over the next decade.

Clearly that increases the car parking capacity – and revenues claimed by some to be worth up to £400,000 a year – in the short term and while there are no public plans for the redevelopment of the car park land at this point, there have been in the past.

The agreement has been described as ‘win-win’ by local politicians and by King as helping ‘simplify future regeneration.’

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