How to open a Primary School

Doug King wanted to open primary schools.

He'd made his money in commodities trading - mathematical engineering degree from Loughborough, hedge funds, rapeseed oil processing. His parents were teachers. His cousin's a headmistress. When he started thinking about giving back, education felt obvious.

The plan: build a network of academies in forgotten coastal towns around Britain. Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth, Isle of Wight. "They're very seasonal," he told the Football Boardroom podcast. "You don't go there unless you go there. And so they get a bit forgotten."

He went to a few conferences. Talked to the right people. Did the maths.

"Wow," he thought. "This is going to take me 150 million years."

So he bought a football club instead.

Coventry City had won the FA Cup in 1987 and spent the next three decades sliding. League Two - English football's fourth tier - in 2017. Homeless for years, playing games at Birmingham's St Andrew's because their own stadium was locked in a dispute with the landlord.

By the time King came looking, they were back in the Championship - doing ok on the pitch. Off it, the place was a mess. Years of ownership chaos. No stadium of their own. Crumbling infrastructure.

King had never been to a Coventry game. He grew up supporting Norwich. But he'd been spending time in the Midlands for his rapeseed business, and he'd figured something out: "A football club done well has huge influence in people's lives - education, schools, sport, everything to do with it."

A faster vehicle for the same cargo.

He did the deal in six weeks. Told his wife. Didn't tell his kids - just pinged them a WhatsApp five minutes before the announcement broke. "You better watch your news in a bit."

Then he went to the training ground.

"I was seriously shocked by it," he says now. Mark Robins - a club legend who'd kept them alive through years of ownership disaster - working out of a grim portacabin. Facilities that looked temporary. "There's not a cat in hell's chance I can get elite players in that football club in that state."

That first summer, when they were recruiting, King had a rule: take the players straight to the stadium. Don't let them anywhere near the training ground.

"I remember we signed Ellis Simms and he had a choice between Swansea and us. And he'd been down to Swansea's training ground, which is rather nice. And I said, look, he's not coming anywhere near here. Take him up to the stadium and have a good chat."

Simms signed.

Eighteen months later, King made the hardest call.

Mark Robins had been the face of the club through all the chaos - the one constant when leadership was hiding away. But King had seen the coaching structure breaking down. "It was actually, and I don't say this lightly as a business person, quite an easy decision. The difficult decision was what Mark was and what he'd been to Coventry City."

Fans were furious. King called an open forum on live radio to explain himself.

Then he interviewed Frank Lampard - legendary player, uneven manager. King met him alone in his Pall Mall office and asked one question: what had he learned from the rough spells?

Turned out, a lot. Lampard got the job.

"I like people who've had a few shockers," King says. "You've got to see where dysfunctionality is not working. And you take a lot of time to reflect on that."

Three years after buying the club, Coventry are back in the Premier League for the first time in 25 years. The training ground is rebuilt. The coaching structure works. The infrastructure is in place.

And the club's community trust - Sky Blues in the Community - runs education programmes in fifty local primary schools. Maths, English, life skills, all delivered through the pull of football. David Busst, the former defender who runs it, hosts open days at the stadium where kids from across the city show up in sky blue.

King didn't build a school network. Not in the traditional sense, at least.

But walk around Coventry on a Saturday morning and you'll see kids in those shirts heading to the game with their parents. You'll see a city that got forgotten starting to believe in itself again.

Sometimes the indirect route isn't so bad.

P.S.: The full Doug King interview is on the Football Boardroom podcast with Henry Winter and Christian Purslow. The training ground story is even better when you hear him tell it.