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I've rarely covered a more frustrating saga than the conflict between Coventry City Football Club and the council owned Ricoh Arena stadium.

In two decades of political journalism, I've reported on child deaths, wars and suicides which put a football club leaving its traditional heartland into much needed perspective. Worse things happen. Nobody died. Yet the matter is so obviously important to a city's pride, economy and reputation, its psychology and good health.

I've conducted long-running investigations, into MPs' expenses, or on council decisions, which have resulted in healthy clashes as the media tries to hold power to account.

Yet I've hardly ever come across such entrenchment, bitter personal rivalries, mudslinging and sheer misleading propaganda from so many sides - despite years spent confronting countless politicians, from Prime Ministers to council leaders.

Just as with the worst political conflicts, this propaganda war has divided the public. There's been sometimes vicious animosity between Coventry City fans who ought to be united. I write as one. Recriminations have extended to vilifying journalists who dare to challenge all sides, including fans' groups.

It reminds me of the 1984/85 miners' strike. The minority of fans who are attending 'home' games at Northampton Town's Sixfields stadium - to witness the most entertaining Coventry side for over a decade - have been branded 'scabs'. Protesters outside the ground as 'the muppets of the mound'.

Arguably, as with the miners' strike, there's a real danger that principles, resentments and pride might drag things out for longer than necessary - and become obstacles to a pragmatic approach towards resolution.

We as fans should not see ourselves as passive victims. Many fans feel defeated - after their protests fell on deaf ears. But they have been key active participants in this conflict. Football is a game of emotion, passion and outspoken opinion, often fuelled by group mentality and safety in numbers.

I believe fans and Coventrians as taxpayers can still influence the ultimate outcome. I include the latent tens of thousands who call themselves Sky Blues supporters, but are not as dedicated as the 10,000 who were still attending Ricoh home matches last season.

We and the city must ask ourselves, 'What does the available evidence now suggest is the best hope of returning the Sky Blues to the Ricoh?'

Opinion on social media strongly suggests a return to the Ricoh is above all else what the majority want among fans and city taxpayers - who risk financial loss from this mess, whatever the propaganda says. What is arms-length Ricoh firm Arena Coventry Limited's bill for hiring lawyers and PR consultants? Might the council end up footing the bill? There is also a risk a £14 million council loan will never be paid back by ACL.

I've covered this conflict since summer last year after the club's hedge fund owners Sisu started refusing to pay £100,000-a-month rent to Ricoh company Arena Coventry Limited, jointly owned by Coventry City Council and the Alan Edward Higgs Charity. The uncompromising rent deal, struck years before Sisu arrived, was onerous. It bled the club's finances, and made no allowance for financially disastrous relegations. Yet Sisu's refusal to pay in full was unlawful - as the High Court ruled last summer.

I remember in the 1990s interviewing then Coventry City chairman Bryan Richardson in his office at the former Highfield Road ground over his ultra-ambitious plans for a 62,000-seater stadium to rival Wembley, with a retractable roof and pitch. That pipe-dream in the honeymoon of boom-time Premiership satellite TV money is ultimately a root cause of this dispute.

So too is the 2003 deal to build the 32,000-seat Ricoh struck when the council stepped in to rescue the project, following up £10million council equity with a £21million bank loan for Arena Coventry Ltd's (ACL's) "mortgage".

The Ricoh Arena project ultimately cost £118million. Money also came from the net £42million proceeds of a land sale to Tesco, and smaller grants from Europe and now defunct development agency, Advantage West Midlands.

The stadium's project manager, Paul Fletcher, has since compellingly argued in his book, The Seven Golden Secrets of a Successful Stadium, that the council's "rescue" in 2003 quickly became a financial stanglehold which deprived the club of vital matchday and commercial revenues from the stadium and surrounding land.

Opposing voices at the Council House had warned of risks - from any Coventry City relegation and from the irrational world of football finances, including the cost of players' wages.

It was feared it would create an unviable business separation between the club and stadium. Mr Fletcher's argument that a stadium should not be run by a council or charity (the Alan Edward Higgs Charity later bought the club's 50pc stake in ACL when the club was desperate for cash) was shared by Coventry City fans and directors prior to Sisu's takeover in 2007.

Today, there is near consensus that common ownership of club and stadium would be better for the club and city. Council executives and leaders are prepared to sell to the "right people". It's just that they haven't wanted to sell to Sisu since talks collapsed early this year over joint ownership, rent and revenues.

Encouraged by countless fans on social media, I have investigated and reported the story intensely since Arena Coventry Limited (ACL) filed to place Coventry City Football Club in administration in March.

I've attended two High Court hearings, read through confidential documents, and have had unparalleled access to key people on all sides. I've questioned them, and taken soundings, on a daily basis.

The result, to give just a few examples, has been exclusive stories including revealing the Northampton groundshare plan; the confidential terms of a Creditor Voluntary Arrangement deal rejected by ACL; and an admission from the Football League that its "administrative oversights" had registered players to the wrong company (CCFC Holdings) as opposed to CCFC Ltd, which held the crucial League 'golden share'.

Persistent questioning also prompted an admission from Sky Blues chief executive Tim Fisher that leaked documents from other clubs' correspondence concerning some players' transfers between 2006 and 2010 showed those players were contracted to CCFC Ltd. It was despite his oft-repeated mantra the players were all in Holdings for more than a decade. Mr Fisher has since reneged on this "admission", claiming in last Sunday's matchday programme that a subsequent internal audit of the players in question showed they were indeed contracted to Holdings after all. People will make of that what they will.

I've had hundreds of confidential briefings from all sides. The journalist's job of disseminating fact from fiction has been tested - amid bluff, counter-bluff, distortion and exaggeration which is part of any propaganda war.

Our coverage from March sought in part to hold the club to account on the clear discrepancies between what its own most recent accounts up to 2011 showed, and the club's claim the players had been in Holdings.

ACL's appointed lawyer James Powell clearly questioned whether the discrepancies contravened Football League rules, at the very least. Given the administrator's barrister had also told the High Court it was a "catastrophic insolvency", ACL was openly arguing a club takeover could be in the best interests of the club and city. ACL hoped US prospective investor Preston Haskell IV or A.N Other could buy the club, and buy into the stadium.

That was then and this is now. The strategy failed. The game-changer finally came on August 2, although the writing was on the wall several weeks before. Sisu-related company Otium Entertainment Group Limited was handed the League's "golden share" right to play in the League as Coventry City. It came weeks after CCFC Ltd's administrator Paul Appleton accepted on June 27 a £1.5million bid from Otium for the minor assets remaining in the company - excluding Ltd's lease and licence to play at the Ricoh, and the players' contracts which he maintained resided in Holdings.

It heaped more misery on thousands of fans desperate for a different outcome. Many fans, and leading councillors I spoke privately with, had much earlier believed Sisu boss Joy Seppala and her "henchman" Tim Fisher would be gone within weeks of the council agreeing in private the £14million bailout for the distressed Ricoh Arena. They believed Sisu would promptly give up on attempts to acquire the Ricoh as cheaply as possible.

Sepella's response was to apply for a judicial review. Months later, it was thrown out by a High Court judge who ruled the council had acted properly in using the £14million of council "cash balances" to buy out and refinance the struggling ACL company's bank loan on "commercial terms".

Again, in March, many predicted ACL's High Court action would see these difficult tenants off, with them "dumping their lot into a bag" as council leader John Mutton had put it, before scarpering empty-handed into the sunset.

The outcome has been the reverse.

I have said many times all sides must take responsibility, and be challenged. I am no apologist for ACL, or the clearly still hugely unpopular Sisu/Otium. They have taken Coventry City to Northampton, after all. Throughout the administration sale process, I was alive to the view that fresh owners could more easily unite the club and stadium, and would be better for the city.

One of the most depressing aspects of the entire saga has been the attempt by some fans to brand as "biased" or "pro-Sisu" anyone who sees this as a multi-faceted dispute in which all parties must be challenged. The accusation comes from some involved in the "Not One Penny More" campaign - which remains a "Let's Starve Sisu Out" campaign, despite its recently stated preference for the more conciliatory name, "Keep Cov in Cov".

Internal disputes over the name reflect divided opinion over the best way to campaign to get the Sky Blues back to the Ricoh Arena. Campaigners belonging to the fans' group Sky Blue Trust also have their own agenda. They want part-fan ownership of the club. Opinion is divided over the best way to bring that about. Some want to start a new Coventry club - a "phoenix club" which might rise from the ashes from a low base in the non-Leagues. Issues remain over how any ambitious club might finance itself going forward.

I am among fans who sense the tide is turning in fans' opinion - hence campaigners' preference for the more emollient "Keep Cov in Cov" slogan.

Sisu/Otium remain deeply unpopular among the vast majority. Yet an academic's survey underlines why 15,000 people signed a Telegraph petition.

People want City back in Coventry - however that is achieved. The majority want that, irrespective of who the owners are. Two-thirds would attend Ricoh matches under Sisu, the report shows.

Anti-Sisu fans - many hostile since poor team performances even before last year's relegation to Division One - are being forced to stare into the deep chasm between wishful thinking, idealism and reality. An intelligent and well-written blog which went viral this week by City fan Tom Furnival-Adams - a Sixfields boycotter - calls for "open minds" and "re-evaluation".

Like so many fans, he had previously believed the current fiasco would never come to pass. That was then, this is now. He further believes the farce of having an excellent council football stadium lying empty without a football club - while Coventry City plays at Northampton - is not likely to end soon simply by a boycott by fans refusing to hand cash to Otium through the Sixfields turnstyles.

As revealed in an interview with me , the Football League's chairman Greg Clarke insisted he had seen evidence that Otium had enough funds to run the club for years - and go ahead with building a new stadium for perhaps £25million in the "Coventry area" in the next three to five years.

Of course, questions remain over the "proof of funds" shown and the League's role in allowing the Northampton "temporary" groundshare. Certainly Mr Clarke was not armed with full knowledge in response to my questions, and said he had no idea of whether the Sky Blues would ever return to Coventry.

He claims the League acted to keep the club alive. Despite the League's near universal unpopularity in Coventry, had the League intervened in a "commercial dispute" by insisting the Sky Blues must play at the Ricoh, it could well have faced litigation on several fronts. It could also have established a precedent that Coventry City and indeed other clubs must remain as stadium tenants paying rent.

But rent in many ways remains a red herring, dispute the council's reasonable offer to reduce it to £400,000, and then £120,000 via the administrator.

Like the intractable conflict in the Middle East which shows no signs of resolution after decades, this is overwhelmingly a dispute over land. It is a dispute over ownership of not just the stadium, but the potential development land around it. The council has always wanted return on its investment, and a potential dividend to help its now heavily cut finances. That is reasonable. But at what point does a so-called "public asset" become a public liability?

What is the benefit to the city of the council owning a football stadium without the football club it was built for, and who nearly everybody wants playing there?

As things stand, Sisu company Otium is the club's legal and rightful owner. That is now likely to be the case for some time.

If all parties genuinely want the Sky Blues back at the Ricoh, it is becoming increasingly accepted that the best way of ensuring it happens soon is to sell the stadium to Otium/Sisu.

From my soundings, I know this realisation is not lost on some council executives or leading councillors, whatever they publicly claim.

I make no comment on whether that must happen. But it is the most likely way of returning the Sky Blues to the Ricoh, based on the balance of probabilities and the evidence as things stand - however incomplete the evidence is.

ACL - whose board members include council executives Martin Reeves and Chris West - insists it still wants the club back at the Ricoh, and claim to have acted in the interests of the club and city.

Yet many fans, including me, have questioned why ACL refused on August 2 to sign Mr Appleton's Creditor Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) - which would have prevented CCFC Ltd's liquidation and the hammer blow of a further 10-point penalty imposed by the Football League that day.

I have put this key question to ACL on at least three occasions - via its hired London PR firm Weber Shandwick.

I partly understand the rationale that it would have "legitimised" the administration process ACL and fans had no faith in. Who could deny ACL as a creditor has been financially disadvantaged by a "rent strike" and administrative club maneovres? The legal lease and licence to play at the Ricoh for 40 more years was dumped into a club company placed in administration with no significant other assets, and ACL will get next to no compensation.

ACL directors have a legal responsibility to act in the business's interests. Yet there seemed little to gain from rejecting the CVA. The city council - which owns the Ricoh freehold as well as being a 50 per cent shareholder in ACL - is a political body which should act in the interests of the city. What have elected councillors had to say on the matter? Next to nothing.

Some "Not One Penny More" campaigners are glad the CVA was rejected and the team lost 10 points. They don't want "Sisu" to succeed. Yet logic and evidence suggests they are in the minority. The city of Coventry, which under chief executive Martin Reeves and the Labour party has ambitions to regenerate, could really benefit from a rejuvenated football team back at the Ricoh, and the ten points back. The current youthful team - a joy to watch to their great credit in adversity - are showing signs of being genuine promotion contenders. Yet team manager Steven Pressley and his squad have been cruelly hamstrung by the ten point penalty.

ACL argues it did not know when rejecting the CVA that the League would transfer the golden share to Otium. Yet the writing had been on the wall for some time. They certainly knew that, by declining the CVA, the team would be clobbered with a points penalty.

Further, ACL after August 2 could have come back to the table and accepted the CVA. Instead, ACL through the media called on court officer Mr Appleton to produce a revised CVA - even though he had made clear ACL's earlier modifications could not be included in law. It was never likely to happen.

Major questions remain over the administration process. Many fans accuse Mr Appleton of doing Sisu's bidding. They argue he jumped the gun with a premature sale to Otium before he had completed his investigations. His counter-argument is he had to act to keep the club alive, and that he was satisfied on the earlier evidence as to which assets were in Limited which he could sell the "rights and title" to.

But we are where we are. ACL has gone very silent. Nobody expects them to take legal action against Mr Appleton. As insolvency practitioner Alan Limb has argued among others, it is difficult to see that Mr Appleton and his lawyers would risk his business and reputation by producing a legally flawed outcome. It is often ignored that, had he accepted a final bid by Mr Haskell or another US investor Jeremy Schwimmer, it is they who would have paid his business's not inconsiderable fees (£900,000 based on the sale to Otium).

Some fans await to see if ACL will mount more protracted legal action against any party. In recent weeks, it has called on others, including the media and MPs, to do the investigating. ACL's recent position has been it cannot be expected to go it alone in the courts if there is little left to gain.

Some fans feel ACL have marched them to the top of the hill - or down the garden path. We shall see. ACL still has an outstanding legal challenge to Northampton Town for enticing its tenant away from the Ricoh. The counter-argument is that it has no hope of success - as the Ricoh's lease and licence at the time rested in the company in administration, and it was a third party company, Otium, which had entered into the agreement with The Cobblers.

Coventry North east Bob Ainsworth MP has been leading the charge for a wider investigation and action against the club's owners with a series of Parliamentary motions. They enabled him to use "parliamentary privilege", without which some of his accusations would have fallen foul of defamation laws in the absence of incotrovertible evidence.

It may well be argued his work has raised questions in the public interest. There are plenty of unanswered questions. Mr Appleton says his investigation into the accounts continues with CCFC Ltd about to enter liquidation - and the entire liquidation process could take a year.

Yet fans have too often been misled with misinformation to suit people's entrenched positions.

Take one of Mr Ainsworth's Early Day Motions tabled in Parliament on August 29. It's first line states..

"That this House notes that the Football League's insolvency policy, as written, requires an owner wishing to move a club away from its traditional area to demonstrate a clear plan with timescales for its return;"

Given his own parenthesis deliberately emphasises the words "as written", you would have thought he would have checked what the League's insolvency policy, a private document, actually states.

In fact it says nothing of the sort. Nowhere does it require clear timescales for a club's return.

Instead, the Football League's regulations, which are published on its website, clearly state the League board has wide-ranging "discretion" on such matters.

The received wisdom in Coventry is that the Football League broke its rules in allowing the groundshare. Whatever else the League can be accused of, any fair reading of the rules shows it has not.

The Not One Penny More campaign hopes an investigation - perhaps now, they hope, by a Parliamentary select committee - could ultimately lead to Otium's directors being deemed not "fit and proper" to run the club. It would ultimately need the Football League to fail Otium et al on its "owners and directors test" - requiring criminal convictions or serious wrongdoing.

This seems increasingly unlikely. I sense a growing feeling of resignation that such a process to belatedly oust the owners would be drawn out, costly and precarious - with absolutely no guarantee of long-term success.

ACL has also called for an independent liquidator to re-examine the whole sale process. The aim would be for the whole club including the players to be put up for sale in a way which would not disadvantage takeover hopefuls.

This now seems entirely unlikely - as does any remote hope of the League re-instating the 10 points - even if a CVA is belatedly agreed, which Mr Appleton has said is still possible after the company enters liquidation.

The League told the Telegraph three weeks ago there is no chance of re-instating the 10 points deducted as a condition of Otium getting the golden share, alongside assurances that ACL will not lose out financially by their CVA rejection. That has not prevented some fans from still calling for pressure on the League to exercise its "discretion", and put public pressure on ACL to sign a CVA. And why should fans not lobby for that? The League and the council/ACL remain wide open to challenge.

It would appear some at the council and ACL still believe the better prospect of waving goodbye to Sisu is to attract an investor who could agree a provisional deal to buy into the Ricoh, then put an offer on the table to Sisu boss Joy Seppala to buy Coventry City. From my soundings, it appears Sisu's mentality remains that 'everybody has a price'.

There are two big problems. First, there is no obvious contender. Haskell, Schwimmer and Warwickshire businessman Michael Byng's Chinese would-be investors are believed to be keeping an eye on developments. But there is nothing concrete. It may well be that they would want to wait for the outcome of the current disquiet and liquidation process. We'll see.

The second problem is how much Sisu would be prepared to sell for. It appears from their stubborn actions they are determined to stick around for a return on their at least £40million investment in the club - despite the heavy extra losses sustained by low crowds at Northampton.

Nobody quite knows whether Ms Seppala's stated strategy of building a new stadium is genuinely the plan. But it would be wrong to rule out that distinct possibility, given the club's employment for months of property consultants, CBRE. Of course, there could well be major practical problems, including financing and winning planing approval.

But I have little doubt Sisu/Otium and the club would consider Ricoh ownership, despite Tim Fisher's insistence they "have moved on".

I also doubt council leader Ann Lucas's insistence ACL is "hugely profitable" without a football club - despite the evidence from last year's accounts, which showed a £1million profit when they were receiving the full £1.3million football club rent.

Sisu would ideally want freehold ownership, but I would not rule out them considering buying a controlling interest in the Ricoh Arena - if one was offered.

Any return to the same landlord/tenant relationship seems a dead duck - even though ACL's offer to reduce the rent to £400,000 a year, and then to £150,000 via the administrator, was a reasonable market rate.

The fans and the city must decide if they can stomach an Otium/Sisu triumphant return to the Ricoh. Of course, Sisu always wanted to acquire the Ricoh for as cheap a price as possible. I said as much in my column a year ago. Acquiring distressed businesses and seeking to turn them round for a profit is what they do. They are less than ideal, their practices do not suggest sustainability. But in the word of international property investment and crazy football finances, neither do any alternatives.

A sale to Otium/Sisu may seem unpalatable. In the acrimonious climate, some fans no doubt fear reprisals if they dare utter those words as an option to be considered.

But it may also represent the best way of seeing Sisu/Otium ultimately exit the club and the city in the medium term. It would still appear to represent Sisu's best hope of a return on investment.

There are independent means of assessing a market value for the Ricoh. The council would expect some return on its investment - but in the gamble of football, people have to write off losses. Councils write-off millions of pounds in uncollected business taxes and council tax every year. Coventry City Council wrote off £3.3million of debt in 2011 alone.

It appears the overwhelming public opinion in Coventry is that all sides must come together to "sort it out" - for the good of club and city.

I have little doubt that fans and the people of Coventry have the power to influence their elected representatives in this regard.

It's time for the all-so-transparent 'blame game' to end. People and fans are not stupid. They see straight through the attempt by each side to blame the other for the continued absence of talks.