In May 2001, John Mullaney stood among his fellow Coventry City supporters and thrust aloft a crudely fashioned sign of defiance: “We’ll be back.”
Coventry had been relegated from England’s top division for the first time, 34 years after Jimmy Hill became the first manager to take the Sky Blues out of the second tier in the right direction.
Mullaney was right, after a fashion. It took a quarter of a century and immeasurable despair, but Coventry are back in the Premier League.
‘They were our biggest local rivals when I was growing up’
But as the club capitalised on an updated version of their supporter’s handiwork to mark the occasion, the significance of where his homemade placard was displayed might have been lost to fans outside the West Midlands.
Nobody who filed into the Coventry Building Society Arena for Wednesday’s Carabao Cup third round tie against Aston Villa was in that category. Coventry were relegated at Villa Park and there’s not a football stadium in the world where they wouldn’t have preferred to suffer.
Pick the ultimate 4-4-2 line-up from players in FourFourTwo’s definitive Top 100 List
Coventry and Villa haven’t been drawn together in the FA Cup or League Cup in the intervening years. It was with a cruel flourish that they were paired in the Sky Blues’ first season back in the Premier League.
Despite their proximity, the rivalry between Coventry and Villa – largely an off-the-pitch matter and not inaccurately described as a little one-side – is often overlooked.
FourFourTwo spoke to Steve, a Villa supporter, outside the ground before Unai Emery’s team faced Coventry.
“I remember sending [Coventry] down, but it was so long ago that I don’t really remember how I actually felt about it,” he said.
“It’s good for the region that they’re in the Premier League again but I can’t imagine they’ll stay long. I don’t mind saying that – they were our biggest local rivals when I was growing up even if we sometimes don’t like to admit it.
“It’s just that I didn’t think about them for a moment in the time they were away.”
That’s the thing about one-sided rivalries. The supporters who don’t actively participate in it react badly to being disliked with such intensity, thus it’s seldom truly one-sided when push comes to shove.
Coventry were unable to harness a match with needle to kickstart their season
What’s not in doubt is that the rivalry with Villa, in some shape or form, is real for many Coventry fans.
The teams were together for years without others from Birmingham and the West Midlands crossing their paths all that often, and the Sky Blues’ relegation and a few players moving to Villa Park left a bad feeling.
“We’re a club without a mutual rivalry, I think it’s fair to say,” Dominic Jerams, the Coventry supporter behind Sideways Sammy, tells FourFourTwo.
“When I started going to Coventry games we were in the Premier League and Aston Villa were the main rivals. When we were first in the Championship, Leicester City became the big rivalry.
“Our rivalries have always been contextual. And there was Dion Dublin going to Villa. Moustapha Hadji. George Boateng. It was really galling after a while. As a young fan, they were all of my favourite players, so Villa have lingered as a rival in my mind.”
Rivals or not, Coventry and Villa arrived in the third round of the Carabao Cup in need of a springboard, and it was the visitors who booked their place in the fourth round and will hope to have earned a boost in confidence into the bargain.
Victor Torp scored a beautiful free kick to briefly give the home team hope, but Tammy Abraham scored two goals either side of Ross Barkley’s unmarked header as Villa put three goals past the Sky Blues again, quarter of a century after the last time.
For manager Frank Lampard and Coventry, there was no sweet relief and no respite from a brutally difficult start to the season. Six matches into 2026/27, a 4-2 win over Plymouth Argyle isn’t enough to ease a darkening mood.
By the time this fixture is replayed in the Premier League, both Lampard and Emery will know much more about where their teams stand.
Neither should read too much into their first encounter of the season. The Villa manager told reporters after the match that the Carabao Cup is important, not least as a possible route back into Europe, but sometimes matches pop into the fixture list that are really more for the fans than anything else.