There’s hope for Reading but having lived through their worst-case scenario, football cannot allow them to become ‘the next Bury’.
If you made a bullet-point list to describe yourself, how far would you get before you wrote down your football team? You might live and breathe it, travelling home and away. Perhaps you’re an exile and your club ties you to home. You could be a fan from afar, dreaming of seeing your team in the flesh.
What if it was taken from you? How would you cope? One minute it’s part of your identity and the next it’s in the past tense. This is the scenario that Reading fans are dreading.
“I’m terrified.” Ji-Min Lee, a Reading fan and fellow sports journalist tells me.
“Football is such a stabiliser in people’s lives. It’s that constant. You go to watch the games and it’s part of your routine. It helps you build relationships and friendships with people you will have gone and watched the football with for decades. It’s a bonding experience for parents and their kids. The thought of the club, that I’ve gone to watch since I was seven, not existing is terrifying.”
This isn’t hyperbole. I’ve lived this. I took my son to one single match before my own team, Bury FC, were expelled from the EFL in August 2019. For 125 years Bury were members of the Football League. Two-time FA Cup winners from a different era and north of Manchester’s footballing powerhouses, we would punch above our weight as part of the football family, until we weren’t.
When the EFL were unsatisfied that our owner had the funds to allow us to compete in League One, we were suspended and then expelled. 200 miles away and six years later, there is another club with its fans fretting over the nuclear option.
Reading have a deadline of Friday 4th of April to have a new owner in place. Thankfully, there are enough steps to mean expulsion is a way down the track. Even suspension would put the entire League One competition into disarray. All clubs know, however, that there is a brink. Bury went beyond it and Reading are the next club drifting towards its edge.
What’s gone wrong at Reading?
Reading weren’t always a crisis club. The John Madejski-owned side reached a record 106 points in the Championship back in 2006. Following that, their first ever top flight campaign ended with them in eighth place and although they were relegated the following season, by 2012 they were back in the Premier League. Having bought Reading out of receivership in 1990, built a new stadium and turned them into a sustainable football club, John Madejski sold up that May.
Five years later and on the eve of the Championship play-off final, Dai Yongge became the latest custodian of the side formed on Christmas Day, 1871. Reading would go on to lose on spot-kicks to Huddersfield Town at Wembley.
“We were two penalties away from the Premier League and we had this billionaire takeover. We were all very positive about it. We were almost there. The dream looked very much on, but sadly, since then, it’s been a downward spiral.”
Yongge has spent around £200m of his own money in his attempts to get Reading back to the big time. This isn’t the tale of an owner who didn’t have the cash. Ji-Min says Yongge, with no knowledge of football, leaned on the wrong people for advice. Poor player recruitment and overspending saw the club falling foul of the EFL’s Financial Fair Play rules and they were deducted six points in November 2021.
“We signed players for extortionate amounts of money, which killed the football club’s financial operations. Around 200% of what the club was bringing in was being spent on wages. It was completely unsustainable, and the proof is in the pudding now. He’s very much washed his hands of the football club and we’re very much a shell of what we once were”, concludes Ji-Min.
With limited investment, the club continued to stumble into points deductions and winding up orders and were relegated to the third tier, by the end of the 22/23 season.
Now, things have come to a head after it was revealed in court last week that Yongge, due to proceedings against him in his native China, has been disqualified as an owner under the EFL’s ownership regulations. Therefore, a deadline for him to divest is now in place.
What next for Reading?
Sell Before We Dai have been waving the red flags since their inception in June 2023. They’ve marched, dressed as clowns, halted matches with tennis balls and even forced an outright abandonment in their attempts to shed light on what’s been happening in Berkshire.
“We’ve never heard from Dai Yongge. He’s never spoken to the local or national press; he’s never even given an interview to club media. He’s the invisible man and that’s why so many fans are concerned about the club. We don’t know his intentions”, says campaigner and supporters trust board member, Adam Jones.
With Yongge disengaged, the group know that any boycott would achieve little and have changed tack for this weekend. There are at least two interested parties, including Casa Pia owner, Robert Platek. The American is in an exclusivity period to buy Reading and as a result, Sell Before We Dai are pulling out all the stops for Wycombe’s visit on Saturday to try for a capacity crowd.
“Filling the ground makes us a more attractive option for investors, and that’s a key reason why we’re going with this plan. The players deserve our backing and have pulled off some remarkable results this season. This is something we can do and definitely influence, controlling the controllables has been quite a rewarding experience.”
Defying the odds
On the pitch, somehow, the second-youngest squad in League One, full of academy graduates and ex-Premier League youngsters, are doing the business. It’s even more impressive given manager Ruben Selles left for Hull City in December, with ex-striker Noel Hunt keeping them on course for a tilt at a Championship return.
25-year-old Harvey Knibbs has excelled since his move from Cambridge and is flying in his second season with 15 goals across all competitions. Lewis Wing’s player trait chart speaks for itself. He has been the division’s outstanding player in the middle of the park.
Without the money for overnight stays for away trips, unsurprisingly, their away performances place them 18th in the table. At their own place though, they’ve channelled all that uncertainty into a siege mentality, losing just three at home all season in League One.
Women’s team turmoil
Not all of Reading’s teams have been quite so lucky. Fran Kirby is Reading’s home-grown heroine. The Euros-winning Lioness may be Chelsea Women’s all-time leading scorer and regarded as one of the best footballers of her generation, but she came through the ranks at Reading from 2001 aged 8 to fire them into the WSL by 2015.
With no funds forthcoming Reading Women were forced to resign from the Women’s Championship, despite a 10th placed finish last season, dropping into the fifth tier.
“Last weekend, they lost 10-0 to Oxford City in the Southern Region Women’s Premier Division. I don’t think there’s any greater indictment of how drastic the demise has been at the club than that.”, says Ji-Min.
An entire generation has lost their pathway to senior football. The next Fran Kirby will not be turning out for Reading Women any time soon.
Whatever happens, stick together
What happened to Bury precipitated the formation of the UK government’s Football Governance Bill which is snaking its way through Parliament. Lessons should and have been learned. It means that Reading will be given every opportunity to be saved. Bury are now fan-owned and in division nine. Now, I don’t know where Lower Brek is, other than being three points behind us in the race for promotion from the North West Counties Football League. But we have a team, I get to take my children to Gigg Lane and that’s enough.
To Reading fans: whatever happens, it’s you that make the football club. So long as you’re together, you will still have a team to support somewhere, somehow.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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