Reading FC is dying

Personally I hope they survive in league 1. Not by getting points off us of course. I can remember them is their Elm Park days when they struggled just like us. They enjoyed new ownership that brought a new ground and a better future. Much like the things we hope for now. But owners move on, like ours will one day, and it started to go wrong. It happens with ownership changes as we know. We will face that too at some point.

So I take absolutely no pleasure in watching what’s going on. I feel for their fans too. After they play us I really hope they get enough points to survive.

When I started watching football, I found I had 'soft spots' for certain clubs, and would like to see them do well, or was just neutral towards most.

Roll on a few decades, and nearly every club has annoyed me in some way at some stage, and it's hard to like any of them.

Add in social media, and its unerring ability to allow you to see the gobbiest morons of every fanbase, and it's not surprising.


Reading's problems would be the same as any other club that's got into financial trouble, if it weren't for two things.

Firstly, the owner has owned three clubs, and he folded the other two after they each dropped into their country's third tier.

Second, a whistleblower from inside the club revealed the owner's plan is to run down the club and liquidate in the summer. The same whistleblower revealed that two players were being sold without the knowledge of the manager or director of football - which is exactly what happened.

It gets even murkier when the owner's dealings in China are looked into, suggesting allegations of large scale fraud, working with government contacts to frame an old business associate, not to mention his businesses being delisted from the HK stock exchange pending investigations.

The club, the stadium, the training ground, the land around the stadium, and the hotel, are all in separate companies (the land being pilferred by the previous ownership group, along with the hotel), which the owner intended to sell separately. The football club will have virtually no value other than players, hence the desire to sell players now.


The lack of any remotely alternative to the Madejski means that anyone buying the club, who can't purchase the stadium as well, is going to be stuck paying the £1.5 million a year rent the owner changes. 

If the club folds, a reformed club will have nowhere to play. There is the ground that non-league Reading City FC use, but that's just a basic "hard standing and a couple of meccano seating units" type ground. They'd probably have to groundshare at Maidenhead.

There are supposed to be a number of parties interested in buying the club - hopefully the whole club, but there is kind of a feeling among many that if a sale isn't made by the summer, then the club is gone. There are suspicions that the owner has lowered his price, which would help, but there are also people apparently wanting to buy the individual parts. Mike Ashley only wanted the stadium, for example.

The bizarre thing is that this could have been a very good owner. He's certainly put a lot of money into the club, including building a top-notch training facility. Unfortunately the owner stopped paying bills, and the catering company pulled out, and the players have to heat up microwave meals now, and staff often have to wear coats inside because the heating isn't turned on.

A ridiculous amount of money was spent on players. Inexplicably, the owner and his cronies got rid of all the people who knew what they were doing, and put recruitment in the hands of agents instead, largely Kia Joorabchian. By remarkable coincidence, a large number of the players signed were clients of these agents, and with the agents getting a cut of both the transfer fee and the players' wages, there didn't seem to be much restraint on either. It meant a large squad of players who, with a few exceptions, only seemed to be at the club for the money, and didn't care about performances or results. Four years into a five year transfer embargo, the last of the big earners was shifted a few weeks ago, but even he had to paid to leave early.

Other odd things include maintaining a Category 1 academy, even though the EFL's salary restictions meant we couldn't offer improved salaries, meaning good prospects leave for free every summer, because we can't offer them new deals. At a supposed £5 million a year, it's a luxury few League One clubs can afford, and would be an immense struggle in League Two.

The EFL do get painted as the bad guys quite a lot, and there are stupid things like as mentioned above, not being able to offer young players improved deals (which would probably be fairly low anyway) but they have already pushed for the owner to be banned from football. The independent disciplinary panel that reviewed the recommendation rejected it, and uselessly just gave him a fine instead, which he is just not bothering to pay. It seems they are going back to push for him to be banned again.

If he does get banned, he has 28 days to sell the club, and if he fails to do that, there would probably have to be a vote on expelling Reading from the league.