Reading’s Lengthy Takeover Saga: How Fans Stay Optimistic

Reading’s Lengthy Takeover Saga: How Fans Stay Optimistic

while a Midlands-based Royal, physically separated from the club and the majority of our fanbase, it has been difficult to watch from afar while the team struggles. My personal life has prevented me from attending many Reading games since 2020, but in reality, it feels like the natural culmination of a process that began when I first moved up north in 2014. In the decade afterwards, I’ve done my best to stay up to date on club affairs, but as poor ownership bred cynicism and even apathy in me, I’ve battled to maintain a healthy relationship with the club.
Ultimately, I’m tired. I’ve seen and heard those sentiments from a lot of Reading fans over the last several seasons, as Dai Yongge has drove the club to the edge of administration or possibly extinction. But today, I’ve never felt more connected to the fandom. I hope it’s a happy union. I was unable to attend last season’s final home game, but those scenes reminded me of what made me fall in love with the club at my first game as a child, when we were promoted from Division Two.
I’d like for us to be jubilantly celebrating good news, particularly the sale of the club. But we aren’t. We are united by the anguish of not knowing whether our club has a future. And there is one reason for this. Football has an ownership issue. It’s not simply Dai or the club’s salespeople who have made this process so difficult. It’s the time wasters, tyre-kickers, and circling vultures.
Even though we thought we had resolved the Bearwood problem, we are now faced with uncertainty over its future. Redwood Holdings obtained their loans to the club, which have been as vital in keeping Reading alive as Select Car Leasings’ heroic efforts on the training ground. Furthermore, allegations circulate that the current dominant party interested in the club is a group led by Rob Couhig, the apparent mastermind behind the initial Bearwood tragedy.
It speaks a lot about the impact of the past decade on my mentality that a supposedly benevolent Football League owner, beloved by Wycombe Wanderers fans, instills such distrust in me. If the chairman of a well-managed team that has hovered around our present League One/Championship level wants to buy Reading, shouldn’t we be pleased? I would want to be wrong. But I can’t shake the idea that this isn’t what we need. While some of the knee-jerk reactions to the incident were unnecessary and nasty, the cancelled Bearwood training facility purchase raises far too many red flags for me.
Primarily, I still feel that the sale was prevented only because to the overwhelming PR outcry, action by Reading supporters and support from certain Wycombe fans, and “political” pressure within the footballing and wider community. I saw it as a naive blunder from a man with five years of experience in English sports ownership, including successfully navigating pandemics, and great success with his hometown baseball team in the US. But if such inexperience was troubling for a potential Bearwood buyer, it is even more so for a potential club owner.
In an interview with a Wycombe podcast, Couhig depicted the training field as a “huge, huge revenue drain” as part of the desperate effort to reframe the situation, with Wycombe intended to act as Reading’s saviour. I believe the bulk of our fanbase would argue that this misses the point: aside from the general pride in our facilities, academy, and academy products, who have become increasingly essential to the first team, there is an obvious financial benefit to having high-quality facilities for our club and academy.
A stable Category One academy provided some of our only transfer income prior to the January 2024 fire-sale-that-wasn’t-a-fire-sale, as Manchester City were forced to purchase Luca Fletcher from us rather than pay the low levels of EFL-set compensation that are due when a Category One academy signs players from a lower-category academy. Even if the larger clubs continue to take our talent, they will have to pay. In contrast, Portsmouth’s story teaches us a valuable lesson. Despite their recent rising trend, Pompey have already seen Premier League clubs with Category One academies sign some of their brightest talent for modest amounts.
Then there’s the fact that Couhig was using external investment in Wycombe to buy an asset that was blatantly being stripped by the Chinese businessman as he cut his losses, while also apparently working with a consortium that would benefit from being able to purchase the club at a lower price if Bearwood wasn’t included in the deal.

When I expressed my concern on social media, Wycombe fans labelled me a conspiracy theorist, but I’ll take it: my day job is in the highly regulated financial sector, and the possible conflict of interest here makes me really uneasy. In these cases, I don’t assume the truth, and I believe that it is critical to scrutinise these large transactions in general. That is not to say that I am promoting a major conspiracy or anything unlawful under current regulations: like all prudent investors, the venture capitalists at Chiron and the supporters of other consortiums want to buy us when the stock is low, build us up, and sell when the stock is high.

Couhig has done this successfully with Wycombe. I’m simply arguing that the Bearwood mess demonstrates the possibility for the bigger arrangement to be manipulated by ostensibly outside parties, who do not need to have Reading’s best interests at heart while still having an interest in the team. Does it feel ethical for someone to depreciate the club while at a competitor, then leave months later and acquire the club at a lower price?

We are realistic about the risks of a sale not going through, as evidenced by Dai’s past teams. If we remain under his ownership, we will perish. But is it too much to ask for owners that want us to prosper rather than just pick us up and sell us for a fast profit? This highlights the need for an independent authority to oversee our clubs’ ownership and transfer of ownership. How are the roles of people that appear frequently in a short period of time, ranging from Rob Couhigs, who appear to have a decent track record, to unscrupulous figures like Chris Williamson, being assessed?

Is there a method to gain the trust of fans in those who serve as fixers in the UK football club market? Do we want football clubs to go through frequent ownership changes? Can we make long-term sales less unpleasant for communities? Despite the EFL’s efforts, transparency in football club business remains at an all-time low. The apparent candour of characters like William Storey and Daniel Loitz – who are widely derided as time wasters – demonstrates that the spin machine is in full swing when buyers surround clubs, since they can fill the hole if clubs do not speak honestly.

Fans can’t see where the money is coming from or why transactions are taking so long. Multi-million dollar transactions are expected to take place behind closed doors, but uncertainty in the football world is harsh on a massive scale. In cases like ours, both the club’s players and non-players suffer. Their families suffer. We, the fans, suffer. But we should not be discouraged. The club stumbles upon. This is when we can rally our supporters, the family that has been brought together by our shared terrible experience, and go on. Away from our own team, we should advocate for a robust regulator to ensure that no other fanbases go through what we have.

More importantly, we must support one another when football becomes too much when mixed with other stresses in our life. I previously went on BBC Breakfast to address my own experiences with mental health concerns among students, motivated in part by our fanbase’s outspoken mental health support network. The recent work of the great @TalkingRoyals has demonstrated that the network is stronger than ever. On a broader level, football frequently works with the charities Mind and Calm. If you require assistance, please reach out. Regardless of where we are, we are all Reading fans. UTFD.