Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here
Walking up to the home of Reading is a distinctly doleful experience in 2024, like passing through the high street of a town you used to live in and knowing you can never get those years back. This was the house that John Madejski built that once bore his name, full most weeks during the good years when magic dust seemed to land upon Reading for a while.
Madejski was chairman from 1990, a man who grew up in a children’s home in the town and then made his many millions. He rescued Reading from receivership, built them a new home and then funded a dream not through wanton overspending but by savviness and sensible delegation to well-appointed managers.
Reading had three seasons in the Premier League – the latest in 2012-13 – and finished eighth in 2006-07. They didn’t spend more than £3m on a player until 2017. They made a cult hero team by making good with what they had and who they found along the way: Steve Coppell, Brian McDermott, Adam Le Fondre, Kevin Doyle, Nicky Shorey, Graeme Murty, Stephen Hunt, Dave Kitson, Ibrahima Sonko, Steve Sidwell and more. Reading were a single point away from European football in 2007.
That is the cast list you think of when you walk around the Select Car Leasing Stadium now and not only because their faces, frozen in moments of shared joy, adorn walls that have witnessed far worse times since. Reading have spent more than a year in a state of civil war, an emergency that gets worse with each passing month and each potential takeover that fails. There is one message above all others here: leave fast, Dai Yongge.
As such, there were less than 13,000 at Reading on Saturday lunchtime, vast swathes of blue seats obvious at one end and that splash effect in the main stands, where a concentrated collection of fans in the middle eventually gives away to sporadic dots. Some feel that they cannot give any more money to the owner and, although it doesn’t quite work that way, you have to accept their desire to stay away. Others simply had their spirit eroded to the point that going to the football wasn’t fun enough to justify the cost, time or effort.
Madejski lost control of Reading when he sold it to Thames Sports Investments, a Russian consortium fronted by Anton Zingarevich that were never able to fully complete the purchase, a Thai ownership group stepping in instead. In November 2016, Chinese siblings Dai Yongge and Dai Xiu Li began negotiations to take a majority stake having tried and failed to buy Hull City. By May 2017, they were in.
Dai’s first match – for it was he who was more hands-on and is now effectively the sole owner – was the Championship play-off final at Wembley. Reading lost that on penalties and have never been as high again. That is the tragic irony: all this hurt, all this sorry wastage and all this wasted energy to never get back even to where you started. It could all have been so different but this is all it is now.
Dai might be accused of many things, but not spending money isn’t one of them. The enforced parsimony that eventually swallowed Reading’s potential arrived because of their own excesses. They spent around £15m on George Puscas and Sone Aluko despite being a second-tier club with lower revenues than many of their peers. They reportedly relied upon agent Kia Joorabchian as their high-end transfer fixer. They were known as generous wage payers, especially for loan players.
Unhelpfully, Reading also didn’t sell particularly well. Under Dai’s entire ownership, they have sold two players for a fee of more than £2.5m. The first was Leandro Bacuna, who left for Cardiff for just under £3m in January 2019 (in the same season Reading paid more than that for Sam Baldock). The second was Michael Olise, criminally undervalued by a release clause that allowed him to join Crystal Palace for just £8m.
More to the point, Reading weren’t actually very good. They finished 20th in the first two full seasons under Dai’s ownership and then 14th in the third. In 2020-21, the season before everything started to unravel, Reading were in a dominant position to at least make the Championship play-offs. They won one of their last 11 league games and finished seventh.
That created only one likely reality. Spending on wages alone eventually doubled revenue, financial regulations started to bite and, in November 2021, Reading were deducted six points for exceeding agreed limits on losses with the EFL. The following season they were deducted a further six points for failing to comply with the schedule agreed after the first punishment; this time it meant relegation to League One.
And then last season, more farces still. Reading were docked one point for failing to pay players on time the previous season, two points for making late payments to HMRC and another three for more late payments of salaries. The club existed under transfer embargoes for breaching profitability and sustainability regulations. It became clear: Dai had got it all wrong and the club was paying for his mistakes.
Supporters may have forgiven the wayward stewardship if they could believe that their club was meeting them halfway. Football clubs get relegated all the time and many step on the wrong side of the rules, even multiple times. Tricky times can bring clubs together and create siege mentalities that reinforce the sensation of social institution rather than degrading it.
Here that never happened because lines of communication were broken. Supporters’ groups were told repeatedly that Dai was a private individual, but that doesn’t adequately explain the information vacuum in which only fear or rumour could ever hope to breed sustainably. Relegation to League One could have offered a shot at a clear reset and return to the values that propelled Reading on in the past. Instead, it was bad business as usual.
That is what provoked the protests that have become one of the most concerted supporter campaigns in recent history. Five groups combined to create Sell Before We Dai, a protest organisation that demanded the sale of Reading before more damage could be done. Many of these supporters did the same to save the club in the 1980s; here they were again.
A year ago this month, thousands met at Blue Collar Street Food market on Hosier Street on the eastern edge of the town centre and marched the two miles to the stadium. That was the breakout event of Sell Before We Dai, a means of gaining national attention for their plight before a home game against Portsmouth, a club who had suffered painfully similar turbulence.
The depth and breadth of initiatives that Sell Before We Dai have organised since is genuinely astonishing and impossible to list exhaustively. They created websites and merchandise. They wrote manifestoes for change. They participated in countless media interviews with almost as many different outlets.
They reached out to the council and managed to obtain Asset of Community Value status for the stadium, offering a layer of protection given the separation of the club and ground under Dai’s watch. They relentlessly worked to secure help from local and national MPs, including an approach to use Reading as a test-case club for a new independent regulator.
They organised sit-in protests, tennis ball protests, red card protests and clown fancy dress protests. They became investigative journalists to unearth information that could help their case. They held meetings with the EFL and used social media to conduct sessions in which supporters of other clubs are educated on the issues. They helped to raise money for financial shortfalls within the club. They became educated and active on four different Chinese social media platforms to try and raise awareness in Dai’s native country.
“You name it, Reading fans have done it,” says Adam Jones of the protest group.
“Sell Before We Dai has been the central point for protests and pressure, but it’s the whole fanbase that has helped to bring some of these ideas to life through their participation and fundraising.
“As a group we’re extremely grateful for the support. A prawn sandwich brigade we’re not. Fans have shown that they’re willing to go to all lengths to save their football club.”
One shift over time is how the protests became more studied (focusing on aiding the end goal) rather than reactive (causing a stink about the situation). As Sarah Turner, chair of Reading Supporters’ Trust, explained to me before Saturday’s game, that was a deliberate move because they could not risk more harm to the team due to punishments for interruptive action. “Support the team, not the regime” became another mantra.
You see the point: if the aim is for the club to be sold, getting points deductions for actions calling for that sale is only going to take the club down the table and make them less attractive to buyers and exacerbate the emergency. Instead they became a committed cooperative in which experts from multiple industries worked with an army of general volunteer supporters.
And where has that led but nowhere at all. For all their magnificent, tireless work, Reading supporters cannot force through a sale and cannot alter its conditions enough themselves. Last month, a third potential takeover in 12 months fell through as former Wycombe Wanderers owner Rob Couhig was unable to complete a deal. It is the same old story: constant effort and worry with no obvious reward nor end in sight. I have timed my trip to Reading deliberately: this marks the 365th day since Dai announced that the club was for sale.
“I don’t know what as a campaign we could’ve done more,” Caroline Parker of Sell Before We Dai told i.
“We’ve given blood, sweat and tears for 15 months to try to get this man out of the club. We’ve tried everything. We couldn’t have been more high profile.
“And what’s it got us to? Nothing. No football fans should have to keep going through this.”
When chatting to Sarah outside the stadium, her reaction is slightly different but no less bleak: “You know what, when I heard the news, there was no anger and there were no tears. It was just a feeling of complete resignation. It has all made me dead inside.”
This is not just a case of wanting a new owner because they don’t much care for the record of the current one. According to a report in The Guardian, Dai’s attempts to sell the club are being complicated by his failure to repay debts to a Chinese bank, which would raise fears for any potential buyer that they may lose control of the stadium if it is taken as collateral.
Furthermore, Couhig’s group loaned the club money to keep players and staff – and HMRC – paid up and avoid further points deductions. Olise’s sale to Bayern Munich by Crystal Palace has provided a cash injection, but supporters are clearly worried about how long the money will last.
“The fact that they are choosing not to [fund the club] is deplorable, dishonourable and brings the entire game into disrepute,” a statement from the Supporters’ Trust read.
“The club statement asserts that ‘funds are in place to fund the club until a transaction is completed’. This is a huge claim for the club to make given Dai has not funded the club for over six months, the club has continually missed payments without external support and the selling process is nearly entering a second year.”
All the while, things keep getting worse. Staff have been made redundant, a sale of the training ground only collapsed after significant protests, the club’s women’s team were forced to pull out of the second tier because they could no longer operate professionally and those staff left at the club are under enormous pressure and live in constant fear that wages may not arrive on time. It doesn’t get much worse than this.
And yet, counterintuitively given all this place has witnessed over the last two years, I am here to find some hope too. In part it is to be found in everything I read and hear about the supporters themselves. When a fanbase comes together and unites over a single goal, it creates the potential for a day, further down the line, when they can look each other in teary eyes and know that their comradeship made this happen. How could hope not exist while that remains a possibility?
But it’s also present here because of what is happening on the pitch and who is driving it. In Ruben Selles, Reading supporters have a manager who is committed to making the best of the worst and has been an ally to them off the pitch. Reading academy regained Level 1 status in the summer of 2023 and without it god knows where Reading would be now. These two factors have meant everything.
On the side of the stadium is a giant mosaic of Eamonn Dolan, on the stand that now bears his name. Dolan was the academy manager at Reading from 2004 until his tragic passing from cancer in 2016 at the age of just 48. Dolan’s work was not just in providing key ingredients in some of Reading’s greatest ever teams, but in the principles he upheld and standards he set in the academy that would last long after he left us.
Reading beat Bristol Rovers on Saturday; they were dominant throughout although the scoreline was only 1-0 and although they survived a late wobble. They have now picked up the most points at home in the EFL this season, remarkable given preseason expectations and the general mood. A haven has been found in the most unlikely place.
Reading’s starting XI had an average age of 23.8, one of the youngest in the country. More remarkable is that the team contained five academy graduates and there were another four on the bench.
In total this season, Reading have included 12 different academy graduates in their matchday squads. This may not last because the depth in the squad is non-existent, because young players suffer troughs as well as peaks and because there is no money to spend in January, but Reading are sixth in League One.
After the match, Sarah drops me a message: “I hope you could see that there is a good feeling between fans and players – it feels like a team fighting against the odds too”.
And she’s right; it absolutely does. This is a group of young kids who have only known hardship here under a Spanish coach who has been forced to suffer exactly the same, and yet they seem determined to do all they can together. That is enough to provoke intense feelings of pride, even in an outsider visiting for a day.
Who knows how long that can last, because the cycle of emotional turmoil begins again. A new period of exclusivity has opened with a different potential purchaser. Perhaps, after three failures, the fourth one will be a charm. Sarah gives me a knowing smile when I ask if she’s hopeful of it going through. Adam verbalises the same look.
“The club may be in a period of exclusivity now, but we’re still engaging with politicians to try and keep the pressure on. We appreciate the fact we need to be doing meaningful things to actually make any difference and that’s firmly in our minds. We can’t take anything for granted and our work continues.”
Nobody here will dare celebrate until there is a new name above the door. One day I will come back here and not feel as if I am walking towards a wake as I venture along Acre Road with the white metalwork of the stadium coming into view. For now that remains a pipe dream that ultimately sits outside of the control of all but a few.
But when it does happen, and the cloud finally lifts from this club and its 153-year history, we should take a step back to pay homage to those who have offered solace and made a difference over the last year. To the academy players who have stepped up to fill the gaps. To the manager who has somehow shut out the noise. To the staff who have kept on working, taking on more duties under harder circumstances.
And to the supporters: those within the protest groups, those leaders of the movement, those who have volunteered and organised and those outsiders who have lent their help, advice or simply listened. These are the people who went above and beyond because they felt they owed it to those who loved Reading before them and those who would love it after them. They have done so for far longer than they ever feared that they might have to. The things that keep football clubs alive are exactly the things that make that life worth fighting for.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/QbcFwor
Post a Comment