Maintaining Hope Throughout Reading’s Protracted Takeover
The Royals’ ownership saga has been drawn-out and convoluted, and evolved further with recent news that former Wycombe man Rob Couhig is interested in a purchase.
As a Midlands-based Royal, geographically distant from the club and the majority of our fanbase, it has been hard to watch on from afar as the club suffers.
My personal life means I’ve been unable to attend many Reading games since 2020, although in truth it feels like the inevitable conclusion of a process which started when I first moved further north in 2014. In the decade since, I’ve tried my best to stay abreast of events at the club, but as inept ownership has instilled a sense of cynicism and even apathy in me, I’ve struggled to keep a healthy relationship with supporting the club.
Ultimately: I’m tired. I’ve seen and heard those words from so many Reading fans in the last few seasons, as Dai Yongge has driven the club towards the brink of administration or even extinction.
But, now, I’ve never felt more united with the fanbase. I’d love for it to be a happy union. I wasn’t able to attend the final home game of last season, but those scenes were reminiscent of what made me fall in love with the club at my first game as a child as we were on the up from the old Division Two.
I’d love for us to be joyously celebrating positive news, especially about the sale of the club. But we’re not. We’re bound together by the anxiety of still not knowing whether our club has a future. And there is one cause behind this.
Football has an ownership problem. It’s not just Dai who has made this process so painful, or the people involved in the sale at the club. It’s the timewasters, the tyre-kickers, the circling vultures.
Even after we thought we’d put the Bearwood incident to bed, we’re now faced with uncertainty over where its future lies. Redwood Holdings secured their loans to the club, which have been as important in keeping Reading alive as the heroic contributions of Select Car Leasings, against the training ground. Furthermore, rumours swirl that the new leading party with interest in the club is a consortium involving the apparent mastermind of the original Bearwood incident: Rob Couhig.
It says a lot about the impact of the last decade on my psyche that an apparently benevolent Football League owner - loved by Wycombe Wanderers fans - prompts such a level of distrust in me. If the chairman of a well-run club which has hovered around our current level in League One/Championship wants to buy Reading, shouldn’t we be happy?
I’d love to be wrong. But I can’t shake the feeling this isn’t what we need. While some of the knee-jerk reactions around the situation were unwarranted and abhorrent, the aborted Bearwood training ground purchase just raises too many red flags for me.
Primarily, I still believe that it was only the sheer PR backlash, action from Reading fans and support by some Wycombe fans, and “political” pressure within the footballing and wider community, which halted the deal. I totted it up as a naïve misstep from a man who has five years’ experience - including excellently navigated pandemic years - in English sports ownership, after great success back home in the States with his hometown baseball team. But if that naivety was concerning from a potential buyer of Bearwood, it is even more concerning from a potential owner of the club.
As part of the frantic approach to reframe the situation - with Wycombe intending to act as Reading’s saviour - Couhig described the training ground as a “huge, huge revenue drain” in an interview with a Wycombe podcast. I think the majority of our fanbase would say this misses the point: besides the general pride around our facilities, academy and academy products who have been increasingly important to the first team, there is a clear financial benefit to top-quality facilities for our club and academy.
A stable Category One academy provided some of our only transfer income before the January 2024 fire-sale-that-wasn’t-a-fire-sale, as Manchester City were forced to buy Luca Fletcher from us rather than paying the low levels of EFL-set compensation which are due when a Category One academy signs players from a lower-category academy.
At Category One, even if the big clubs continue to pick off our talent, they’ll have to pay. Contrast that with Portsmouth, whose story we can learn a lot from. Despite their recent upwards trajectory, because of their category level, Pompey have already had Premier League clubs with Category One academies pick off some of their brighter talent for low fees.
Then there’s the fact that Couhig was also using external investment in Wycombe to buy an asset which was - in the eyes of anyone with knowledge of Dai’s history - blatantly being stripped by the Chinese businessman as he cut his losses, while also apparently involved in some capacity with a consortium which would benefit from being able to purchase the club at a lower price if Bearwood wasn’t included in the deal.
When I voiced this concern on social media I was hounded by Wycombe fans as a conspiracy theorist, but I’ll take that on the chin: my day job is in a highly regulated financial sector and the potential conflict of interests here makes me incredibly uneasy. I don’t default to truth in these situations and believe in the importance of scrutiny of these huge deals as a whole.
That’s not to say I am touting a grand conspiracy, nor anything illegal under current regulations: like all sensible investors, the venture capitalists at Chiron and the backers of other consortiums want to pick us up when our stock is low, build us up, and sell when the stock is high.
It’s what Couhig has done successfully with Wycombe. I’m just suggesting that the Bearwood debacle shows potential for the broader deal to be manipulated by supposedly outside pressures, who do not need to have Reading’s best interests at heart while able to have an interest in the club. Does it feel right that someone could devalue the club while at a competitor, then months later leave them and buy the club at the cheaper value?
Realistically, we know the risks of a sale not progressing - from the examples of Dai’s previous clubs. If we stay under his ownership, we will not survive. But is it too much for us to hope for owners who want us to thrive, not just pick us up and flip us for a quick buck?
This is where the need for an independent regulator with strong oversight of the ownership, and the transferral of the ownership, of our clubs is clear. How are the roles of people who pop up frequently in a short space of time, from the Rob Couhigs - with an apparently good track record - to the shady figures - such as Chris Williamson - being assessed?
Is there a way to build fans’ trust in the people who act as fixers in the UK’s market for football clubs? Do we want football clubs to frequently change hands? When sales are protracted, can we make the sale process less painful for communities?
Despite the EFL’s efforts, transparency in the trading of football clubs is at an all-time low. The apparent candour of figures such as William Storey and Daniel Loitz - roundly dismissed as timewasters - shows that the spin machine is in full flow when buyers circle clubs, as they can fill the void if clubs themselves do not communicate openly.
Fans can’t see where the money is coming from, nor why deals are taking so long. Multi-million transactions are expected to be done behind closed doors, but uncertainty in the world of football is brutal on a huge scale. In stories like ours, the club’s playing and non-playing staff suffer. Their families suffer. We, as the fans, suffer.
But we shouldn’t get disheartened. The club stumbles on. This is when we can turn to our fanbase, the family which has been brought together by our shared painful experience, and march forward. Away from our own club, we should push for a strong regulator so no other fanbase experiences what we’re experiencing.
Even more so, we need to be there for each other in the situations where football gets too much when combined with other stresses in our lives. I previously appeared on BBC Breakfast to discuss my own experiences of mental health issues in the student population: I was partly inspired by the outspoken mental health support network within our fanbase.
The recent work of the incredible @TalkingRoyals has shown us that network is stronger than ever. On a wider scale, football frequently collaborates with the charities Mind and Calm. If you need help, reach out. No matter where we are, we’re all together in this as Reading fans. UTFD.