Only the bad Dai Yongge

Reading are back on the brink, but does the owner even want to sell the club?

It’s been five years since Bury were expelled from the EFL, more than a century of a football club’s existence wiped away because it was treated as little more than an item of convenience for others. There were tears and there was much furrowing of brows. There was much fine talk of what must be done to prevent something like this from happening again.

Yet here we are, staring into a familiar abyss again. There’s still no independent football regulator. No rules of significance have been changed, no safeguards have been put in place. And there is almost no sense of surprise about what is happening now, a couple of hundred miles to the south of Bury, in Berkshire.

On the pitch, things couldn’t be going much better for Reading. Their 3-1 win at Shrewsbury Town on Tuesday night nudged them back up to sixth place in League One with five games of the season left to play, two points ahead of Bolton Wanderers. They’ve lost just once in their last fourteen league games, a run stretching back to the start of February.

Their last home match, at home to local rivals Wycombe Wanderers last Saturday, attracted a crowd of over 15,000, their biggest of the season. And all of this has come despite losing manager Ruben Selles to Hull City at the start of December and top scorer Sam Smith to Wrexham at the end of the January transfer window.

But as we all know, the defining story of this season at this club has little to nothing to do with football. The latest chapter of woe in this ongoing story came three weeks ago, when the EFL confirmed that disgraced owner Dai Yongge had failed the Owners & Directors Test on account of “unsatisfied judgements in China” and gave him until the 5th April to sell the club; that he’s in serious financial trouble has been an open secret for quite a while, now. With that deadline having not been met, the League extended their deadline to the 22nd April, giving them twelve days to resolve the matter to their approval.

Except there’s a problem with all of this. Dai continues to give the impression that he doesn’t even want to sell up. Negotiations with Rob Couhig, the former owner of Wycombe Wanderers, collapsed in September. A bid fronted by Roger Smee, a long-time supporter who was involved in rescuing the club from the Thames Valley Royals debacle of 1983 (£), was rejected in December.

Another bid was made to buy the club has been made since then, this time led by the American businessman Robert Platek, only for the club to have now issued a statement stating that, “the exclusivity period with the prospective buyer has now expired, and club representatives are now in advanced dialogue with an alternative bidder”. With just twelve days left before this fresh deadline reaches its expiry date and considering the fact that three previous bids to buy the club this season have now been rejected, it’s difficult to hold onto the hope that this time things will be any different.

The club was somewhat coy about the identity of this “alternative bidder”, but it’s been reported that it’s most likely Couhig again. But the problem here is that the main complication has been a legal dispute between Rob Couhig and Yongge. Couhig's deal to buy Reading collapsed last September and has since been pursuing £12m in loss of potential profits, although he has stated he still wants to buy the club.

At a court hearing in March, Dai attempted to get an injunction against Couhig, who he claimed was blocking his attempt to sell because of securities he has over the stadium and training ground as a result of money that he has previously put into it. The injunction was rejected. The current rumour—of many—is that the Platek deal fell through because of these securities, but nothing official has been confirmed regarding this.

Dai and Couhig were instructed to find a solution via alternative security or a payment into escrow; a type of account which is managed by a third party. If that can be resolved, then the path, in theory, should be clear for the sale of the club to go ahead. In theory.

But does Dai even want to sell? When Smee’s offer in December was rejected, it was done so with what was described as a “short email”, and it is understood that Couhig received a similarly dismissive response to his bid in September. It’s all very well “putting the club up for sale”, but if nothing comes of any of it and all attempts on the part of others to buy it are rebuffed, how “up for sale” can it reasonably be presumed to be? Considering that Dai has already forced the bankruptcy of clubs in China and Belgium, there are reasonable grounds to believe that he could have no compunction about doing the same in England.

The bottom line is the bottom line, here. No-one can force Dai to sell the club. All that can be done is for pressure to be applied to him to do so, and this appears to be the route that the EFL are taking. But having said all of that, it is to be presumed that the club have made a convincing case to them that there are grounds to believe that an extension to the 22nd April is actually worth giving them in the first place, because pushing this closer and closer to the end of the season only increases the risk of disrupting the entire League One season.

And this does matter. There are 23 other clubs in this division, four or five of whom could still be said to be having a realistic chance of making that final playoff place. As we reach the final few weeks of the season, that one of the clubs—indeed the club currently inhabiting the final playoff place—could be at risk of suspension from playing is fundamentally absurd and proof, as if it were needed, that Reading FC can be a viable concern as a business if it can be managed competely, and there there’s certainly been little sign of that since Dai took ownership of the club eight years ago.

And his record over that time certainly has been abysmal. There have been points deductions and a fall from the Championship. The ground has been removed from the club and placed into hos ownership, while the women’s team was gutted for cost-cutting reasons. Reading have become a byword—yet another one—for the incompetence of those who seem to believe themselves to be above the rules that everyone should be following. The reason for his instrasigence over offers to buy the club remain broadly guesswork, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that no matter what they are, they’re for his benefit and his benefit alone.

It is to be sincerely hoped that the sale can be tied up soon. Reading Football Club were formed in 1871. They’re older than the Football League, older than the very concept of professionalism in football, and they deserve to be run in a manner befitting that rich history. This football club deserves better, in the same way that all football clubs deserve better.

More than five years on from the Bury debacle, perhaps one of the key acid tests for the state of the game in this country as the 2024/25 season comes to a close will be Reading’s survival. At the moment, although there are causes for optimism that the sale can be completed, the matter remains up in the air with just five games of the regular league season left to play. How much progress has their been since the crocodile tears and the cries of ‘never again’ that we heard at the end of August 2019? We shall see.

The accompanying image by John Fielding is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.