Reading FC: it's all a matter of where you draw the line, really
The supine response to the slow unravelling of Reading FC is infuriating because there have been so many steps on the way.
It’s all a matter of where you draw the line, really.
We accept that football clubs, from time to time, have to have ‘fire sales’ of players, whether on account of overspending, an inability to maintain an overburdened wage bill, or a sudden cessation of inward investment or sponsorship. We accept that rival football clubs are more than happy to take advantage of this, and that players can, too.
We acknowledge that clubs shouldn’t overspend on players, and that there are times when you have to cut your cloth according to what you can afford rather than what you hoped you could afford. To buy a player at a reduced price because the seller needs a quick sale isn’t particularly considered in a negative light, primarily because players are ultimately a luxury.
The better the player, the bigger the advantage, and the bigger the advantage, the bigger a luxury they are. It’s hardly as though there’s ever likely to be a shortage of them. So if you have to trade down then, well, yes, that should be a natural and necessary guardrail against completely reckless overspending.
But when it comes to fixtures and fittings, it’s a different matter. Players are by their very nature transient. The same goes for managers. But the same cannot be said for fixtures and fittings, bricks and mortar, the parts of a football club that should last considerably longer than any player, manager, or owner. This is why Wycombe Wanderers have come in for considerable criticism over their decision to buy Reading FC’s training ground from their disgraced owner.
Because it’s all a matter of where you draw the line, really.
What is happening to Reading Football Club at this of all times is, at its heart, a story of a fundamental failure of the regulation of football in England. That this laissez-faire attitude should have resulted in a situation like this yet again, one in which there is a significant risk that a football club that is seventeen years older than the Football League itself could go out of business, feels like both a parable for our times and categorically no surprise whatsoever.
A football club which has attracted five-figure home attendances this season despite being anchored near the League One relegation places on account of multiple points deductions, and who play at a relatively modern stadium into which they only moved in 1998 could just… cease to exist. It says something for how broken things are that we all know that such trivialities as how viable a football club should be often have little to do with how viable they actually are.
It’s worth remembering, every time something like this happens, that none of this is any form of ‘natural selection’. This is all a matter of choices that have been taken and decisions that either have or haven’t been made. Dai Yongge got involved with this football club knowing what the costs could be. He was, we should presume, of sound mind when he made the decisions that were made over the years during which Reading sank deeper and deeper into the mire.
And the EFL could have seen this coming. They could have seen it from the bankruptcies of clubs that felt Yongge’s septic touch in Belgium and China. They damn well did see it from the 214% wages to turnover ratio, while in the Championship. But they didn’t act, because we live in the financial Wild West, in which the values of the marketplace trump the values of community every single time.
Because it’s all a matter of where you draw the line, really.
And in the event that Reading FC should go to the wall, then at least spare me the hand-wringing of football’s self-appointed Great & Good, dabbing away their crocodile tears with yet more sanctimonious platitudes about the ‘life-blood’ of the game. Spare me the caterwauling something must be dones from those who’ve spent decades dining at the gilded trough without lifting a finger, part of the very grotesque inequality which has led to so much of the EFL becoming a casino, with entrance to the Premier League as its top prize.
The last three decades have bastardised football in this country to such an extent that it’s barely recognisable. For all bar a select few, the idea of actually winning anything has come to feel like a distant memory rather than a possibility. The Premier League’s hyper-wage-inflation has been the only thing to trickle down to the EFL since 1992; well, that and a generation of club owners who’ve willing to sling everything on red on the off-chance of a place at that top table.
Tribal loyalties have come to ultimately defeat any interest in the wellbeing of the game in a broader sense. No lessons have been learnt from what happened to Bury, exactly as so few were learned from so many of the other clubs who’d sailed so close to ending up in the same position as them over the previous two decades. The situation had already reached such a point that the threat of an independent regulator hung over the game for years, and still they did nothing. The Premier League and the EFL were given the opportunity to set their own terms, if only they could reach agreement. And they couldn’t.
Because it’s all a matter of where you draw the line, really.
The nature of what makes up a ‘football club’ has been hotly-contested over the years. The badge? Whichever badge it happens to be at the time? The colours? The special commemorative fourth colours? The supporters? Those who watch in the ground or those who watch on the television? The ground? The one you played in for a hundred years, or the one that your last-but-three chairman built as a vanity project? It certainly isn’t the limited company that owns the holding company of which the club is currently a subsidiary.
But while there remains this slow, steady stream of football club owners and administrators who frankly do not deserve to be custodians of anything, let alone our national game, there also remain incredible strength and depth in English football, of which we should be proud. Both the men’s and women’s national teams are among the best in the world. Attendances are at incredible highs across the entire spectrum of the game. Women’s football is blossoming and the game is, for all the work it still has to do, more diverse than ever. It might well be argued that both the strength and the depth of the game in this country have never been higher.
If Reading Football Club fail, it won't be because there weren't enough supporters, or because those supporters didn't spend enough money. It won't be because the club didn't have the facilities, or because the infrastructure wasn't in place. It won't be because Reading ‘can't support’ an EFL club. It's been doing that for more than a century. Reading Football Club is more than 150 years old.
It will be because an incompetent owner stripped the cupboard dry, whether by accident or design, while those who passed for regulators issued gruff statements and deducted points, a singularly futile action when the owner is already halfway out the door and clearly doesn't give a damn any more. When they’re not acting as a deterrent, these punishments end up primarily punishing those who are still trying, increasingly in vain, to fight the numerous fires that this ownership has lit and keep the club alive, and the people who care the most, who spend their money to support this team through thick and thin.
Wycombe Wanderers probably aren't the biggest problem here. My heart says that it's poor to buy the facilities of another club, but I guess we can at least console ourselves with the knowledge that Reading still have somewhere to train, even if the branding might look a little different in a few weeks time. But my head says that the considerably bigger problem, a huge but solvable problem, that we are all here, having this conversation in the first place. Again. It's a systemic failure, from top to bottom.
Really, it’s all a matter of where you draw the line.