Reading's cri de coeur strikes a chord as a sign of our times

The pitch invasion at Reading on Saturday was yet another manifestation of the maladministration of football in England.

The temperature had been rising under The Select Car Leasing Stadium for a considerable amount of time, and on Saturday afternoon it finally truly boiled over. Sixteen minutes into Reading’s match against Port Vale, in a throw of the dice that it was hoped would finally throw some serious light on the plight of their club, home supporters invaded the pitch, eventually forcing the cancellation of the match.

And the reaction to all of this was very much a sign of the times. In a country in which anger seems to be rising at the casual cruelty of everyday life, there were few of the condemnatory comments that we might have expected to see in response to something like this occurring. There were, are and always will be people who go to the game on a Saturday to escape what may to a lesser or greater extent be considered ‘politics’, but when the very existence of a football club is at stake due to a most peculiar combination of recklessness and indifference, well… it’s different.

It’s worth pausing a moment to consider what we’d be losing at such a time. Formed in 1871, Reading Football Club are as old as Germany and only ten years younger than Italy. They’ve been entrants in the FA Cup since the late 1870s, were members of the Southern League by the middle of the 1890s, and have been a League club for more than a century. They’ve spent three years in the Premier League, and have beaten Aston Villa, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool in the FA Cup.

This isn’t just a matter of history, either. There’s obvious potential at this club. Just over a decade ago, Reading were playing in the Premier League to average crowds of over 23,000. Even now, staring the possibility of relegation into League Two—a division they last played in forty years ago—full in the face, their average home attendance is over 12,000, the fifth highest in the division and beaten only by fellow former Premier League inmates Derby County, Bolton Wanderers, Portsmouth and Charlton Athletic. The Select Car Leasing Stadium is a modern venue, capable of holding top level football. The failure of Reading Football Club is very much about the people who have been running the club, rather than the club itself.

And the events of last Saturday weren’t the beginning of something. This story has been playing out in front of all of us for the last few seasons. Financial losses over the last five years amount to £191m, a period during which the club has spent every season spending more money on wages alone than it had coming into the club. in the last two years alone the club has been docked 16 points by the EFL, leading to their relegation from the Championship at the end of last season; the first time in more than two decades that they’d fallen below the top two divisions.

There’s little question that the acceleration of this deterioration has increased since the start of this season. At the time of writing, Reading are fourth from bottom in League One, sandwiched between Exeter City and Cheltenham Town. The women’s team has been half-abandoned, forced to go part-time after relegation from the Women’s Super League on the last day of last season. Select Car Leasing, owned by two of the club’s supporters, have stepped in twice to help pay the wages at the end of the month to prevent a further points deduction. And the club were hit by two winding up petitions in four months over unpaid taxes, although both of them have been paid.

News from inside the club has been no better. Redundancy letters were sent out to staff—including some coaching staff—a week before Christmas, while suppliers have severed ties with the club because of the non-payment of invoices. Overnight stays for away matches have been scrapped for away matches, while it’s even the case that staff in the club’s offices have had to keep their coats on throughout the winter because the heating wasn’t switched on. The word ‘Dickensian’ springs immediately to mind.

The clues about owner Dai Yongge have also been evident from pretty much the outset. In 2010, Yongge’s business Renhe took control of the Chinese club Shaanxi Chengfeng Football Club. In 2012 they moved to Guangzhou and in 2014 to Beijing, settling on the eventual name of Beijing Renhe. In 2013, they won the Chinese FA Cup. They folded in March 2021. A little closer to home, Yongge’s sister and business partner bought the Belgian club KSV Roeselare in 2016. They folded in the autumn of 2019.

Mr Dai was charged with misconduct by the EFL in September over a failure to comply with the order of an independent Disciplinary Commission which required him to deposit an amount equal to 125% of the Club’s forecast monthly wage bill in a designated bank account specifically to prevent the scenario of staff not getting paid at the end of the month from coming to pass. He was fined £20,000 with a further £50,000 suspended to the 12th January, an amount which has now also been activated.

In a statement issued after the abandonment of the Port Vale match, the EFL said that, “We urge Mr Dai either to fund the club adequately or to make immediate arrangements to sell his majority shareholding to appropriate new owners so everyone can move forward with renewed optimism.” It is perfectly evident that he either has burnt or is in the process of burning his bridges with football in this country. Good riddance, we might well say. But how much damage might he do on his way out the door?

Of course, we’ve been here before. With Derby County. With Bury. With Wigan Athletic. With Bolton Wanderers. With Portsmouth. With Coventry City. With Port Vale. With Darlington. With Rushden & Diamonds. With Chester City. With Stockport County. With Southampton. With Plymouth Argyle. With Hereford United. With Luton Town. With Bournemouth. With Halifax Town. With Rotherham United. With Leeds United. With Boston United. An entire paragraph’s worth of clubs pushed to the brink—and in more than one case beyond—by incompetence, ego and maladministration.

And the fact that so many of us have been here before—and the above list is far from exhaustive—is probably what informs the sympathetic response to the Reading protest on Saturday. We’re now long past the point at which there is a common understanding that the administration of football in this country is fundamentally broken, a matter so blindingly obvious that even this government is probably going to do something about it, even if their current prevarication on the matter of actually getting it into law isn’t especially encouraging.

But at this time, in this country, the plight of Reading seems to be catching a mood. We’re all sick of things being a bit shit, and of this feeling that a tiny number of people are doing extraordinarily well for themselves while the majority of us struggle. Reading supporters didn’t even see any benefits from the rash overspending of Dai Yongge, yet they’re the ones having to fight tooth and nail to save their club. Port Vale supporters on Saturday were supportive of their fight. In turn, Reading supporters have raised thousands of pounds (at least double the amount mentioned in this news story) towards a fundraiser for a statue in tribute to former manager John Rudge to go outside Vale Park.

As ever, when the authorities and the ownership class let you down, and when the ‘banter’ has been stripped away, you can usually rely on the supporters of football clubs to look out for each other. Because ultimately, we’re all victims of the broken way in which our football clubs have been run for decades, and almost everybody—certainly below the Premier League—has their story to tell. It is to be hoped that it is not too late to save Reading FC. And if it is, then we already know who’s to blame and it isn’t the supporters of the club.