Cheering on our own ruin

After a tumultuous few years, Reading have been relegated, run up huge debts, don’t own their own stadium and have yet another points deduction coming down the line. But who’s willing to take responsibility?

There’s plenty of blame to go round at Reading. Most fingers are currently pointing at owner Dai Yongge.

Apparently under the influence of agent Kia Joorabchian, Dai sanctioned an endless series of bad hires, poor signings and rash firings, offering – and occasionally failing to pay – outlandish wages, far beyond the club’s means.

Back in League One, Reading fans have had enough, forming a protest group ‘Sell Before We Dai’ to demand the owner slings his hook.

As someone who first began following the club when their very existence was threatened by Robert Maxwell, I have never forgotten the fear of my team’s extinction. And so I pray the campaign is successful. But I think that, once that’s done, and the club stabilised, there needs also to be some self-reflection.

Because, for the most part, Dai’s offence hasn’t been that he spent huge sums to try and get Reading into the Premier League. His issue was that he failed.

It has been perfectly clear for years that Dai had no idea what he was doing, gave no thought to the long-term future of the club and, for all his riches, couldn’t spend his way out of a paper bag. But few voices were raised against him while he kept putting his hand in his pocket.

The truth is, had he spent well – made good hires and pushed Reading into a respectable mid-table position in the top flight – very few fans would care. Most of the people now angry that the club’s future is under threat were perfectly happy for him to spend money the club didn’t have in pursuit of success it couldn’t otherwise earn. They aren’t angry at unsustainable spending, only bad spending.

The same is true at virtually all the clubs that have got into trouble in the last decade. Few want to admit it, but almost every club-wrecking, unsuitable owner has, at some point, been popular with that club’s fans because they were splashing the cash and looking determined to buy success for the team.

I’m old enough to remember that, having rescued Reading from oblivion, built the club a new stadium and overseen an unprecedented run of success, there were murmurs among some fans about wanting John Madejski, a genuine local-boy-made-good, to sell up because he ‘lacked ambition’. (He didn’t, of course, he just wasn’t a billionaire or an idiot.)

And when business troubles forced Madejski’s hand, there were Reading fans who celebrated the sale of the club to Anton Zingarevich, a man who it was widely known wasn’t independently wealthy, but simply the son of a rich guy. There was optimism when that disaster ended and a Thai consortium took over, bringing the club the gift of song. And there were no protests when Dai bought the club, despite him having previously failed the Owners and Directors Test when he tried to buy Hull.

There were also not protests when the club first missed a wage payment. Many dismissed that as a slight administrative error. When the club sold its ground to Dai or spent more than 200% of its income on wages, as it did several times in recent years, many fans’ greatest concern was not potential homelessness nor the ever growing mountain of debt the club was accumulating, but whether we could avoid FFP penalties and keep challenging for promotion.

‘This has to stop happening,’ fans say. And yet, up and down the country, how many fans have welcomed successive takeovers by people with unclear sources of wealth and no prior connection to the club and town because they believed it would enable them to buy and maintain a place in a higher division? (Having a local owner is no guarantee of being well-run, of course, but at least you know why they want the club.)

And so, yes, clubs need more protection. Bring on an Independent Regulator and a beefed up Owners and Directors Test. But fans also need to take some responsibility for the fact that they almost always applauded ruinous spending when it was happening.

It’s difficult. The culture of football and its financial structure are such that failing to spend what you don’t have is generally a recipe for a miserable and perpetually lower-mid-table existence.

But, I think there’s a risk we infantilise fans when we excuse their support of reckless owners on the basis that fans just love their clubs and can’t be expected to care about anything else but results. Yes, financialisation and lack of regulation have got us in a mess that fans alone can’t dig us out of. But that doesn’t mean fans are powerless and so beyond criticism.

If you want the world to change, you must at least engage with how it works and recognise your role in it.

‘Fans are the custodians of their clubs,’ we will often claim when we’re explaining why billionaires and sovereign wealth funds can’t be allowed to treat football teams like their own private playthings. So when are fans going to step up and start acting like it?

When are fans going to stop demanding that owners show ‘ambition’? When are fans going to celebrate clubs living within their means, growing organically and trying to earn everything they win? When are fans going to recognise that being the custodian of their club is a full-time job, not a firefighting exercise that happens during a once-in-a-decade emergency?

It’s tempting if you’re a Reading fan to say that now’s not the time and that we just need to focus on getting the club saved and sold. In my view, that’s just a continuation of the short-term thinking that got this, and so many other clubs, in trouble.

If we want a better, more sustainable future for football, and to safeguard our beloved clubs for generations to come, then we must also be more sceptical of new owners and, above all, stop demanding they buy us unearned success.

The time to start is now, not in three years’ time, when the shine has come off the next owner and they’re wondering how long they want to keep running up losses.

And it starts with admitting that what’s happened at Reading isn’t Dai Yongge’s fault alone. We cheered him on as he destroyed our club.

************************************************

Martin Calladine

If you enjoyed this piece, please buy my latest book: No Questions Asked: How football joined the crypto con. That way, I’ll have the money to write more things you might like. Oh, and please spread the word, too. Thanks a lot.