The Reverse Luton Town

Sometimes clubs are part of a giant feel good story that takes over the news cycle, but sometimes they die in relative silence. Reading FC was on the threshold of the Premier League twice in the last eight years, but now it languishes perilously at the bottom of the English league system, in need of a savior to keep itself afloat.

Unpaid players, toxic atmosphere, and a club that could have been the next big thing completely undone by a set of tough circumstances. A victim of financial mismanagement on such an epic scale that the sheer audacity is impressive. This is the story of how it all went in reverse.

Much Love,
The Zealand

Sources
► Get Reading
https://www.getreading.co.uk/news/reading-berkshire-news/reading-fc-takeover-bids-nearing-28084460

https://www.getreading.co.uk/sport/football/match-reports/reading-fc-1-fulham-0-13045351

https://www.getreading.co.uk/news/reading-berkshire-news/reading-fc-takeover-bids-nearing-28084460

► Transfermarkt
https://www.transfermarkt.us/reading-fc/rekordabgaenge/verein/1032/plus/0/galerie/0?saison_id=&pos=&detailpos=&w_s=

https://www.transfermarkt.us/fc-fulham/alletransfers/verein/931

► Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Olise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Reading_F.C._seasons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_F.C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Yongge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Chengfeng_F.C.

► BBC
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/65960177

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/66031836

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/65975518

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/65929124

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/66291076#:~:text=The%20most%20serious%20red%20flag,the%202022%2D23%20Championship%20season

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/66053700

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/66291076#:~:text=The%20most%20serious%20red%20flag,the%202022%2D23%20Championship%20season

► Sky Sports
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12897432/reading-women-to-go-part-time-following-relegation-from-womens-super-league#:~:text=Reading%20Women%20will%20move%20to,of%20the%20season%20by%20Chelsea.

► Reading FC
https://www.readingfc.co.uk/news/2022/january/15/club-statement—liam-moore-relieved-of-captaincy/
► Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news/reading-fc-chinese-takeover-english-football-league-dai-yongge-dai-xiu-li-a7741266.html

► ESPN
https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/38919233/everton-given-10-point-penalty-financial-rule-breaches

► Wokingham Today
https://wokingham.today/reading-fc-owner-dai-yongge-fined-by-efl/

► Football League World
https://footballleagueworld.co.uk/how-wealthy-is-reading-fcs-owner/
► EFL
https://www.efl.com/news/2023/december/19/efl-statement–mr-yongge-dai/

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🙌 Thanks for watching & scrolling!

#Reading #Hashtags

The introduction of a new owner can be a time of incredible optimism around a club just look at the swell around Newcastle or Chelsea’s rampant spending but on the flip side of it it can also have devastating and longlasting effects on the club itself look at Everton just

Working its way through a 10-point deduction from the financial mismanagement of its previous owner then of course there’s Manchester City even though those owners have been there for a while now they’ve run up a rrap sheet of over a hundred charges that might undo or at least threaten the success

They’ve had but both of those situ ations look like a veritable Paradise compared to what has happened to reic and their once optimistic owner dong this is the story of an owner who helped guide a club from the edge of the Premier League to the edge of

Destruction can we just say one more time we want our reading [Applause] back it’s gotten so bad that the British government is passing legislation and citing reading as an example of why they’re passing the legislation to try and make sure this situation never never happens again your quick history lesson

Is reading was founded way back in 1871 and finally scrapped its way into the Top Flight of England for the first time in 2005 all told reading’s been in the Premier League for three seasons over the past 15 years and in 2017 reading was on a tear it was on the cusp of

Being able to get into the Premier League again and that’s when a new owner came swirling around you see Reading had been through four owners The Last 5 Years at this point which it sounds absurd but it’s true and they were succeeding in spite of that but you can

Understand the club in fan optimism when a very wealthy Chinese investor turned their eye on to reic you see earlier in 2017 dong had attempted to buy whole city for $130 million but had failed the checks to be able to successfully buy the club so then he shifted to reading

Later in that year dong and his sister completed a deal to buy 75% of reading and the reason for the high optimism wasn’t that he was just any wealthy Chinese investor this guy was worth a billion dollar and actual billion dollars and his sister daul Lei was worth 1.2 billion those are estimations

In the years before the purchase of reading in 2017 now the die family’s wealth was centered around the fact that they had been building underground shopping malls in former air raid shelters which sounds like a bond villain sort of thing the apparent reason for building these underground shopping malls is that

You are not beset by the same taxes and regulations as building above round which while kind of Genius also seems to show a willingness to tow the line and bend the rules that we are definitely going to run into again later as with these things most of the time it took

Months for the deal to be negotiated until it finally went through the week of the playoff final in the championship and I’m not just mentioning that for no reason reading was in the playoff final against huttersfield at wimbley in 2017 the winner going to the Premier League

And considering Reading had just been in the Prem four years earlier and huttersfield had never been there in their entire history reading was the favorite and it looked like it was a Sound Investment from D young to help Propel the club into their new premier league era the highest realm of optimism

Was that D young was going to become the next Roman Abramovich somebody with an unlimited amount of money who would take over a non-traditional power and propel them to Premier League greatness but it didn’t happen penalty kicks happened and huttersfield won the penalty kicks 4-3 to go to the Premier League for the

First time and from that moment on reading has entered a downward slide that with fits and star has ended dramatically this year it started the very next season because reading showed up in the championship and after making it to the playoff while finishing third they finished 20th the First full season

Of D Young’s ownership they had 41 less points than the season before in The Following Season they’d get 20th again this was in spite of what was rumored to be a huge amount of investment from D young himself up to 200 million dollars that were injected into the club but in

A story that’s eerily similar to Everton’s failed investment that money was just not producing any results at all and because reading was busy wallowing at the bottom half of the championship the amount of spending that da young was partaking in started to draw the watchful eye of the English

Football league by 2023 the pre-tax losses over the previous 5 years would hit 146 million which is just slightly over the efl requirement of just 13 million the peak was in 2021 when these problems started to become apparent because reading was spending 234 of its revenue on play wages alone

234. and it wasn’t just Financial issues they also started to run into bouts of really poor man management that were honestly kind of hard to explain for example flaming the club captain on the club website from January 2022 this is a quote over the course of the last few

Months Center back Liam Moore has spoken with manager velco panovich and directors of the club to State his clear desire to leave Reading Football Club and pursue his career elsewhere our club together with its manager is intent on selecting players in the first team squad who are dedicated to giving their

Absolute all to Reading Football Club that starts with our captain as a result Moore will no longer be given the honor of our club captaincy while it is certainly more eloquent than what you get from a Twitter troll it’s not exactly the sort of thing you want to be

Reading on a club website the end result of running a foul of the efl and their own players is that reading was hit with transfer embargos and a Sixpoint deduction in 2022 and 2023 and it was the 2023 Point deduction that proved fatal for reading last year reading was

Relegated and if they hadn’t had those six points deducted they would have been safe it sent them down to League one for the first time in 21 years after multiple spells in the Premier League and as relegation so often does it brought attention to an increasingly untenable situation at reing it was a

Pot of boiling water just waiting for something to boil over and that happened almost immediately after relegation when his Majesty’s revenue and Custom Service pip pip cheerio LS I say colloquially known as the hmrc issued a winding up petition over unpaid taxes this is something that’s issued by

The hmrc if a debt has been ignored for more than 3 weeks so considering this was issued about 3 weeks after they got relegated D essentially was ignoring the Deb from the moment that Reading had been sent out and when hmrc Came Calling that was the catalytic moment for

Reading fans they started to organize they actually formed a group called sell before we die which fair fair play fair play fair play from one Enthusiast of word play to another well done when discussing why they formed they said despite his best intentions Mr dy’s stewardship has been an unmitigated

Disaster anytime somebody breaks out the word unmitigated things are not going well they went on to say we are now calling for Mr Dy to sell the club at the earliest opportunity and it’s hard to blame the fans for feeling this way in 2017 they were staring at a likely

Promotion with a new billionaire owner at their back and now they’ve got nothing but misery and embarrassment ever since and it isn’t just the men’s team either in 2023 the women’s team from Reading FC was relegated from the women’s Super league and the financial issues were so crippling they had to

Take the team from full-time to part-time the 16-year tenur head coach Kelly Chambers was let go and this clear consistent disintegration around reading has left the question who and what is to blame and for a lot of people the answer seems very clear it’s D young but I’m

Always hesitant when talking about these ridiculous sums of money to just go in full and blame the owner I find it hard to blame someone for not spending hundreds of millions of dollars they’re never going to see again just because people think that they should it’s clear

That the issue for the club wasn’t a lack of investment it was honestly way too much after all D allegedly spent over $200 million so what happened to it even the fan group calling for his ouer acknowledges that the failure has been despite his best intentions the Beloved

Former owner Sir John deski added it hasn’t been a success obviously I think he’s had very bad advice because quite frankly for the investment he’s put in he’s seen scant return and the most obvious indication of bad decision-making has been on the transfer market particularly the lack of

Profitable sales of players and the best example is looking at a player like Michael ois everybody in their mother seemed to know that Michael ois was going to be a good Premier League Winger at some point while he was plying his trade on that reading team that somehow

Managed to get up and finish seven and all that got for him was just over $9 million in a sale to Crystal Palace even at the time transfer Mark thought that that was low their estimated value for him was nearly double that this was the

Same year that Jared Bowen was sold in a similar transfer to West Ham for over $21 million and while that sale feels low it’s the only one in the top 10 reading sales in history day has been responsible for as the owner in fact the next one that day young is responsible

For is the 15th most expensive sale in the history of reading which was LE Andro bakuna for under $4 million but there is another potential culprit outside of just terrible decisionmaking and inability to maximize player value and it could be the one that is contributing most outside of dayone

Apathy to the financial shortcomings at reading in recent years China De Young still lives in China he still works in China in the money that pays for readings accounts is transferred out of China every month which the BBC clearly believes is not the best way of doing things much to my

Amusement describing his monetary Logistics transferring money from China every month as shambolic and the reason it’s quite so shambolic is right around the time that dong bought reading China started to change its approach to allowing investors to funnel tons of money out of China according to this BBC

Article China started to crack down on International spending because they believed that it was hurting the domestic economy as a result it just got harder and harder to move money around as Professor Simon Chadwick told the BBC the shutters started to come down in 2017 2018 right when D bought the club

And it became very difficult to move money around particularly for unproductive assets and all that’s important to point out because in other videos I’ve made about bad owners sometimes they just ran out of money but what everybody seems to agree on is that dong still has plenty of money after

They bought the club together his sister transferred full control of the family business and the club to him as far as everybody understands and based off their estimations of net worth over the past 10 years that means dang is worth at least a couple billion dollar there

Are estimates out there of Dong’s net worth that are over $20 billion obviously that stuff is hard to calculate but the company still exists and he’s still the sole head of it so what is definitely clear is that the issue isn’t a lack of money it’s a lack

Of financial Logistics an ability to get the money to the right place at the right time and be able to pay off everything in an intelligent way essentially it boils down to either D young is just a bad businessman or he doesn’t does care and whatever the

Actual reason that all these bad things are happening it’s not necessarily the first time that they’re happening if you’re a reading fan cover your ears cuz this one might sound a little too familiar but D young used to own another club Beijing renhe it was relegated to

The third tier of Chinese football in 2021 and it dissolved as a result of the financial strain that that put on the club also it just feels worth mentioning that the China Dilly Group which is the parent company of Dong’s company has been suspended from trading on the Hong

Kong stock exchange since last year the reason concerns around financial reporting so it is clear at the very least that a lack of financial organization has plagued da Young’s past wherever he’s been and has helped contribute to a death spiral for reading and that spiral is still going reading

Is currently in the relegation Zone in League one at the moment it’s been such a resounding failure that the ownership of D young has been used as an example by the British government to try and clean up ownership situation so that quite literally this doesn’t happen again the government vowing to tackle

Inappropriate ownership D Young’s ownership being classified as inappropriate I made a whole video about the proposed changes the British government is laying down you can check that out in the description as for reading things are still getting worse in September of this year da young was charged by the English football league

For official misconduct they had asked him to deposit the amount totaling 125% of the month’s wages into an account and he failed to do so by the deadline the efl recommended that he be suspended from all football activities for a year but an independent commission finded him £20,000 with an extra £50,000

If he failed to deposit the right amounts into the account by January even though they laid down a lighter sentence they did call it deliberate misconduct on the part of D they came to that conclusion after his and I quote failure to provide detailed evidence as to the

Ongoing reasons for failure to pay the efl then went on to threaten further action if he Contin continues to not meet the deadlines and requirements of the efl but we do arrive today at a light at the end of the tunnel and that is that D young is looking to sell the

Club an end what has become an increasingly intense nightmare for reic It’s a situation that nobody seems to be enjoying at all and it’s also a situation that hopefully the legislation the British government’s trying to push through will make impossible in the future all the links for the research in

This video are down in the description as well as the information for our researcher Isaiah and if you enjoyed the video please do subscribe also if you want to keep binge watching videos check this one out we went to the feral islands and spent a week there following

The smallest European Club ever it is awesome very cool very fun lots of Drone footage flying around you know wild stuff