The Losers From Reading’s 2024
It has of course not been a great year for the Royals, on a number of fronts, mostly off-field.
Of all the years in Reading FC’s existence, 2024 has certainly been... one of them. It’s not all been bad news though! We have some heroes and villains, some of the good and the ugly, some of the memorable and forgettable, the downright delightful and the ludicrously insane.
I’m going to attempt to try and summarise these events, so when you – the good TTE reader – are sick of turkey sandwiches and family board games, you can have a moment to escape and reflect on the football.
Part one included the ‘winners’ from Reading’s 2024. This piece, part two, takes in the ‘losers’. There are some very obvious candidates that should be front and centre in this section, but to be honest, I’d prefer not to waste any time wherever possible discussing the leeches of ownership ruining the club. They just aren’t worth yours and my time.
Reading’s women teams
Absolutely shafted. As bad as things have ever gotten for the men’s teams, the women have been punished even more harshly for things that simply aren’t their fault. Being binned off and having to start from the bottom of the pyramid all over again is cruel, insulting and goes against the community values that are club should be representing.
They’ve had a difficult start to their season/second half of 2024: having to relocate stadiums, build an entirely new team and find a way to get financed without any support from the club they represent, under the guidance of a completely new manager in Pedro Bruno.
They’re playing teams around them who are much more street-wise and tougher to break down. Not to mention the unenviable task of having a bullseye on their backs because they are Reading: the former WSL team fallen on hard times, now only able to train twice a week.
What we need to do as a fanbase and a community is rally around them, show them love and support and make them feel a part of the club, even if that club is sidelining them right now. To learn more, I’d recommend reading Pete’s excellent match reports. Maybe take the family down for a game from time to time.
Cream always rises to the top, no matter how far it’s been pushed down to the bottom, and the good times will roll back into town one day, eventually.
If you’ll indulge me for just a moment - my views and only my views here - when Jim Ratcliffe took over at Manchester United, he prioritised the men’s team and largely ignored the women’s team, despite their FA Cup final success against Tottenham Hotspur. They lost key players to rivals and not much was done really to stop it from happening.
Their fans started a petition against this to raise awareness. Now, I’m not saying they were wrong to, but let’s have some perspective here. None of that is even close to the mess Reading Women have been dragged through, and they’ve just been expected to get on with it while the world gave a collective shrug.
Again, it’s just awful that this has been allowed to happen. Everyone connected to Reading Women suffered because of this and did nothing to deserve it.
Mark Bowen
I wrote about this earlier in 2024 so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here.
He made mistakes, yes. Did anything he do impact the club operations? No, though perhaps the negative publicity related to his actions has had the smallest of impacts to the club - much like a drop in the ocean though. Damage the reputation of Reading FC he did not - a club routinely now famous for collecting points deductions and not paying taxes and/or staff.
If anything, he has been the bastion of all that was good in the rebuild of the ruins of Reading. He pushed to bring in Ruben Selles, he made himself available to answer questions about the club, he organised the sterling recruitment efforts and he effectively ran the men’s team with a lack of actual leadership turning up to bother to do their jobs.
I am not going to preach that he was perfect, but we’d be in much worse state without him and he should have been offered support, not his P45. However, if you are going to tell him not to come in in the morning, you absolutely do not shuffle him out of the back door and pretend like he never existed.
His time with us is over now. He’s done great things for the club in all manner of roles and circumstances. I hope he is able to move on, begin the healing process and maybe find a home where he is both appreciated and not working for [insert nominal choice of expletive here].
He’s a loser in this article by default because of how badly he has been treated, and for what? There were even rumours circling that, when a takeover was allegedly imminent, he was expected to be moved on with a ‘thanks and close the door on your way out’. It’s a strange way to treat someone who has, as I have mentioned many times, been a bastion of hope for the club in the dark times.
Liam Gilbert
And his coaching staff, for that matter. No goodbye, no announcement, no thanks. Just kicked out of the back door for having done his job by rebuilding the team and keeping them in the Championship.
This is the thanks he got: his P45. He deserved so much better. So maybe he was better off getting away from the club and being allowed to work somewhere where he could be treated with a bit of respect?
Rob Couhig
An interesting story arc, this one. He started the year as the villain, trying to purchase the training ground and leave us to Prospect Park instead. I won’t dwell on that any more in this article, despite it being a real low for us.
Then he went a full 180 and decided he liked the cut of our jib and wanted to buy the club, making him something of a knight in shining armour for fans. For whatever reason, and I’m not going to bother to speculate why, it didn’t happen. Now, he’s taking Dai Yongge’s company Renhe to court due to loss of earnings and I can’t quite work out if he’s a villain again, or the hero of the story.
It’s probably, in truth, neither of those things outright. It seems he really did have the best intentions at heart for the club, and really wanted to buy us. He still does want to buy us. The problem here is that the way he went about it was quite damaging for everyone involved.
Releasing photos of working from The Purple Turtle, walking out onto the pitch before the start of the Wigan Athletic home game, having end-of-match chats with Sir John, changing your social media picture to you in front of the club badge. These are all the boxes that an owner who cares - something we have been sorely lacking - needs to tick. Paying the bills before owning the club is a nonsense in itself, but fair play to him I suppose for doing that to get things over the line.
The damage here is doing all these things when you’re not actually the owner - because then, if you doing these things upsets the actual owner or you can’t get a deal agreed, and the deal falls apart and you’re not owning the club, you’re going to come out of it not looking great. Then with the court case against the owner… I don’t even know what to think about that.
The damage with doing that though is the unwelcome attention it draws to us as a club. We already look like a circus without more clowns falling out of the tiny car in which they arrived. Good intentions or not, a statement of intent or not, a final roll of the dice to acquire the club or not… it’s needlessly messy and no-one needs this. Just some quiet decorum please, it’s all we ask for.
Andy Yiadom
The one ever-present within the club. As I’ve said in another article, he joined when we played at the Madejski Stadium, were sponsored by Carabao, had shirts made by Puma and were fighting for promotion to the Premier League - in a squad with a wage bill which was something like 207% of its turnover.
The fact that he has stayed shows his loyalty to Reading, and that he does care about us. He has, largely, also been a very consistent performer for us too. His experience - a quality that such a young squad sorely lacks - and his leadership as our captain are values that mean he’s a real asset to the team.
However... injuries. Lots of them. A slight decline in form and a slowing-down of the pace. He’s getting older, is our Andy, and times have been tough. We have three legitimate candidates to take his place in the side - Michael Craig, Ashqar Ahmed and Kelvin Abrefa - and all have stepped up well enough to almost render him forgotten.
He’s not had the best year, and he really needs a good 2025 to put things right again. Frankly, we need him to have a really first half good 2025 as well, to help our push for the play-offs, or at the very least avoid being dragged into an unwelcome relegation scrap if the January fire-sale happens and means our worst fears come to pass.
And this is all before we consider he has only six months left to run on his contract.
Coniah Boyce-Clarke
It just hasn’t really happened for him yet, has it? And I am not sure if it ever will, at least not at Reading. The chance was there - David Button injured, meaning he was the EFL Trophy goalkeeper and could finally begin getting a foot into the first team.
Then Joel Pereira got injured, so the promotion into the first team was there. Pereira is a good goalkeeper, but you thought that a couple of good performances could see Boyce-Clarke really win that number one shirt.
And we all know what happened next. He wasn’t trusted to start in the league again after a howler against Leyton Orient, and he’s disappeared since. In a year when the stars should have finally started to align for him, the concerns around his footwork continue and those howlers keep happening.
Perhaps 2025 will be the year, under the stewardship of Noel Hunt. I hope so, I really do, because Button can’t go on forever as our back-up. There’s an elite goalkeeper in Boyce-Clarke somewhere. However, it’s never seemed more unlikely than it has right now, even despite Hunt being in the dugout.
Communication
I am going to caveat this: yes, it has got better. It has. I also want to be clear that, in my own view and only my own view, the people who are in charge of releasing the communications are probably not allowed to do anywhere near half of what they want to do. Whether this is in terms of the things that they want to be able to write or the content that they want to release, they are working with the handbrake very much on.
No, the issues with communication that have continued to plague the club come from a higher level. It’s difficult to say who because, frankly, who is actually running the club now? Who is the head honcho? Brian Carey, maybe? But who is he answering to higher up? Do they even know who he is and what he is left to do?
At various stages in this article I have, or will have, mentioned bad communications about Bowen’s departure, Gilbert’s departure and the sacking-off of the women’s team.
As well as this, we have few takeover updates. Yes, we know you can’t release certain details because of NDAs. We get it. But if someone who once tried to buy the club is now trying to sue the club, maybe, just maybe, say something to acknowledge it? Even if it is the “we are aware of X allegation and, while we cannot implicate the case due to wanting to manage this the correct way, we are fully co-operating with the necessary authorities and intermediaries to find a resolution to this”. That would be something, at least?
It’s tough on the fans because we all just end up asking ourselves who the hell knows what’s going on, what to expect, what’s going to happen tomorrow and who is keeping the lights on. But, I can only imagine it’s more difficult on the staff who literally earn their crust from the club operating smoothly.
The staff
We all know about the article from The Athletic that references the people working in offices having to wear coats during the winter because the heating bill wasn’t getting paid. The layoffs just because Christmas 2023, while occurring in 2023, still had an impact on the club and community in 2024 and will get mentioned here.
The cost-cutting measures everywhere are damaging a club that has been hamstrung by poor ownership, and an inability to sell the club - for whatever reason - is further exacerbating the issues. We saw this most recently with the difficulties in the management of the cup games, with a far more limited number of stewards deployed and only one stand being opened for the occasions.
There’s not one person at the club who isn’t suffering through this. I suspect, even though they’ve stopped caring, the ownership get headaches when they have to think about Reading. While it’s the smallest amount of suffering possible, it is still suffering.
However, it’s the staff really: the everyday people, those who have been at the club long before the current owners and will be there long after new owners come in, and many have certainly been there a lot longer than a number of the revolving door of players and don’t get very handsomely compensated for it either.
They just seem to be treated like a commodity, rather than as people, by the owners. It’s appalling, and worse still, all the issues around job security and getting paid on times just make it worse many times over.
They deserve the change, more than anyone. But change seemingly isn’t coming any time soon, unfortunately.
2024’s departures
One of the classic Reading quirks of recent times is that we don’t really sell players well. That’s both in terms of getting suitable money for them and the timing of the sales, but also the fact that their form does, more often than not, seem to drop off the edge of a cliff when they arrive somewhere new.
If we look at those who left in the last January window: Tom Holmes took his time getting into Luton Town’s starting XI and Tom McIntyre is struggling for Portsmouth, while Caylan Vickers and Taylan Harris have disappeared into academy teams for their respective new sides instead of gaining the first-team minutes they would have got with us.
At least Nelson Abbey has been able to escape Olympiacos, if only on loan... except, it’s pretty much out of the fire and into the frying pan at Swansea City where he has had just one run-out in the Carabao Cup. Remember the things he was doing this time last year? He was arguably our best player in the first half of 2023/24, but now he’s rotting away.
During the summer, Sam Hutchinson’s contract ran out and he has only recently found a club, in League Two AFC Wimbledon. Recent releasee Jokull Andresson has also only just found a short-term contract in a new side: Afturelding in Iceland. Femi Azeez, despite playing relatively regularly, is struggling with his attacking output in new surroundings at Millwall.
The two relative success stories have been Clinton Mola and Nesta Guinness-Walker, who are getting regular minutes in their new League One sides: Bristol Rovers and Northampton Town respectively. Perhaps this is reflective of our better recruitment in recent years: given they were some of the last in the door, they have done better since leaving.
All in all, the trend still remains that people don’t do well when leaving Reading. It’s worth remembering, lads, when January rolls around. It’s better off staying put really, isn’t it?
Nigel Howe
I think Howe might be something of a divisive figure within Reading’s current fanbase. Having stepped away from the club, perhaps because he’d had enough of the people running it, he was brought back in to try and get a proper process for selling the club in place.
In that sense, he’s already designated a “loser” because the club hasn’t been sold despite it being on the market since forever. However, it gets worse because then he was fined a lot of money and suspended from any football-related activities due to his involvement in Olisegate.
The irony, really, is that in doing what has been deemed the wrong thing by the authorities, he actually sort of did the right thing. Getting that sell-on clause in there has generated revenue for the side unlike anything else transfer-related ever has, and coming at a time when the club was struggling to keep the lights on, it’s actually been a bit of a life-saver. Alarmingly, that isn’t as figurative and is probably more literal than should be comforting.
And yet, he’s punished, fined, banished and left to return to exactly the same mess he’s left behind because of course he is. The final nail in the coffin of 2024 for Howe was his press conference in September, as news of the sale falling through came out.
For a man who does obviously care about the club and have its best interests at heart, he sort of missed the point a bit and absolutely misread the mood of the room, which is a shame, and the more I reflect on it, it was probably a happenstance of trying to sell a club owned by wastrels. Many probably would have broken sooner.
Away form
It is getting better, there’s no denying that. And yeah, a lot of our more difficult assignments away from home this season have been at the sides challenging nearer the top of the table. However, we still have that monkey on our back and we need to work on getting rid of it.
We’re 15th in a League One table consisting of only away performances, which isn’t great, but it’s still an improvement on where we were a couple of months ago, in the “relegation” zone. However, when you factor in that we’ve played 11 games away from home and all the sides “below us” have played between one to three games fewer, it doesn’t make for such great reading.
Perhaps it’s encouraging that we have, in theory, more home games left to play given our form is typically better there. We’ll take the incremental improvements but the underlying concern here, and what makes it a “loser” for 2024, is that it’s just not clear what is stopping us from bringing that confidence we have at home to stadiums away from home. What is the blocker here? We don’t seem to be anywhere nearer to finding out.
To end on a (mostly) positive though... the fans
A special mention to the fans here. It was difficult to know where to place us - in ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ - because it’s been a rollercoaster of a year. We’ve had incredible highs and crushing lows, and all sorts in between - and that’s just on the football pitch.
Where we are winners is largely in what we’ve been able to watch on the football pitch. The improvement in the side, despite being such a small squad heavily dependent on the academy, is tangible and sustainable. They are a joy to watch, though not without the occasional bad day at the office, and they are a group of players who will fight for us, as we demand them to.
There has been a little improvement off the pitch too. While communications at the club have been stifled, there is someone, somewhere listening. Complaints that fans have made about ticket prices for cup games and the entry fiasco in the stadium have been heard and improved on. Even though nothing has been formally or officially said to show it, the changes are being made where they can be.
The bad stuff obviously remains with the takeover - we still don’t know what the future of the football club we hold close to our hearts will be or if it even will have much more of a future. The uncertainty is awful, and all we can do is keep aiming for the next match, the three points, and moving onto the next game hoping for the best while bracing ourselves for the worst.
To end on a proper positive though: it would have been easy for us as fans to walk away and stop caring. Some have had to take a break from it all, a lot more haven’t been able to get to games any more. That’s fine - we as a fanbase all have our own reasons and our own ways of supporting.
It must be said though, for the majority of fans, seeing the turmoil has strengthened our resolve to keep fighting on, make ourselves heard through fan action and other such avenues.
The more difficult it gets, the easier it is to realise what matters above all else to us in the most important of the unimportant things: Reading Football Club. Who knows what 2025 will bring for us as a fanbase or for the club as a whole, but I know that, for every second the club is still alive, this loyal fanbase will be right there fighting with it.
URZZZZZZZ!