At Long Last, We Can Look Forward To Reading's Future

A new era has finally begun at Reading Football Club, and the fans can be positive about the future for the first time in years.

It’s hard to put into words the emotions we’re all feeling at this moment. Over the last 18 months or so we’ve been ground down to our lowest of lows, received false hope of new dawns, been left in the cold and had our patience stretched to the nth degree.

We’ve marched on the streets of our town, we’ve stormed our own pitch and postponed a game, we’ve emptied every Sports Direct in Berkshire of their stocks of tennis balls.

We - spearheaded by the superb, steadfast and unwavering Sell Before We Dai group - have campaigned tirelessly to get rid of Dai Yongge. We’ve made national headlines, we’ve been mentioned in the House of Commons, we’ve demonstrated on the streets of the nation’s capital.

And we’ve won!

No group of supporters - people who essentially just want to watch their team play football every weekend - should ever have to do the things we (and the fans of far too many clubs before us) have done, and go to the lengths we have in order to try and save a club from extinction.

Football clubs are bedrocks of their communities, safe havens for people from all walks of life to come and rejoice in a mutual love. Their existence should never be put at risk because of greed, money or personal gain. And when the dust settles here, serious lessons must be learned to ensure nothing like this ever happens to another football club again.

But right now is a moment for big sighs of relief and even bigger celebrations. It was a long, winding, tortuous road to get here, but we made it.

Although other clubs have been in similar positions before us, no one will ever truly understand the emotional turmoil we’ve been put through for the last couple of years. Near enough everything associated with the club has declined under Dai Yonnge’s ownership.

Attendances, the stature of both the men’s and women’s team, the academy and the match day experience - among many other things - are all worse than they were before.

But one thing which hasn’t wavered, which has only seemed to grow and grow, is the fight, support and love shown by us - the fans. Even when things looked at their worse, when we were walking blindly towards extinction, we never gave up.

We continued to fight for our club, for the memories we’ve made with loved ones past and present watching this team, for every member of staff on the payroll that didn’t know whether they’d get their pay packet at the end of the month. So we deserve this.

I mean, of course we deserve this. Every football fan as a basic right deserves to be able to expect their club to still be around this time next year, or for the foreseeable future. Football clubs should never die.

But we were put into a position where we had to fight for that, where we had to earn it, and you better believe we’ve done just that.

And somehow, I don’t really understand how, among the last year to 18 months, the players and staff have managed to build some kind of foundation for new owners Rob Couhig and Todd Trosclair to work with. They’re taking over a club full of young, hungry players who have just finished seventh in League One.

In a not-too-far-away parallel universe, they’re taking over a club in a much, much worse position than that.

We don’t know what the next few months hold, but now we can be excited about the future rather than dread it.

There are contracts to sort out, but you’d hope that a fair amount of the players will be keen to stick around now - and even if there are departures, we can recruit properly and replace now. We can actually function like a proper football club, and thanks to the monumental effort of the players and staff last season, I think we should be quite an attractive proposition for new signings.

We don’t know what the Couhig era will look like. But the early promises of transparency and honesty are really all we’ve ever wanted and craved. You can have your opinions about how Couhig has gone about getting the club, but you cannot accuse him of not wanting it enough.

So go out and celebrate, have a drink or five, reminisce about the crazy whirlwind of the last God knows how long. Have a toast to all of those who have put the club before themselves and helped us when we needed them most: the SBWD team, James Earnshaw and every other local writer, every national journalist who helped us campaign, Select Car Leasing, Ruben Selles, Noel Hunt, this simply wonderful group of players, Robbie bloody Savage...

...but most importantly raise a glass for yourself, because you’ve got your club back.