Who's to blame?

[The Royal Forester]

Who do you blame for the state in which our club is in? Is it
Zingarvitch? Did he start the downhill slide.
The Thai's? Maybe they only wanted Royal Elm Park?
The Dais? Has the club gone (further) downhill since they took over?
Kia? Enough said!
Pauno? Is he really to blame for the club being where it is now?
Madejski? For selling to a crooked Russian in the first place?


By the way, if you were one of the many people who said JM should spend more, should sell up and other non repeatable comments about him, have you changed your mind now? How many of you wish SJM had, had enough funds to keep on bankrolling the club still?

[Zip]

The Madejski era was the golden period for our football club. We may never see it again. We had a virtually new stadium, a high profile Chairman and a very astute manager. We did show ambition especially paying big money for the likes of Murty, Caskey and Forster. We had the feel of a club very much on the way up.

That has all gone. We have sold all our assets. We are a club on the way down. Looking back Zingarevich was certainly the start of our downturn....although you could argue it began in the summer 2007 when Coppell failed to properly invest in the squad.
The Thais provided a degree of stability but got their pound of flesh in return.

A whole series of poor appointments have followed under the Yongge regime with the appointment of Gourlay proving to be disastrous. We failed to learn from his time at the club and went on another spending splurge having just come out of a transfer embargo in 2019.

So there are a number of parties responsible for where we are now.

[SCIAG]

The general state of the club? Well to be honest, while we’re in the second tier I consider the club to be successful. My default expectation is that we are a third tier club.

The transfer embargoes and points deductions? Everyone involved in transfer decisions over the period from about 2016 to 2019. Too many big-money signings that haven’t worked well enough, most obviously Aluko and Puscas. Too many lucrative sales turned down, most obviously Loader and Moore. Too many players paid too much for too little for too long, most obviously Moore. Too much mediocrity padding out the squad, like Popa and Baldock. Too many players allowed to leave cheaply, most obviously Stacey, Dickie and Richards.

Things have got a bit better in recent years but we’re still dragged down by our past mistakes.

[WestYorksRoyal]

The general state of the club? Well to be honest, while we’re in the second tier I consider the club to be successful. My default expectation is that we are a third tier club.

It's been 20 years in the top 2 tiers with an infrastructure to match. Reset your expectations.

[Getthebeerens]

Kia Joorabchian is the man advising the owners and is the reason why most experienced championship managers don't want to come to Reading. We have a very bad reputation due to him.

Get rid of him and I honestly think things will start to move in the right direction.

[SCIAG]

The general state of the club? Well to be honest, while we’re in the second tier I consider the club to be successful. My default expectation is that we are a third tier club.

It's been 20 years in the top 2 tiers with an infrastructure to match. Reset your expectations.

Yeah, and as long as we stick here I am not upset about the state we are in.

Oh no, we’re in the bottom half of the Championship, oh the calamity…

[Elm Park Kid]

Personally - I think our boom and bust experience is a result of lack of patience from both owners and fans. We're not Sunderland or Leeds or even Forest or Derby. Reading are fundamentally a Championship team that, like most Championship teams, have the capacity to play in the top league if they get everything right, but also the reasonable likelihood of getting relegated if things go wrong.

We should have never fired McDermott the first time. We should have allowed him to rebuild back in the Championship and given him and the team the support it needed. Instead, we split the fan base in half and created a toxic atmosphere that has never really gone. Since then we've had a number of managers (including McDermott again) who could have, over a few seasons, built us into a decent Championship team with ambitions for promotion. But we created an environment where every manager is judged over 6-7 games - where every poor result is an evidence that the manager is 'clueless' and the solution is always to make a panic replacement and then paper over the crack with expensive loan signings and the occasional 'big money' player.

We've wasted a lot of our owners money, we've had some miserable spells and being a Reading fan hasn't been much fun. But the fact we've been in the Championship for the last 9 seasons is not a 'disaster' by any means, and the declining fanbase is as much to do with huge player/manager turnover and lack of connection with the club then it is to do with results or style of play.

[AthleticoSpizz]

The Madejski era was the golden period for our football club. We may never see it again. We had a virtually new stadium, a high profile Chairman and a very astute manager. We did show ambition especially paying big money for the likes of Murty, Caskey and Forster. We had the feel of a club very much on the way up.

That has all gone. We have sold all our assets. We are a club on the way down. Looking back Zingarevich was certainly the start of our downturn....although you could argue it began in the summer 2007 when Coppell failed to properly invest in the squad.
The Thais provided a degree of stability but got their pound of flesh in return.

A whole series of poor appointments have followed under the Yongge regime with the appointment of Gourlay proving to be disastrous. We failed to learn from his time at the club and went on another spending splurge having just come out of a transfer embargo in 2019.

So there are a number of parties responsible for where we are now.

honest question… did SSC have a free rein to spend (to what was basically SJMs investment money) with gay abandon back then?


For me, it was the trust put into the untrustworthy Russkies that started the death of everything that we were taking for granted and were quite rightly enjoying that did it for me.

[AthleticoSpizz]

…..and yes, I was ‘suckered in’ too

[Zip]

The Madejski era was the golden period for our football club. We may never see it again. We had a virtually new stadium, a high profile Chairman and a very astute manager. We did show ambition especially paying big money for the likes of Murty, Caskey and Forster. We had the feel of a club very much on the way up.

That has all gone. We have sold all our assets. We are a club on the way down. Looking back Zingarevich was certainly the start of our downturn....although you could argue it began in the summer 2007 when Coppell failed to properly invest in the squad.
The Thais provided a degree of stability but got their pound of flesh in return.

A whole series of poor appointments have followed under the Yongge regime with the appointment of Gourlay proving to be disastrous. We failed to learn from his time at the club and went on another spending splurge having just come out of a transfer embargo in 2019.

So there are a number of parties responsible for where we are now.

honest question… did SSC have a free rein to spend (to what was basically SJMs investment money) with gay abandon back then?


For me, it was the trust put into the untrustworthy Russkies that started the death of everything that we were taking for granted and were quite rightly enjoying that did it for me.

Coppell admitted he had the funds to spend but chose not to do so. It would never have been unlimited funds but he realised we should have strengthened more than we did.
I agree Zingarevich was hugely damaging but the tens of millions spunked away since then cannot be blamed on him.
We have also failed to capitalise on prized assets and in that respect losing Nicky Hammond was damaging too.
Our transfer dealings have in the main been dreadful.

[AthleticoSpizz]

Thanks

Guess the transfers and the sp11nked out money won’t be our concern for a few seasons.
Going forward

[Green]

FIFA, the FA and to a lesser extent STAR. The game is unsustainable and in terrible shape. The majority of clubs are badly run, we're just outdoing the rest at the moment.

[YorkshireRoyal99]

I think it's all really a combination of the aforementioned factors that have got worse before they've got better and I don't see how they will get better until owners with a more realistic viewpoint is found, which could be x years away anyway.

I probably wouldn't be too far from the truth (if at all in some views) to say we are the worst run professional football club in the country, potentially even topping the likes of Oldham and Swindon, who would put forward a justifiable case that they are in a worse shape than ourselves but given where we were, what we had and what we have been left with is staggering. The ifs, buts and maybes that with proper and sensible management would have seen us so much better off.

Nearly 5 years in and I still fail to really see what the Dai's are trying to achieve with Reading. It's obvious how they've tried to do it, by being ridiculously silly with woeful recruitment on big money players, but I don't understand where the thought process came from that they believed that would work. I still sit here baffled that billionaires honestly sat there, discussed the plans and agreed that this methodology of running the club is the best for everyone. It's almost do or die nature (die in a couple of cases with Beijing Renhe and KSV Roselare going bust).

I've splattered it about somewhere else but this club should be a great place to play football and I think, as a modern fan, I can turn around and say that in the last generation we should be easily a top 10 Championship club at least. Maybe not in terms of long-term history or size of the club but given where we have been in the last 20 years, we should be in the top 10 of the Championship or higher each and every year.

This is our 150th year, it should be a cause for celebration, yet this is probably the worst it has been since the beginning of our troubles.

[John Smith]

Kia Joorabchian is the man advising the owners and is the reason why most experienced championship managers don't want to come to Reading. We have a very bad reputation due to him.

Get rid of him and I honestly think things will start to move in the right direction.

I'd agree with this.

[Elm Park Kid]

I think it's all really a combination of the aforementioned factors that have got worse before they've got better and I don't see how they will get better until owners with a more realistic viewpoint is found, which could be x years away anyway.

I probably wouldn't be too far from the truth (if at all in some views) to say we are the worst run professional football club in the country, potentially even topping the likes of Oldham and Swindon, who would put forward a justifiable case that they are in a worse shape than ourselves but given where we were, what we had and what we have been left with is staggering. The ifs, buts and maybes that with proper and sensible management would have seen us so much better off.

Nearly 5 years in and I still fail to really see what the Dai's are trying to achieve with Reading. It's obvious how they've tried to do it, by being ridiculously silly with woeful recruitment on big money players, but I don't understand where the thought process came from that they believed that would work. I still sit here baffled that billionaires honestly sat there, discussed the plans and agreed that this methodology of running the club is the best for everyone. It's almost do or die nature (die in a couple of cases with Beijing Renhe and KSV Roselare going bust).

I've splattered it about somewhere else but this club should be a great place to play football and I think, as a modern fan, I can turn around and say that in the last generation we should be easily a top 10 Championship club at least. Maybe not in terms of long-term history or size of the club but given where we have been in the last 20 years, we should be in the top 10 of the Championship or higher each and every year.

This is our 150th year, it should be a cause for celebration, yet this is probably the worst it has been since the beginning of our troubles.

Come on man - on what metric are we the 'worst run club'?

If it's difference between money spent and success i'd say Stoke City win that award by a good margin.
If it's wasting the opportunity we got from being in the Premier League - well there are a host Championship clubs with many more PL seasons than us.
If it's putting the club at financial risk - well, any club that's gone into administration beats us on that criteria.
If it's not following EFL rules then any club that's had more than 6 points deduction in the last 10 years beats us.
If it's fan base vs success than Forest/Derby/Sunderland/Middlesborough/Ipswich/Sheffield Wednesday and maybe more are all doing relatively worse.

We haven't been out of the top two divisions in close to 20 years. We actually met your criteria of being a top 10 championship club last season and were well on the way to doing the same before our points deduction and omnicrom. Have we been mismanaged in the last 10 years? Obviously yes. The worst run club? Not even close - not by a long way.

[YorkshireRoyal99]

I did say it's probably not too far from the truth and obviously I am not aware of every other EFL clubs' situations either but we aren't exactly in great shape and it was more given at this moment in time rather than looking over the history books.

We've only actually finished in the top 10 twice since we've been relegated from the Premier League. That's where we should be every season and we haven't even been close to that kind of consistency, flirting with relegation to League One more often than not. Some fans older than me will remember when the club were in League One, but we've grown since then and we should be looking higher than where we were 20 years ago.

Probably was a bit of an exaggeration to be fair, probably still reeling from Saturday's result, but at this moment in time not many clubs are in worse situations than ourselves considering all aspects.

[Elm Park Kid]

I get it - I get it. It's frustrating. I just think people need to keep things in perspective and appreciate that the whole world of football is a mess at the moment.

If it wasn't for the absolutely ridiculous injury situation I reckon we'd be doing fine right now. Pauno is clearly lacking in a lot of areas, but he's shown us some proof that he knows how to put out a winning side when he's got the available players. I fully accept that that isn't enough - that we should be collapsing the way we are.

[Del Goose]

Maybe questions need answering by the physios.

Only so long you can attribute it to "bad luck".

[paultheroyal]

In answer to the thread title - the yellow relegation kit - obvious.

[Jagermesiter1871]

Was it the 2019 summer where the whole summer we were telling everyone we had no money, then fired Nigel Howe and instantly went on a bonkers spending spree that no one seemed to understand how and where the funds suddenly came from but we all assumed some sort of deal had been made or the owners had gone mental?

That for me was probably the main contributor to our recent woes.