The greatest tragedy of the decline of Reading Women, confirmed this week with news that they would not be able to take their place in Women’s Championship next season but instead drop three divisions to the fifth tier, is that they were once a Royal blueprint for success in the women’s game.
From 2017, Reading finished in the top of the five of the top flight three seasons in a row and reached the semi-finals of the FA Women’s Cup, a mainstay during the formative years of women’s football’s professionalism in this country. Since then, only decline: seventh, eighth, relegation, a reversion to semi-professional status, one place above relegation to the third tier in 2023-24.
And now this. The women’s fifth tier is entirely amateur. As a result of their self-imposed demotion, young women will lose their jobs. Young girls in this area of Berkshire have not just lost a clear pathway to professionalism; they have lost the right to dream of something that those before them fought for.
“The great shame is that we have gone from a position where we were miles ahead of the curve on women’s football to significantly behind it,” says Greg Double of supporter protest group Sell Before We Dai.
“It just feels desperately sad that our foundations were superb and we were perfectly primed to capitalise on the growth in the women’s game, and now we’re not.”
In part, Reading Women have become collateral damage in the wider demise of Reading FC. In January 2024, an EFL statement said that owner Dai Yongge was either not in a position – or did not have the motivation – to support the club financially. That only repeated what supporters had long suspected.
Reading’s financial collapse has been pronounced and painful. They have received a significant points deduction in each of the last three seasons.
When a financial emergency hits, the football teams suffer. Reading’s men’s team finished seventh in the Championship in 2021. One great escape was followed by relegation to League One and, last season, their lowest league position since 1989.
Reading began to lose control of themselves when a Thai ownership group sold to Chinese investors – brother and sister Dai Yongge and Dai Xiu Li – with the former having the more active involvement. The announcement of their purchase came during the second leg of a playoff semi-final that took Reading to Wembley. That was as good as it ever got.
Money was grossly wasted. Reading spent £15m on George Puscas and Sone Aluko despite being a second-tier club without high-end revenue streams. They built a new training facility. They spent £3.5m more on Sam Baldock.
They reportedly relied upon super-agent Kia Joorabchian as a transfer guru and fixer. They were known as generous wage payers – especially for loan players – and their spending on annual salaries eventually doubled the annual revenue. Live fast, Dai Yongge.
The women’s team were never going to escape the crossfire. To compete in the Championship requires funding for licensing, maintenance, salaries and the general costs of upkeep: electricity, gas, water. Without a cash injection, there was no money to make this possible.
If Reading have been used to punching, they were not ready for the influx of heavyweights about to make that process even harder: Sunderland, Newcastle United and Birmingham City will all compete in the second tier next season, all clubs with sizeable fanbases and in the case of the latter two, forward-thinking owners at last.
But even if austerity became the natural habitat, there is still great resentment that the events of the last week could have been avoided. According to a report in the Guardian, the takeover of the women’s side may have been blocked by potential new owners of the club.
“If that’s true, that would be the bit that leaves us most upset,” says Double.
“The fact that it has come to this is an absolute disgrace. It should never come to a point where you are choosing between funding the men’s and women’s teams, and don’t forget why we are in that position: because one man has run a football club into the ground. We are talking about managed decline.”
Communication has been desperately poor. Over the last few days, players Charlie Estcourt and Becky Jane have both spoken publicly about finding out news on the club – and therefore their own professional futures – through the media.
That is another inevitability of the money running out. There is no Head of Communications listed on the club website. Everybody is doing the best they can but the circumstances are deeply trying.
It is easy – and tempting – to lay the blame squarely at the feet of Yongge and those who allowed the collapse of a flagship women’s team into comparative ignominy. We will always wonder whether more could and should have been done. The shock of Reading’s situation is a smokescreen too – people must have seen this coming down the line.
But Reading are not the only ones. This week, the Daily Mail reported that Blackburn Rovers are planning to pay their women’s team minimum wage for the upcoming season, £9,000 annually on a 16-hour-per week contract in the Women’s Championship. In the same division, Sheffield United’s players have reportedly not been told whether they have contracts for the upcoming season.
This reflects two things. Firstly, the link between men’s and women’s clubs forces the fortunes of both to be intertwined financially. As Double puts it perfectly: “When the men’s team sneezes – relegation, financial overstretching or both – the women’s team catches the cold”.
When Reading were relegated from the Women’s Super League (WSL) on the final day in 2023, then manager Kelly Chambers lamented the sad reality facing clubs like hers: without the muscle of a men’s Premier League club behind them, they were facing an inevitable spiral away from the elite.
She did not know then how rapidly they were being sucked into the sandstorm. Bristol City went the same way – the gulf was unbridgeable and they finished the most recent season with six points and one win from 22 games, with a goal difference of -50.
In the Championship itself, the pattern is the same: Watford, with no men’s Premier League team, and Lewes, without a prominent men’s team, were relegated. Durham and London City Lionesses – no high-profile men’s teams – finished eighth and ninth respectively. Reading were 10th, just one place above the relegation zone.
More widely, what has happened to Reading reflects the fragility of a game that is still in its growth phase when it is tied to a sport that is deeply in its late capitalist phase. In the men’s game, clubs lose money. The average annual losses for a Championship club in 2022-23 was £13m, in League One £5m and in League Two £1.5m.
There are honourable exceptions, but sustainability of the English pyramid as a whole is a topic of great urgency, hence the demand for an independent regulator and greater wealth distribution from the elite downwards. The suggestion that the women’s game has to strive to emulate the men’s is both misguided and perilous.
At those clubs where decisions are difficult, the women’s teams are predictable fall guys. If it is a choice to financially support the women’s or the men’s team, the men’s team are always likely to win out because a) they have the majority support where the PR wins are more pronounced, and b) progress in those competitions – league and cups – provide more financial reward.
We repeatedly talk of the disgraceful impact of the 50-year ban on women’s football between 1921 and 1971 in England, but its fingerprints are here for all to see.
It placed women’s football – quite deliberately – decades behind the men’s domestic game and therefore created an interdependency at almost every level. When that begins to coincide with financial unsustainability, the women’s game loses out twice: last in, first out.
It is embarrassing for the Championship that this has unfolded in the first summer of NewCo, the body that will assume responsibility for the top two tiers of women’s football in this country from the start of the 2024-25 season.
Those who engineered the change did so with the best possible intentions; if you want women’s football clubs to make a profit, it suits that the organisation running it is for-profit, rather than the FA. NewCo will focus on the women’s tiers alone, rather than operating in the shadow of men’s football.
More investment will roll in. The biggest question mark looming is who will benefit, and whether it is true that at least three-quarters of the money will be funnelled into the WSL in its quest to become the world’s first billion-pound women’s league.
Just as there is no point in the Lionesses earning £1m sponsorship deals if their lower-league counterparts are bringing their own sandwiches – that’s advisable too, after Reading players were struck down with food poisoning from a platter of dodgy chicken wraps at their game against Wolves in January.
So the new structure will only work if it really is new. Financial fair play regulations are not perfect in the men’s game but in the women’s, they remain a long way off.
There will be more Readings and Blackburns and there are not many silver linings to this stormcloud, but you take your wins where you can. Sell Before We Dai, who campaigned so superbly against Dai Yongge’s continued ownership and hope soon to be surplus to requirements, have plans to do as much as they can.
The first idea is to make Reading Women’s first league game the highest attended ever in the fifth tier. More importantly, they are hoping to fundraise enough money to allow the youth teams from Under-10s to Under-14s inclusive to continue for at least another year.
It shouldn’t have to come to this, though. Reading Women should have been protected. Reading’s academy should be protected. If social institutions and community assets are left so prone to the changing of the wind, something isn’t working. A football club is only as healthy as its element most in need. A game is only as healthy as its club most in need.
“Reading has always been a huge family club, a community club,” says Double. “And I query whether you can call yourself either of those things if you don’t have a women’s team or if you are so willing to sacrifice its future.
“Fans are upset because it represents a fall in status of the club as a whole. What is this football club meant to stand for? When you have the Reading badge on your shirt you should be part of our community. Can we say that is true anymore?”
