Heard the one about the chairman who’s taken more points from his team than any opponent in the past three seasons? Football supporters’ capacity for humour during the darkest days never ceases to amaze and, for fans of crisis club Reading, after six years of eye-watering excess and decline under their elusive owner, Dai Yongge, the outlook has never been bleaker.
Sixteen points. That’s how many Reading have been deducted by the EFL — two more than their biggest bogey team, Millwall, managed to win in six meetings since 2020-21 — with the fear being that, unless the Chinese businessman sells the club, worse is to come.
Those fears are justified, too. Two other clubs have gone bust in recent years under the stewardship of Dai and his associates. KSV Roeselare, members of the Belgian top flight as recently as 2010, and Beijing Renhe, a Chinese Super League club who competed in the Asian Champions League, both fell into financial trouble on his watch before eventually going under.
The scale of mismanagement has been staggering. Dai, who in 2017 bought a club on the brink of the Premier League, ran up a wage bill of historic proportions, paid players and staff late on three separate occasions last season, has drawn the ire of HMRC, and, in April, after a failure to comply with a business plan imposed for breaching EFL spending rules, earned his club a six-point deduction which ultimately doomed Reading to relegation from the Sky Bet Championship.
No mean feat and Dai, who has maintained an apparent vow of silence since his arrival six years ago — initially alongside his sister, Dai Xiu Li — has arguably been the most inept and destructive owner in the country during that time. All in all, losses are approaching £200 million — a figure that would have been greater without the sale of the club’s stadium to a Dai-owned company for £40 million in 2019 in an attempt to circumnavigate profit and sustainability rules.
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This season, after his failure to deposit 125 per cent of the club’s monthly wage bill in a designated account as agreed, a £10,000 fine and a misconduct charge were imposed by an increasingly exasperated EFL. Rubén Sellés’s callow Reading side, shorn of another four points as a result, are already staring down the barrel of consecutive relegations.
And so on Saturday, 40 years on from a protest march against Robert Maxwell’s proposed merger with Oxford United, supporters will once again march to save their club from a businessman threatening Reading’s very existence.
“He’s absolutely wrecked the club,” Caroline Parker, 42, a “Sell Before We Dai” campaign leader and Supporters’ Trust at Reading (STAR) board member, says. “Reading were once a beacon of how to run a sustainable club and occasionally flirt with the top flight, but without that being the be-all and end-all. It’s frightening to see how far we’ve fallen. We just want a sustainable team to support. But Dai has wrecked it, set it on fire.”
So how did it come to this? Dai’s takeover, which arrived during a fleeting drive by China to invest in European football, came a fortnight before Jaap Stam’s side lost on penalties against Huddersfield Town in the Championship play-off final in 2016-17. In every season that followed, the club spent a figure in the region of double its revenue on wages. By 2021, for every £100 of revenue Reading earned, they were spending £244 on wages.
Last season, as the club finally fell into the third tier, having finished 20th or below in three of the previous five seasons, Reading were haemorrhaging £500,000 a week, a legacy of enormous contracts for underperforming players, bad advice and the folly of a reckless gamble to reach the Premier League.
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“People in Reading are very realistic,” Dave Kitson, the former Reading striker who spearheaded the 2005-06 Championship title-winning team and who still lives in the town with his family, says. “We’re not asking to be a top Premier League team. But we’re most certainly a team that should be competing at the top end of the Championship.
“We’ve got a Category One academy, a good stadium, and a fan base that can fill that stadium when the team’s doing well. But it’s underperforming because Dai Yongge’s tenure has been an absolute unmitigated disaster.”
Kitson, along with the former owner John Madejski, and local politicians James Sunderland, Conservative MP for nearby Bracknell, and Matt Rodda, Labour MP for Reading East, will join the march on Saturday. STAR, meanwhile, would like Reading to be a test case for the incoming independent regulator. A cross-party group, including the former prime minister, Theresa May, has been set up to support Reading’s plight.
“Not so long ago it was a profit-making Premier League club; it’s now a club at the foot of League One with £200 million of losses,” Kitson says. “However you slice it, that’s a hell of a swing. And people are genuinely concerned that they’re not going to have a club to support if this carries on much longer.”
Dai — whose family fortune was amassed through the construction of shopping centres — has a home in central London, speaks little English, and has made fewer and fewer appearances at the Select Car Leasing Stadium of late. Withdrawing money from China is understood to have become increasingly challenging.
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Despite repeated efforts, he has never responded to requests to engage with fans. “He’s very private,” Parker says. “So the only thing we can really do to influence Dai is to make him uncomfortable. Keep his name in the the public domain. Keep applying the pressure. Because we have no power over him deciding to sell, how much he sells for, and, indeed, who he sells to.”
Last month, 24 hours before protesting supporters rained tennis balls down on to the pitch to halt play during the goalless draw with Burton Albion, a club statement explained that Dai was “openly inviting” offers from interested parties to buy the club.
Reports that Dai had agreed a £50 million deal with William Storey, a controversial figure who was linked with takeovers of Sunderland and Coventry, and briefly owned the Haas Formula One team, were swiftly refuted by the club.
Given what has unfolded in the decade since Madjeski’s 22-year ownership came to an end, supporters are understandably concerned about who might come next. Anton Zingarevich, the son of a Russian billionaire, was the man Madejski passed the baton to, shortly before Brian McDermott guided Reading to the Premier League again in 2012.
Yet 18 months later, with Zingarevich’s father’s money having dried up and Reading back in the second tier, the club was sold on again, this time to a Thai consortium. Their sale to Dai, in 2017, did not include a lucrative piece of the Madejski Stadium car park, on which hundreds of new homes and leisure facilities were due to be built. Kitson says that he has been approached by three consortiums seeking his endorsement recently, all of whom turned out to be property developers.
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Businessmen with links to the town have expressed interest, but entering into negotiations with Dai, or the club’s equally elusive chief executive, Dayong Pang, who has not been seen at the club for months, has not been straightforward.
But, as Reading fans will demonstrate on Saturday, the damage Dai is inflicting must end. “This campaign is not going to stop until that man has gone,” Parker says.
Dai Yongge has been contacted by The Times for comment.
