‘ALL THIS HAS MADE ME A BETTER COACH’
RUBEN Selles realised very quickly that there was nothing to be gained from sugarcoating Reading’s dire situation.
“Players aren’t stupid,” explains the Spaniard, who took charge of League One’s most dysfunctional club in June, a month after suffering relegation from the Premier League as interim manager of Southampton.
“If you lie, you become part of the problem. So the first rule we have is that we tell them the truth every time. No matter what.”
At Reading, the truth can be difficult to discern, and even harder to swallow. This season, their first in the third tier for two decades, the Royals have been docked points – six in total - for financial issues on three separate occasions, taking the tally under the ownership of Dai Yongge to 18 in less than three years.
Yongge, who amassed an estimated £656m fortune building shopping malls in his native China, spent lavishly in the years immediately following his takeover in 2017, a strategy that left Reading in almost perpetual breach of the EFL’s profit & loss regulations.
The Royals haven’t been able to pay a fee for a player since signing Ovie Ejaria in 2020 and are unlikely to do so again until at least 2025.
Off the pitch, things are even worse. Wages repeatedly paid late. Sponsors stepping in to cover costs. A raft of missed payments to HMRC.
Several non-playing staff were made redundant over Christmas, and those who remained were forced to work in unheated offices.
Players, meanwhile, no longer have access to on-site catering and overnight stays have been banned. Reading are a club on the breadline.
Yongge claims that China’s strict capital control regulations are preventing him from moving money to the UK, and that he would gladly sell up. Progress is slow, however, with several interested parties privately expressing their frustration at the 55-year-old’s lack of urgency.
Supporters have held protests and halted games. The EFL have urged Yongge to sell the club and handed him multiple fines for failing to deposit wages in time - the most recent of which have gone unpaid.
And the problems keep coming. A week ago, Yongge announced that Reading’s Bearwood training ground could be sold to raise funds.
It is against this apocalyptic backdrop that Selles was tasked with running a functional football team, something that - after a dismal start - he has achieved with impressive alacrity.
Problems
Last weekend’s 2-1 reverse at home to Wycombe marked just a fifth defeat in 21 league matches and, whilst there is no guarantee that Reading will actually get to keep all the points they earn between now and the end of the season, survival looks likely.
“If there is one big lesson of th
