After two straight wins, Reading are up to seventh in League One, their highest position in English football’s pyramid for 18 months and only five points behind Wrexham, America’s team, with a game in hand.
It would be a stretch to say these are heady days for a club that finished eighth in the Premier League in 2007 — and lost the Championship play-off final only seven years ago — but things are looking up after a miserable three-year run of points deductions, transfer embargoes and a relegation to English football’s third tier.
Or they should be looking up if common sense can be applied before the money runs out again.
Tuesday’s victory at Exeter City came on the same day it was confirmed that Reading’s holding company, Renhe Sports Management Co Ltd, had been served with a winding-up petition by Walker Morris, the law firm the club used for several years until its top sports lawyer, David Hinchliffe, left last month to join a new firm, Wiggins, taking the Reading account with him.
With Hinchliffe no longer on the payroll, Walker Morris took the not-unreasonable decision that it might be time to call in Reading’s sizeable debt to the firm. Reading — who have now been hit by four winding-up petitions since 2020 — declined to comment.
For those new to the boxset that is Reading’s takeover, Chinese businessman Dai Yongge bought the club in May 2017, shortly after that play-off final defeat. His reign in Royal Berkshire has been disastrous — for him and the club — with Reading’s fans in open revolt for over a year.
Dai has been trying to sell the club ever since they were relegated to League One in 2023 but received no concrete offer from a credible buyer until this summer, when New Orleans-based lawyer Rob Couhig appeared on the scene with a £30million bid for the club, stadium and training ground.
If you are wondering why a New Orleans-based lawyer would be interested in buying an English football team, you have obviously not been reading much of my output over the last five years. But Couhig is not just the latest wealthy American to fancy a spin on the promotion/relegation roulette wheel, he has already done it, having owned Reading’s neighbour, Wycombe Wanderers, for five years until May, when he sold the League One side to Kazakh billionaire Mikhail Lomtadze.
Rob Couhig, centre, while chairman of Wycombe Wanderers in 2022 (Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
So, the 75-year-old litigator is coming into this with his eyes wide open. In fact, he even tried to buy Reading’s training ground earlier this year — when Dai seemed to be pursuing a yard-sale approach to getting his money back — only to quickly withdraw the offer after criticism from fans.
But, with his Wycombe sale proceeds burning a hole in his pocket and a gap in his weekend where the buzz of owning a football club used to be, Couhig and fellow Louisianian Todd Trosclair agreed a deal with Dai in August and fully expected to close it last month only for… well, they are still not sure.
Contrary to some reports, Couhig did not pull out of the deal. He had every right to, as the club inexplicably failed to disclose the fact that one of Dai’s British Virgin Island-registered companies had borrowed £55million from a Chinese state bank secured on the stadium until Couhig’s advisors stumbled on it during the late stages of due diligence, but he did not. Dai did.
This meant, Reading had to repay the almost £5million Couhig had lent them at the start of the season, which the club did very promptly, thanks to a sell-on clause in former star Michael Olise’s transfer to Crystal Palace that turned into a timely windfall when the France winger moved to Bayern Munich this summer.
Couhig, however, did not the cancel the liens, a form of security, he has on the training ground and stadium.
Why? Well, he declined to comment when The Athletic asked him but our educated guess is that he is a bit miffed nobody has taken the trouble to explain why his takeover, which was only Dai’s signature short of completion, collapsed, and he would still like to buy the club for what would appear to be a fair price of £30million, with just over half of that upfront.
If that is not possible because Dai has, as has been repeatedly suggested, another buyer, we suspect Couhig will release those liens as soon as Dai reimburses him for the £350,000 he has spent on legal fees and due diligence.
Our hunch, for what it is worth, is Dai will eventually realise he is not going to get a better offer than Couhig’s and Reading can return to being a club focused on wins and losses, not docked points, embargoes and winding-up petitions.
Tranmere’s Maxx power
Speaking of American lawyers who want to buy English football clubs, some more detail emerged this week about who is joining Donald Trump’s former lawyer Joe Tacopina in his attempt to buy Tranmere Rovers.
As The Athletic reported last month, Team Tacopina has been in talks with the League Two side’s majority owners Mark and Nicola Palios for more than six months and his proposed takeover is being assessed by the English Football League.
In our report, we explained that the 58-year-old New Yorker wants “to harness the power of his celebrity contacts” to propel Tranmere and SPAL, the Italian third-tier team he owns, up their leagues, and, if the takeover is approved, we should expect a Welcome to Wrexham-style documentary.
Last weekend, the showbiz editor of British newspaper The Sun on Sunday revealed the name of the first of those “celebrity contacts”, although in this case the relationship is also lawyer/client as Tacopina is defending American rapper A$AP Rocky against a charge that he fired a gun at a former friend in Los Angeles in 2021.
For those not familiar with A$AP Rocky’s oeuvre, he was a prominent member of Harlem-based hip-hop collective A$AP Mob, before branching out as a solo artist, entrepreneur and producer. He is perhaps best known, though, for going out with Rihanna, with whom he has two children.
For those not familiar with Rihanna… what have you been doing?
Anyway, the prospect of A$AP Rocky, real name Rakim Mayers, and RiRi rocking up at Prenton Park has certainly added some spice to the Tranmere takeover tale and this column can now reveal another of the celebs Tacopina hopes to include in his group, Las Vegas Raiders star Maxx Crosby.
Maxx Crosby, coming to Tranmere? (Louis Grasse/Getty Images)
Again, if you are wondering why an NFL player might want to buy a relatively unheralded English football team, what have you been doing? JJ Watt has a stake in Burnley and Tom Brady a piece of Birmingham City, while NBA great LeBron James owns a slither of Liverpool and a dozen different American athletes own shares in Leeds United. It has almost got to the point where it would be strange if a syndicate of American investors trying to buy an English football team did not include a professional athlete or two.
Crosby, unfortunately, is not named after the beach near Tranmere Rovers but his wife did play college soccer and he earns £20million a year — and he is very good at his day job of sacking quarterbacks.
Neither Crosby nor Tacopina responded to requests for comment.
GO DEEPER
Birmingham City: The story of how Tom Brady’s football club were relegated
Everton eye docklands regeneration
From one proposed American takeover of a Merseyside club to another. Don’t panic, Evertonians, I bring good news.
After two years of kissing frogs, Everton owner Farhad Moshiri found his prince this summer in the shape of The Friedkin Group (TFG), the Texas-based family firm that owns Toyota dealerships, hotels, swathes of Tanzania, film production companies and football clubs.
But you know all that.
The good news is that the regulatory approval process is progressing smoothly, with the only real hurdle still to clear being a deal to settle a £200million debt owed by one of Moshiri’s holding companies to one of those frogs, 777 Partners.
With 777 now on the verge of liquidation, that debt has been claimed by its main creditor, an American insurance firm called A-Cap. But because things can never be simple at Everton, A-Cap is being sued by a British investment company called Leadenhall, which has been granted an injunction that stops A-Cap selling assets/doing deals without Leadenhall’s approval.
So, that is what we are waiting for, and A-Cap, Everton, Moshiri and TFG remain confident it will come. Leadenhall is keeping its cards closer to its chest but nobody can think of a good reason why it would say no, so let’s keep it positive.
The newer news is that TFG has already started to look at what life will be like at Everton’s new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock next season.
To be frank, TFG would not be interested in buying the Premier League side if they were not moving into a new, 53,000-seat venue but Everton’s waterfront property will only transform the club’s fortunes if their owner can really maximise its benefits. And that means turning it into an asset that is used every day, not once a fortnight.
With that in mind, TFG is looking to increase the club’s footprint at the docklands site, most likely by buying the land around Nelson Dock, which is immediately to the south of Bramley-Moore Dock, to create more space for the type of entertainment and leisure offering any venue-operator must provide these days to make the sums add up.
TFG would like to expand Everton’s footprint at the docklands (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
There are also whispers — and that is all they are at present — that TFG might want to increase the stadium’s capacity at some point, which will not be easy given the tight constraints of the site and the design of the £750million building. There is, however, some scope to expand the stadium’s east side but only if there is genuine demand for it, as it would not be cheap.
A nice headache to have, perhaps, particularly after the existential crises of recent years.
A week in FIFA politics
For a tournament that nobody has ever seen or played in before, has no broadcast partner or sponsors and has managed to unite Europe’s domestic leagues and players’ unions in an unprecedented campaign to have it cancelled, FIFA’s new and expanded Club World Cup certainly generates a lot of news.
Take last week, for example.
On Monday, the aforementioned leagues and unions filed a formal complaint at the European Commission in Brussels against FIFA for breaching European Union competition law. The aggrieved parties say they have simply not been consulted by world football’s governing body when it decides the international match calendar that underpins the whole industry.
Every lawyer The Athletic has asked believes the leagues and unions are right and it is only a matter of time before FIFA is forced to radically change its decision-making processes, as FIFA itself seemed to acknowledge that same day when it announced a “global dialogue” on how to respond to the European Court of Justice’s ruling on the Lassana Diarra case. That ruling has effectively said that a key part of FIFA’s rules on international transfers breach EU law.
On Tuesday, also in Brussels, LaLiga boss Javier Tebas told a gathering of the Union of European Clubs that FIFA should just “scrap” the Club World Cup because “it is not needed by the players, the clubs or FIFA”.
Later that day, FIFA announced another new sponsor… for the 2026 Men’s World Cup and 2027 Women’s World Cup, two tournaments it is having no trouble selling to commercial partners.
And, during a visit to Seattle Sounders’ Lumen Field, FIFA president Gianni Infantino confirmed that the venue will host six games at the Club World Cup, including all three of the Sounders’ group-stage games, as they are one of Major League Soccer president Don Garber’s champions. More on the other one in a moment.
With Pasadena’s Rose Bowl also hosting games in the tournament, the original plan to leave West Coast venues for the Gold Cup — CONCACAF’s tournament for international teams that is running in the same slot — while the Club World Cup took the East Coast, has already unravelled. Clearly, FIFA decided it could not stage an event in the U.S. and not visit California.
On Wednesday, the circus moved to the home of English rugby union, Twickenham, for two days of networking, panel chats and free drinks at Leaders Week London, Europe’s biggest sports business conference. Among the star turns was Garber, the man who runs the biggest annual soccer competition in the country that is hosting next summer’s Club World Cup.
“We all need to be mindful of the calendar, and I understand Javier’s views,” is how Garber diplomatically put it, although he did also point out that two of his sides will be in the new competition and that will be a great way to “show our competitiveness against the rest of the world”.
On Thursday, FIFA finally received some unequivocal support for its month-long, 32-team venture from the chief executive of Saudi Arabia’s best team, Al Hilal.
“I can understand there’s a preoccupation with the number of matches but it’s probably the single most important competition of the season for us,” said Esteve Calzada during a Q&A at The Summit, part of Leaders Week London.
Friday and Saturday passed without any further Club World Cup developments but, on Sunday, FIFA coughed up the world’s worst-kept secret: Lionel Messi — sorry, Inter Miami — were getting the berth reserved for a host-nation representative thanks to them posting the best regular-season record in MLS.
Messi with Infantino after Inter Miami beat New England Revolution (Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
To be fair to them, they did this with a record points haul and Infantino was in Florida to watch them smash New England Revolution 6-2. Messi came off the bench to score a hat-trick and his old Barca buddy Luis Suarez bagged a brace.
But dishing out rewards for regular-season success is usually considered to be as un-American as communism, walking to the shops and the metric system, so eyebrows will continue to be raised until Inter Miami win the play-offs, too.
However, Infantino does now have Messi in his tournament, which should presumably help with those negotiations with broadcasters and sponsors.
The other big help will no doubt come shortly after December 11, when an Extraordinary FIFA Congress will meet online to vote “en bloc” to award the 2030 World Cup to Argentina, Morocco, Paraguay, Portugal, Spain and Uruguay (it will never not be weird to type that out), and the 2034 edition to Saudi Arabia.
Because if there was a consensus view in the coffee breaks, lunch buffets and after-parties in Brussels and London, it was that if Saudi Arabia does not ride to FIFA’s rescue with, at the very least, some big sponsors, Europe’s Club World Cup entrants will not send their strongest teams.
If this column had to guess (and I have started, so might as well continue) what will happen, it is that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will invest heavily in FIFA+, the governing body’s streaming platform, solving the Club World Cup’s broadcast problem, and two or three PIF-backed sponsors will be announced.
But Saudi Arabia, which does not like being taken for granted and is determined to get some financial returns on its investments, will insist that this becomes a FIFA/PIF joint venture, with actual FIFA money in the pot, too.
That might make perfect sense to most of the countries with participants in the Club World Cup, as new ideas usually do require some investment to get them going, but it might be a tough sell to the two-thirds or so of Infantino’s membership that will have little chance of ever seeing one of their champions at a Club World Cup.
GO DEEPER
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(Top photo: Everton’s new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock; by Carl Recine via Getty Images)
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Publish date : 2024-10-24 17:09:00
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