Those of you familiar with The Tilehurst End will know we do a semi-regular (dependent on when I remember to do it) ‘approval rating’ feature for Reading managers. We did one for Noel Hunt back in mid-May, for instance, and the results were pretty decent for him.
Even longer-term readers will remember that, in the past, we’ve done the same thing for the club’s owners. Now, on the off chance you haven’t quite been keeping up with goings-on at Reading Football Club in recent years, I’ve got some shock
news: there’s been a bit of news on the ownership front since our last approval rating on Dai Yongge, in March 2023. More than a bit in fact: a lot.
Yes, dear (unfeasibly ill-informed) reader (who I’ve made up for the purposes of this article intro), it eventually turned out that Dai Yongge wasn’t such a wonderful bloke after all.
His last approval rating was actually pretty good: 3.08/5, which is pretty much a dead-on middling score. That was down from 3.59/5, which he managed in September 2022, but still fairly positive, and certainly well ahead of how he went on to be regarded.
Indeed, just a couple of months later in mid-June, Dai was hit with a volley of charges from the EFL, the existential threat to the club became clear and Sell Before We Dai was born. Then followed almost two years of campaigning, protesting, false dawns, anger, fear and pretty much every other emotion under the sun. Sometimes in the same day.
Amid all of that, the idea of doing an approval rating for the owner simply didn’t feel right. It would have been stupid at best, insulting at worst, to ask fans to grade someone who had not only left the club to fend for itself, but was also maddeningly bad at finding a buyer who could end our nightmare. And anyway, the only legitimate response would have been: “1/5, but change the ratings system to introduce a negative option too.”
Side note: it’s really, really nice to be able to use the past tense when writing about Dai Yongge.
Fast-forward to May 2025 and we finally got our takeover. Rob Couhig and Todd Trosclair rode into town, completing a deal which should have gone through the previous year. A new dawn, at long last, broke over Reading.
That brings us to the present. Couhig and Trosclair have now had the keys to the SCL for around four months and their first transfer window has closed, so this feels like a good time to bring out the ownership approval rating once again.
A bit of context
It’s worth quickly zooming out and noting the broader context around this ownership. What makes Couhig and Trosclair somewhat difficult to fully and fairly judge at the moment – besides not having a proper baseline to compare them against – is that so many important elements of the overall rebuild job they have on their hands won’t be heavily publicised or discussed.
For example, Couhig has spoken about modernising the accounting system from an outdated paper-based system to a digital one, Reading are finally in a position to hire people in order to boost manpower across the organisation, and a number of initiatives are being undertaken to increase the club’s revenue. And, somewhat cryptically, Couhig has alluded to affairs at Reading not quite being what he’d expected before the takeover (from 6:35 in this YouTube video):
“I thought it would be different, in the sense of what we were told. I want to be careful how I describe it because of some other things that are going on. And so I had a basic understanding of what our probable SCMP would be, just from published figures. What we were not aware of was some of the things that would diminish that number.”
(SCMP is the EFL’s Salary Cost Management Protocol, which essentially dictates how much of a club’s turnover can be spent on wages. Couhig and CEO Joe Jacobson discussed it in that video.)
All those things are important work to be done in the short term and could have significant ramifications in the medium and long term, but as things stand, they can’t be properly analysed.
How are they getting on so far?
Going by the exchange of views on social media, opinions are very mixed on Couhig and Trosclair, so I’m fascinated to see how their first approval rating pans out. Look through Twitter for five minutes and you’ll find passionate critics and committed defenders of the ownership, but I suspect most fans are somewhere in the middle.
As for my own views, I’m pretty content with the ownership: one of those ‘somewhere in the middle’, but more positive than negative. I don’t have any major concerns, and where I am annoyed/frustrated, I’m generally happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Before I crack on with some more specific points, a few basics that probably aren’t all that controversial.
- This is now a normal (if such a thing exists in football – everything’s relative) and stable club that doesn’t give its supporters existential dread every day of the week. This obviously doesn’t warrant special praise – it’s the lowest of bars for any business owner to see to their obligations – but I like being able to write it
- I also appreciate the fact that we ended up with owners who a) actually have a passion for running a football club and b) want to do so responsibly. Again, I’m not saying this to give Couhig and Trosclair credit, but we could have ended up with a much worse kind of ownership
Now, a lot has happened since mid-May on and off the pitch, so I won’t try to get through everything about Couhig and Trosclair exhaustively. I also won’t go back over transfers too much as I’ve already done that (I was pretty happy with Reading’s “solid but not spectacular” summer window) or delve into matters on the pitch as that’s Noel Hunt’s responsibility.
Let’s start with comms, where we’ve seen a colossal change from the Dai era and now regularly get substantial updates from the owners. While we never actually heard the former owner speak to fans out loud (though he did have a footrace on the pitch that one time), Couhig has directly addressed fans in audio/video format a number of times – through official club channels, the media and on our podcast.
The volume of communication isn’t the issue, but the substance is. As commendable as it is to see owners talk up Reading’s future (whether for the sake of morale or selling season tickets), they’ve been over-eager, a bit naive and not always read the room well. This is, after all, understandably a largely cynical fanbase after the last couple of years.
I don’t think any of that’s done from some deliberate attempt to mislead, but still, an adjustment of communication style would make sense. We do seem to have been hearing a little less from Couhig and Trosclair in recent weeks, so that could well be a conscious decision.
On a related note, the club’s media output is so, so much better. You can tell very clearly that time, effort and cash are being heavily invested in a way to make in-house coverage as good as possible.
Phil Catchpole’s come in as director of communications and now commentates for RoyalsTV; former Reading Chronicle journalist James Earnshaw recently joined the media team; the production standard of the Access All Areas videos is fantastic; Ryan Jefferiss does a great job on the Opposition Report videos; we even get drone footage for some home games… there’s a lot to like.
Things like that naturally don’t get the praise they deserve when results and performances are poor, but I really like what’s being done regardless. Genuinely, great job guys.
If there’s one area of ambition that Couhig has talked up above anything else, it’s improving the matchday experience. Of course, that’s been found wanting in recent years due to a general lack of funding – not just in the post-relegation years, but going back to Covid really. It’s relatively little things as much as anything else: dirty seating areas, no hand soap in the dispenser and so on.
I can only speak from my own perspective obviously, but the progress on this front has felt… a mixed bag. I’ve found myself using the phrase ‘mixed bag’ a fair bit when talking about Reading this season, etc etc. The space by my seat in the SJM Stand is still dirty, there is consistently hand soap in the dispenser, the toilets were seemingly cleaned a few games into the season and the new audio system was inaudible at one game but then fixed 10 days later.
If there’s one thing about the matchday experience that says a lot about the ownership more broadly though, it’s the pre-match flame displays, which I think have now come out for every single league home game. (I’m not sure why I felt the need to clarify the home game bit, as if we’d somehow sneak pyrotechnics into Sincil Bank, but anyway.)
A lot of resources are being invested into them, as part of a broader ambition to liven up the matchday experience. I appreciate the effort and get the theory behind why it’s being done: it goes down well with younger, more impressionable fans who’ll then want to return, and with at least one parent with them, that’s a couple of tickets sold right there.
But for the adult section of the fanbase – again, one that has grown cynical – it doesn’t feel appropriate. Going big on the opening day of the season or for other special occasions is one thing, but for a third League One match of 2025/26 at the SCL against Port Vale? It feels to me like a poor reading of the room. (No shade at the Valiants, of course.)
I really don’t think I’m one of the more negative or downbeat fans out there, but even I roll my eyes at it a bit. I know, it’s not aimed at me and there’s a diverse range of fans in a home crowd for the club to try to impress, but I doubt mine is a particularly rare opinion.
It wouldn’t be fair of me to just whinge and offer nothing productive. I’m much happier that the club are funding blue and white flags for supporters at the Leyton Orient game – it’s a much more natural, appropriate way to boost the matchday visuals. As for some longer-term things, I’d love the stadium itself to be more personalised and get some artwork/displays: there’s a lot of blank space to be painted over so the SCL can feel more like our home.
On a brighter note, the academy. This was a substantial source of concern for me before the takeover, with persistent rumours that Couhig would look to cut it back in some way. However, he made it clear in August (at an event Bobbins covered) that the academy’s Category 1 status would remain for the duration of his ownership. So that gets a big thumbs up from me.
On a similar note, we’ve seen some encouraging recruitment at academy level, including Reading shelling out a fee (yes, a fee!) for under-21 striker Sean Patton. Further, after last season’s coaching reshuffle across the club following Ruben Selles’ departure, the under-21s and under-18 have been reinforced by new assistant managers coming in: Craig Alcock and Sean Wood respectively.
There’s so much I don’t have the time to cover in this section, but one thing I can’t not mention is the club’s new gambling sponsorship. This is an area that’ll split fans depending on their own sense of ethics, but my two cents is that the gambling industry’s hold over football overall is as insidious as it is damaging (as I’ve written before), so I was deeply disappointed to see Reading announcing their own ‘betting partner’.
I know this is the modern reality of the football industry and I accept that, if you want to boost revenue, this is a good way of doing that. I also wish my club was better.
A general sense of discontent?
This last bit is more about the mood at Reading overall than it is the owners specifically, but it’s important nonetheless. While there’s no single, specific reason for this, it does feel as if Couhig and Trosclair’s honeymoon period ended surprisingly quickly. While there was initially no shortage of goodwill and patience from supporters, that went after, what… a couple of months?
I’m not saying the new owners are outright unpopular – among most fans, anyway – but it does feel as if they now don’t get the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong (for example an underwhelming end to the transfer window) as much as you’d expect of people who saved the club only four months ago.
Maybe that’s because of the nature of the takeover process, with everyone having already formed an opinion on Couhig well before May. In fact, an April poll we ran on Twitter suggested more fans were negatively (46.5%) or neutrally (32.9%) disposed towards Couhig than took a positive view (20.6%). Had an unknown quantity become owner instead of Couhig, they’d have likely been granted a longer honeymoon period.
Or perhaps it’s because of how much Couhig has been seen to be promising in the last few months. A not-insignificant number of fans feel they’ve been given commitments by the new ownership that haven’t been delivered on. While I don’t completely agree with that and do feel some of the pushback has been wide of the mark (contrary to public opinion, Couhig didn’t promise a “spectacular” window), when it comes to club/supporter relations, perception is as important as reality.
Then again, maybe I have myself misread the mood of the fans and it’s actually a lot more content/positive than it seems from looking extensively through social media (too extensively for my own good, probably).
Poll time
You’ve now read all that context and my views on Couhig and Trosclair (or just skipped to this bit to get to the poll, for which I wouldn’t blame you – there was a lot of waffle), so what do you make of Reading’s ownership duo?
You can find our 1-5 approval rating poll just below. If it doesn’t display on your device, try this link right here. If it STILL doesn’t work, Dai probably neglected to pay the bill.
