Congratulations to Benn Ward, winner of our 2025/26 rookie of the season award!
He only had one challenger, John Ryan, but he was a comfortable winner. Ward took 86% of the vote, well ahead of Ryan’s 14%.
In truth this result was a bit of a foregone conclusion, and that’s no slight on Ryan. The young Irishman played half a dozen times earlier this season and showed promise, but was unable to build on that beyond December due to serious injury.
Ward on the other hand was a fairly high-profile mid-season
purchase, arriving to a fair amount of anticipation as a talented defender on the up. He followed up on that with a string of standout performances in the first team, although he ultimately also succumbed to the same fate of an injury layoff.
He joins the following list of former rookie of the season winners:
- 2014/15: Jake Cooper
- 2015/16: Aaron Tshibola
- 2016/17: Liam Kelly
- 2017/18: Omar Richards
- 2018/19: Andy Rinomhota
- 2019/20: Tom McIntyre
- 2020/21: Tom Holmes
- 2021/22: Femi Azeez
- 2022/23: Nesta Guinness-Walker
- 2023/24: Tyler Bindon
- 2024/25: Jayden Wareham
The bigger takeaway from this season’s award is just how narrow the shortlist was. As explained in the original article, we’ve used the same criteria each season, in order to narrow the field down to Reading’s own young players who’ve had a genuine breakthrough campaign.
While it’s fair to point out that the squad was bound to be rebalanced in some way in 2025/26 after the latter Dai Yongge years, when a lot of academy talent had to be extensively used, the pathway has dried up too much. Hopefully 2025/26 was just a blip though and we’re able to get back to regular business next season.
