Recently we ran our third approval rating on Reading’s current owners – predominantly Rob Couhig, but also Todd Trosclair and Rick Catania – and the results look good from their point of view.
After kicking off with 3.46/5 in September 2025 and then pushing up to 3.63 last May, you’ve now given them a score of 3.85. That may look like a small improvement, but it’s steady progress regardless.
It’s also put them – just about – into the fourth-highest rating we’ve had in our approval series for the owners,
as you can see on the chart below. For context, the highest scores came during the most free-spending days of the Dai Yongge era, but notably before all of that cash-splashing came back to bite the club in later years.
You’d think that the next step, to take the owners’ score beyond 4/5, will be for the team to get firmly established at the top end of the league.
Though the summer recruitment looks encouraging at the moment, and the decision to stick with Leam Richardson at the end of last season is aging well as things stand, we’ll need to see continued results on the pitch. We are after all still only in late September.
We could quite conceivably be sat here in May 2027 celebrating promotion. If that happens, it’ll be a harsh person indeed who doesn’t give the owners a maximum 5/5. Anyway, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves just yet.
There’s also room for improvement on the matchday experience. Though a lot of money was invested into the SCL over the summer, and a lot of hype was generated by the owners themselves, reviews from match-going fans haven’t been universally positive (though that’s not to downplay the improvements that have come around). More on all that here.
Interestingly, the breakdown of our approval rating results shows a clear direction of travel over the last couple of polls.
While a third of fans were in the middle (orange on the pie charts below) on the owners a year ago, that contingent has since dropped by about 20 percentage points, to the benefit of the highest score options (happy – light green, very happy – dark green).
While ‘very unhappy’ has stayed pretty consistent, I’m not going to read too much into the falling number of people in the ‘unhappy’ camp as I can’t say with certainty what the margin of error on our polls is.
That said, if a fair number of people (around 6 percentage points over the last year) have consciously moved from ‘2/5’ to a higher score, I’d be interested to know what their thinking had been and what’s since changed.
