Old Man Andrews I call being a midtable Championship club pretty good for a club of our size and fanbase, we are far better off than most all things considered.
I think what isn't good is our lack of identity, we have no idea what we are anymore and that really comes from the ownership and questionable business decisions over the past few years with the Thai's coming in, to Gourlay and to the Chinese owners who by their own admission have no real idea about football so hire people like Kia Joorabchian to look after the transfer dealings of the club. Decisions like that have essentially killed off the "Reading Way" which we all know and love and which was the thing that got us promoted with 106 points. We need to change our business model, we need to get rid of people like Joorabchian who is a self-serving conman who is only involved with the club to gain financially, he has no interest in our success.
We need to get our academy back to the sort of level it was when Eamonn Dolan ran it, invest in that rather than taking punts on players from abroad with no clue about our club who only come here to put themselves on the map. We have started to see this happening with McIntyre, Olise and Osho coming through but I fear in the summer we will be picking up free/cheap players from abroad who will take their places. This simply cannot be allowed to happen but I get the impression that if the club bring in more established players then Bowen will be made to play them, I don't have faith that Bowen makes all the team decisions himself.
We need to get a lot better at scouting. How many players are we missing out on from the lower leagues or players at Premier League sides deemed not good enough. Look at sides like Peterborough for example. They pick up really good young players from non-league/League 1 and they go on to be excellent players who get sold on for huge profit and make the club financially secure. They also pick up players like Ivan Toney who scored buckets of goals this season and is now valued at well over £7m. They got him for just over 600k, scouts identified him. Where are our scouts? What do they do exactly? Lets go back to basics and try to follow a similar model to Brentford and Peterborough.
+1 you wrote pretty much the same as me below (at the same time)