Ziptidus_mi2 I had a moan about parachute payments on Twitter, just had Norwich fans telling me to cry more and that a Reading fan shouldn't be lecturing others on club finances.
If anything, Reading's financial mess is caused in part by the massive gap in finances between Prem, Champ and the parachute payments and trying to chase the Prem money. Plenty of teams gamble and fail, plenty gamble and succeed. The stark reality is that the majority of teams that go between the Prem and Champ is largely becoming a smaller pool of teams.
West Brom, Norwich, Fulham and Watford are constantly yo-yoing and I can only see this increase, if Swansea don't go up soon they will probably fall into a similar mess as we have unless they shed a large chunk of their wages.
Our financial mess was self made. We had a huge and bloated squad. Players on unsustainable wages and long contracts. Madness for the size of the club. We were warned about it and went into a soft embargo. Gomes was brought in to apparently bring on Academy players. What do we then do? Go on another financial splurge and rack up huge debts again. Appalling stewardship.
I hope lessons have finally been learnt. No big spending please. Sell our best players. Use the loan market and bring on our best Academy players. It will be tough. We might struggle but I think we have enough in the squad to stay at this level.
We were a financial clusterfuck long before Gourlay. Under TSI, we spaffed our parachute payments on a payday loan from Vibrac. We sold Le Fondre to pay the tax bill.