Potential New Owners

[Snowflake Royal]

Was just from beginning of last season wasn’t it?

And lolz at that patronising GWL post

I'm not sure we really know what his role was in the 3/4 months between stopping being Gomes consultant and being manager.

And obviously a manager has some responsibility for signings, but at most we're talking 1 summer for Gomes and 1 Jan as manager until he came back.

Last summer we were dredging the bottom. This summer looks pretty good.


I hope GWL's better at his job with Parliamentary Committees. His RFC contributions are worse than his AE ones

Who did we sign when he was manager? Can remember Laurent. Can’t actually think of anyone else - no doubts we were under some sort of embargo

Believe we only signed Laurent before he left and that was definitely his.

Don't recall the previous January signings.

I think there's a reasonable inference that Morrison was his before he took over as manager whilst Gomes was here.

[Hound]

Digging back think Araruna and Masika (loan) was when he was in charge if I have my dates right. Though very much doubt they were his choices as such

Yep Morrison was under Gomes but seemed Gomes had little to do with it

Think Howe was still DoF when we signed Puscas/Joao/Ejaria - though at a push you could possibly suggest some Bowen involvement (though suspect unlikely)

[Snowflake Royal]

Digging back think Araruna and Masika (loan) was when he was in charge if I have my dates right. Though very much doubt they were his choices as such

Yep Morrison was under Gomes but seemed Gomes had little to do with it

Think Howe was still DoF when we signed Puscas/Joao/Ejaria - though at a push you could possibly suggest some Bowen involvement (though suspect unlikely)

Transfermarkt is a horrendous site so no idea.

Ejaria had already been with the squad, was he a second loan or a perm deal then? Wasn't high on my list, but at the time seemed ok.

Puscas has agent tenpting Dai all over it. Stupid fee. Not a great record. Bowen's confirmed signings have been pretty UK league focused.

If he was in post for it Joao seems plausible he was involved. But then he was an excellent signing until those penalties and injury. Even then he still did ok for his appearances and would have done better with someone who had a clue, unlike Ince.

But then we know when he was here he was overruled. He wanted Moore gone, got replaced. I think that was when we got interest in Loader and Swift too and declined. Can’t imagine that was a Bowen call.

Can’t imagine it was his call last season to not try to meet the business plan through player sales either... a lot of work went into trying to shift Puscas.

[Royal_jimmy]

This conversation on our academy being easily replicated is ridiculous

Do Preston, QPR, Stoke, Bristol City, Blackburn or Cardiff have academies as good as us? They 'easily' could but don't. I wonder why.

[YorkshireRoyal99]

You know he wasn't DoF until he came back recently right?

He left us for over a year. For almost a year before that he was manager. Prior to that he had some Sports director role and before that he was a consultant to support Gomes.

Was just from beginning of last season wasn’t it?

And lolz at that patronising GWL post

I'm not sure we really know what his role was in the 3/4 months between stopping being Gomes consultant and being manager.

And obviously a manager has some responsibility for signings, but at most we're talking 1 summer for Gomes and 1 Jan as manager until he came back.

Last summer we were dredging the bottom. This summer looks pretty good.


I hope GWL's better at his job with Parliamentary Committees. His RFC contributions are worse than his AE ones

In fairness, I always thought his Sporting Director's role was something similar to a DoF role. Having said that, when he had that I'm not so sure he was really involved that heavily in transfers or at least I'd like to think he wasn't based on the (few) transfers he made and where he thought the club was going wrong, it would just seem very hypocritical for him to comment on spending on players, wanting to move players on with big wages (e.g. Moore) and then have actually done it himself. I think he was probably more involved with the playing squad and staff rather than recruitment during his spell as Sporting Director.

[Greatwesternline]

This conversation on our academy being easily replicated is ridiculous

Do Preston, QPR, Stoke, Bristol City, Blackburn or Cardiff have academies as good as us? They 'easily' could but don't. I wonder why.

If you've got a spare £150m and you want to buy a club and develop an academy it's not that difficult in the grand scheme of things. You build the buildings and you recruit the coaches.

Whilst the business of buying footballers has become detached from economic reality, the economic reality is that if you wanted to as an owner, rather spend £6m on a footballer from Romania, you could build the required football pitches, training buildings, gym and physio equipment. And hire the coaches and staff required. The cost of doing this stuff is not going to be much higher than £10m. It will take a few years to develop the pipeline of players to get the accreditation to be category 1, but the inputs (facilities) of a category 1 academy can be bought off the shelf.

It's a lot easier to do that than it is to get promoted out of the Championship because you don't have 23 other clubs trying to do it to.

If other clubs dont have as good adacemys its largely because that's not what their focus has been on. Its nice that Reading have at least that. But the majority of owners who only want to buy a team to get it into the PL won't be troubled by the existence of an academy or not. Academy's can't hope to be prolific enough to satisfy an owner's desire to get to the PL. The timescales of academyies and the timescale of rich investors are not aligned in any meaningful sense.

The timescale of an academy is aligned to fans interests because they are there for ever, but its important to realise the way a fan assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a club and the way an investor such as 777 assesses it are entirely different.

[Sutekh]

Digging back think Araruna and Masika (loan) was when he was in charge if I have my dates right. Though very much doubt they were his choices as such

Yep Morrison was under Gomes but seemed Gomes had little to do with it

Think Howe was still DoF when we signed Puscas/Joao/Ejaria - though at a push you could possibly suggest some Bowen involvement (though suspect unlikely)

Transfermarkt is a horrendous site so no idea.

Ejaria had already been with the squad, was he a second loan or a perm deal then? Wasn't high on my list, but at the time seemed ok.

Puscas has agent tenpting Dai all over it. Stupid fee. Not a great record. Bowen's confirmed signings have been pretty UK league focused.

If he was in post for it Joao seems plausible he was involved. But then he was an excellent signing until those penalties and injury. Even then he still did ok for his appearances and would have done better with someone who had a clue, unlike Ince.

But then we know when he was here he was overruled. He wanted Moore gone, got replaced. I think that was when we got interest in Loader and Swift too and declined. Can’t imagine that was a Bowen call.

Can’t imagine it was his call last season to not try to meet the business plan through player sales either... a lot of work went into trying to shift Puscas.

Mark Bowen was hired as a consultant to work with Jose Gomes in March 2019, he was later made "sporting director" at the end of August that same year and finally moved to take over as manager when Gomes was given the push in October 2019. He lasted as manager until 29 August 2020 when he was suddenly dumped in favour of Velcro. Following a spell at Wimbledon he returned to Reading as Director of Football Operations in May 2022.

Therefore my guess is he was responsible for player signings and contracts between the end of August and taking over as manager in October 2019 (though would have had some say in who to sign in the summer of 2020) and then again from May 2022.

[72 bus]

This conversation on our academy being easily replicated is ridiculous

Do Preston, QPR, Stoke, Bristol City, Blackburn or Cardiff have academies as good as us? They 'easily' could but don't. I wonder why.

If you've got a spare £150m and you want to buy a club and develop an academy it's not that difficult in the grand scheme of things. You build the buildings and you recruit the coaches.

Whilst the business of buying footballers has become detached from economic reality, the economic reality is that if you wanted to as an owner, rather spend £6m on a footballer from Romania, you could build the required football pitches, training buildings, gym and physio equipment. And hire the coaches and staff required. The cost of doing this stuff is not going to be much higher than £10m. It will take a few years to develop the pipeline of players to get the accreditation to be category 1, but the inputs (facilities) of a category 1 academy can be bought off the shelf.

It's a lot easier to do that than it is to get promoted out of the Championship because you don't have 23 other clubs trying to do it to.

If other clubs dont have as good adacemys its largely because that's not what their focus has been on. Its nice that Reading have at least that. But the majority of owners who only want to buy a team to get it into the PL won't be troubled by the existence of an academy or not. Academy's can't hope to be prolific enough to satisfy an owner's desire to get to the PL. The timescales of academyies and the timescale of rich investors are not aligned in any meaningful sense.

The timescale of an academy is aligned to fans interests because they are there for ever, but its important to realise the way a fan assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a club and the way an investor such as 777 assesses it are entirely different.

I think your figures are a bit low, Bearwood was 50M+

https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/spor ... ry%20first

“The size and scale of the project should not be underestimated. At 120 acres in total, the facility itself will be nearly three times the size of our existing operation at Hogwood. And for our owner, Mr Dai, this already represents a £50m plus project and it has been thanks to his investment, resolute conviction and positive impetus behind it that this development has gathered such momentum to now reach a stage which allows us to welcome first team football onto the grass for the very first training session at Bearwood.”

[Greatwesternline]

This conversation on our academy being easily replicated is ridiculous

Do Preston, QPR, Stoke, Bristol City, Blackburn or Cardiff have academies as good as us? They 'easily' could but don't. I wonder why.

If you've got a spare £150m and you want to buy a club and develop an academy it's not that difficult in the grand scheme of things. You build the buildings and you recruit the coaches.

Whilst the business of buying footballers has become detached from economic reality, the economic reality is that if you wanted to as an owner, rather spend £6m on a footballer from Romania, you could build the required football pitches, training buildings, gym and physio equipment. And hire the coaches and staff required. The cost of doing this stuff is not going to be much higher than £10m. It will take a few years to develop the pipeline of players to get the accreditation to be category 1, but the inputs (facilities) of a category 1 academy can be bought off the shelf.

It's a lot easier to do that than it is to get promoted out of the Championship because you don't have 23 other clubs trying to do it to.

If other clubs dont have as good adacemys its largely because that's not what their focus has been on. Its nice that Reading have at least that. But the majority of owners who only want to buy a team to get it into the PL won't be troubled by the existence of an academy or not. Academy's can't hope to be prolific enough to satisfy an owner's desire to get to the PL. The timescales of academyies and the timescale of rich investors are not aligned in any meaningful sense.

The timescale of an academy is aligned to fans interests because they are there for ever, but its important to realise the way a fan assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a club and the way an investor such as 777 assesses it are entirely different.

I think your figures are a bit low, Bearwood was 50M+

https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/spor ... ry%20first

“The size and scale of the project should not be underestimated. At 120 acres in total, the facility itself will be nearly three times the size of our existing operation at Hogwood. And for our owner, Mr Dai, this already represents a £50m plus project and it has been thanks to his investment, resolute conviction and positive impetus behind it that this development has gathered such momentum to now reach a stage which allows us to welcome first team football onto the grass for the very first training session at Bearwood.”

I think its fairly self explanatory that "£50m" was over-valuing it for the purposes of creating an asset that could be sold off from the club for the purposes of complying with financial fair play.

[From Despair To Where?]

So no new news on additional investment then?

[Hound]

So no new news on additional investment then?

Nope. Lots of GWL talking guff though if that’s why you popped in?

[From Despair To Where?]

Well, that's what I mean. I goes quiet for a week and then the new post is someone chatting shit.

Same with the squad thread on the TB. 2 pages of The Green Programme envoking the Rapture with a bit of No72 homophobia thrown in for good measure.

If they want to spout bollocks, take it somewhere more appropriate like Mumsnet

[Greatwesternline]

So no new news on additional investment then?

Nope. Lots of GWL talking guff though if that’s why you popped in?

There had been discussion of the american sports VC company 777 making an investment. I thought that people may be interested in last week's FT article which had an interview with that company about their philosophy of hyper-commercialising football clubs. The article focussed on their ongoing interest in Everton. There is no mention of Reading in the interview.

What has followed is whether / why any international investor would be bothered in picking up a League 1 team when there are Championship teams that it would be easier to "hyper-commercialise".

No doubt Reading's luke warm start to this season giving strong indications to foreign investors that there won't be an immediate return to the second flight is going to do wonders for our attractiveness.

[Snowflake Royal]

Thanks for pointing us to the article. There was really no need to follow it up with a load of pigshit nonsense though.

[Royal_jimmy]

Well if we drop to league 2 Dai will have to write even more money off

[Lower West]

Well if we drop to league 2 Dai will have to write even more money off

What if it wasn't Dai's personal money? All roads lead to the obscurity of the Cayman Islands.

[morganb]

https://fanbanter.co.uk/ex-eastenders-a ... ms-series/

[Stranded]

So if it was 777, who were interested, and I don't believe it was - then they won't be now as they are close to taking over Everton.

[Orion1871]

So if it was 777, who were interested, and I don't believe it was - then they won't be now as they are close to taking over Everton.

Well the owners of Reading and Everton have close relationships with a certain Super Agent, so wouldn't rule it out that 777 had some interest in us as well and Kia got them Everton instead.

[Stranded]

So if it was 777, who were interested, and I don't believe it was - then they won't be now as they are close to taking over Everton.

Well the owners of Reading and Everton have close relationships with a certain Super Agent, so wouldn't rule it out that 777 had some interest in us as well and Kia got them Everton instead.

Not sure you fan own 2 clubs, of ve invested in 2 in England. Major issues if we end up in the same division.