Reading takeover stalls after breakdown in talks between Rob Couhig and owner Dai Yongge

Former Wycombe Wanderers owner Rob Couhig’s attempt to buy Reading has stalled following the breakdown of talks between the American lawyer and the League One side’s current owner Dai Yongge.

Couhig and his business partner Todd Trosclair had hoped to complete the deal in August — and have already lent the club more than £5million ($6.6m) — but a series of deadlines to sign the agreement have passed, with the most recent coming and going on Friday.

The news will come as a huge blow for Reading’s supporters who have been protesting against Dai’s ownership for more than a year. The Chinese businessman bought the club in May 2017, the same month they lost the Championship play-off final to Huddersfield Town on penalties.

Despite spending huge sums of money on managers and players, the next six seasons were mainly spent at the wrong end of the Championship table, with relegation to the third tier coming in 2023 when they were docked six points for late payments for the second season in a row.

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The club hit new lows, though, last season, as staff were made redundant, the club struggled to pay running costs and the academy’s brightest talents were sold.

In March, the club very nearly sold its training ground to Couhig’s Wycombe only for that deal to collapse, too. And this summer, the women’s team were forced to pull out of the second-tier Championship as they could no longer operate on a professional basis.

But when Couhig sold Wycombe to Kazakh fintech billionaire Mikhail Lomtadze in May, the 75-year-old emerged as a potential saviour for Reading, a club that finished eighth in the Premier League in 2007.

In August, Couhig, Trosclair and their families came to watch the club beat Wigan Athletic and, two days later, the New Orleanian changed his profile picture on X to one of himself outside Reading’s training ground.

But, with Dai a notoriously difficult man to pin down, a final agreement has proved elusive, with both sides blaming each other for the impasse.

Reading fans have been vocal in their opposition to Dai’s ownership (Marc Atkins/Getty Images)

Thanks to a sell-on clause windfall they received when former star Michael Olise moved from Crystal Palace to Bayern Munich this summer, Reading are not in immediate danger of insolvency but a new owner is needed by Christmas, particularly if the club is to have any chance of promotion this season.

The man leading that search for Dai has been the club’s former chief executive Nigel Howe, who received some good personal news on Monday when an independent appeal panel reduced his ban “from all football-related activities” from six months to three.

Howe was originally given a 12-month ban in May for agreeing to make an illegal payment to an agent in 2019 but the first six months of that ban were limited to transactions involving players so that he could lead the club’s negotiations with potential buyers.

With the second and more restrictive half of his ban looming, Howe appealed against the length of the sanction and that has been partially upheld. However, this still means he cannot have anything to do with Reading until January 5, which raises serious questions about how much progress on any takeover proposal can be made until then.

Neither the club nor Couhig responded to requests for comment from The Athletic.

(Top photo: Bradley Collyer/PA Images via Getty Images)