Financial importance when running a football club

Whilst this article is not like my usual one based on non-league football, it does involve the story of a club that has become a non-league club, which hopefully will not result in another EFL, former Premier League club, joining them.
Indeed this has echoes of the spring and summer months of 2019 when the EFL were trying to force Bury owner Steve Dale to sell the League One club that he paid only a pound for. Dale could not provide proof of funds to finance the club then failed to sell up and the Shakers were expelled from the League after 125 years of continuous membership. 
Now they’re plying their trade in the North West Counties League Premier Division, the ninth tier of English football, although there are now run by supporters & have at least managed to play at their spiritual home of Gigg Lane.
There is another similar scenario that could be about to happen for a club believed to be the seventh oldest in England, that club also graced the premiership, it is of course Reading. The EFL has told owner Dai Yongge to sell up by April 4 or else. This is not an unusual situation that Dai finds himself in as history shows that The Chinese businessmen — and his sister Dai Xiu Li — incredibly allowed 99-year-old Belgian team KSV Roeselare to go bankrupt with debts of only £17,000, furthermore Beijing Chengfeng, another club he owned, tumbled from the Chinese Super League to their third tier before they were dissolved in 2021. Since he has been in control of the royals he bizarrely signed players like Liam Moore on wages believed to be around £40,000-£50,000 a week — then failed to sell him to Brighton for a fee of £9MILLION with only a year left on his deal.
The defender then got crocked and walked away on a free. With a track record like this, you would think like most sensible people he would at this point know the game is up.
But on the evidence so far,  applying the law of common sense — or even showing an ounce of business acumen — is something that deserts Yongge. The EFL is clearly trying to force his hand — with league chiefs, Reading fans plus club players and staff fed up after more than 500 days of Yongge failing to enact a sale. The Chinese businessman has rightly been disqualified from owning a club in the Football League and ordered to sell his shares within the next two weeks. The situation if he fails to do so would then mean the EFL management board will meet in late April to consider the options which include suspending the club or booting them out altogether, just like what happened to Bury on the eve of the 2019/20, season & at the same time looked like might extend to Bolton Wanderers as well.
It. Would appear to most people that a simple choice is on the table for Yongge: sell up immediately for somewhere around £25million as a League One club that has the potential to climb to the Premier League or get booted out of the EFL and then pocket only a fraction of that amount. The worrying situation fans find themselves in is that Yongge is known to be stubborn, which could also result in all common sense going out of the window.
This means that there are genuine fears he could dig his heels in, after all, he has already stripped the club of its main assets — their stadium and training ground. Having taken these measures already he could be minded not to give a hoot what happens to the club in the safe knowledge he has a couple of decent chunks of land to sell, especially when you look at the location of the ground close to the M4, with easy links to London, the midlands, Wales & Devon & Cornwall, it would be both an ideal area for housing & or a large business.
The good news is that Yongge’s excuse that any progress on selling the club is being held up by a legal dispute with American Rob Couhig has now been officially rejected by a court. However one of the problems facing the EFL, board is the gaping hole between corporate law and competition rules.
The EFL regulations say they can disqualify an owner and order him to sell — but cannot take the shares off him like a compulsory purchase order. Yongge could just ignore them — and, in the meantime, hold Reading FC as hostages. You take me down, you take down the club. There are as we know from history a lot of people involved in the ownership of clubs more concerned with their own ego than preserving the history of a football club that is also a community asset. This in itself brings into sharp focus why there must be changes in the law to protect already mentioned community assets such as football clubs, this would then mean that a compulsory purchase can be enacted if an owner is behaving recklessly. The Royals owner was finally disqualified by the EFL after it was found he had been added to a bad creditors list by the Chinese government.
This situation has become a dangerous game of chicken, Let’s hope that Yongge finally sees sense and releases the hostage that is Reading FC. This also requires both Parliament and the football authorities to join forces to work together to close every single loophole that allows such a person to treat one of our oldest clubs in such a reckless way.
As always it is the supporters who suffer the most & the loyalty of such support would result in them having to regroup in an effort to pick up the pieces but the protection of club ownership regulations is something Caroline Parker from fan group Sell Before We Dai has been lobbying the EFL over for some time.
It does not matter what level the clubs are at whether premiership leaders or the worst club in the whole of football a supporters club it's just as important, the desire & passion are the same, and the delight & hurt are still as important, let's hope this situation resolves itself because if it doesn't then it could have a domino effect with other clubs, etc & no one who really loves the game wants that to happen.