June 16, 2023. To many, this date is probably insignificant. Even to Reading fans, this warm Friday probably doesn’t stick out in the memory to many. However, this Friday in the height of the close season proved to be a turning point that many would not expect eight months down the line. The birth of Sell Before We Dai.

The shock reverberated around the fanbase as Reading Football Club, a proud and established member of the footballing family, once again found themselves on the English Football League’s naughty step for failing to pay players’ wages on time on three occasions during the 2022/23 campaign, which ended in relegation from the Championship.

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“I’d had enough, and I wanted change,” said 33-year-old Alex Everson from Bracknell, founder member of Sell Before We Dai and a co-host on the Elm Park Royals podcast. “We needed to come up with solutions that people would get behind and tie the fan groups together, making it easy to talk. I had enough of seeing our club taken through the mud.”

A club firmly rooted in community and family; the ‘Royal’ family pulled together. Members of the Tilehurst End; Club 1871; Proud Royals and the Supporters Trust at Reading [STAR] came together on this warm Friday, and the fanbase hasn’t looked back.

"We’ve got some excellent PR people in the campaign who have conveyed what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, so it has helped," commented Sell Before We Dai stalwart Caroline Parker. "When your backs are against the wall, fans will come together because they need some sense of hope and are looking to us to try and help find a way out of it."

“We already had a WhatsApp group from STAR with some of the other fan groups because we have issued a joint statement and we decided that we ought to take action,” began Sarah Turner, a mother-of-two who lives in Warfield and current chair of STAR. “We tried to get representation from across the fan groups and made a plan for how we would take it forward. I then went to the STAR board to get approval to put money in to get it rolling and that they would be happy on the grounds that we would be protesting. There was agreement and we started coming up with plans for how to take things forward.”

Unfortunately, June 16 was not the one-off we had hoped the summer may be, and so began the ‘Summer of Discontent.’ It took until mid-July before a manager was announced, and it was not the experienced Chris Wilder that many had been expecting when the rumour mill was rife. HMRC went unpaid, staff and players went unpaid, and the club were on and off the EFL’s Transfer Embargo reporting service more times than a light switch. That’s not even mentioning the winding-up petitions lodged against the club in June and October.

Pre-season came and the group began with leaflets and an aborted sock protest idea.

“Sutton, away in pre-season we gave our leaflets and were getting quite a negative reaction, not a lot of people were interested at that time,” Sarah Turner added.

Next up came the sit-in, with hundreds staying behind after the opening-day defeat to Peterborough United, waving banners and banging seats to make an almighty racket for an hour after the game.

The off-field unrest didn’t ease up, with Ruben Selles and his young side battling against the odds in the third tier despite being hit with two points deductions before Christmas.

September proved the first step up in action as a barrage of tennis balls were launched onto the pitch in the 16th minute of a 3-2 win over Bolton Wanderers, something that would become the norm at home matches until the New Year.

October saw some action off the field too, with Dai Yongge officially putting the club up for sale, the Select Car Leasing Stadium awarded Asset of Community Value status, and thousands of Reading residents closing down the A33 with an emotional march from the town centre to the stadium, complete with bona fide club legends in tow.

I wrote an email to the council imploring them to award us the Asset of Community Value status,” said 42-year-old accountant Caroline Parker. “It just snowballed from there.

“Jason Brock [Reading Borough Council leader] emailed me back and then Sarah got in touch with me because Jason wanted to meet us. I had a meeting with Sarah, Jason, and John [Ennis] at the very start of the ACV process and I just ended up part of the group. It all snowballed and it’s mental. If you’d have told me this time last year what I would be up to I’d think you were insane. It took a really strange turn.”

Progress, one might think. Well, the story, which is still being written, continues. Talk of prospective buyers and a buzzword of the last eight months- ‘exclusivity’- were banded around before news emerged that the Luxembourg hedge fund had walked away. If only there was an upcoming opportunity to showcase the club’s struggles on national television. Cue Eastleigh.

The Spitfires had done incredibly well to reach the second round proper of the prestigious FA Cup, and Royals fans travelled to Hampshire in their thousands for a classic cup tie. So too did ITV Television. Following the sending of respectful emails to staff and supporters, hundreds of tennis balls and fake pound notes rained onto the pitch at the Silverlake Stadium, with Director of Football Operations, Mark Bowen, fully backing the protests when interviewed pre-match, even revealing that he had refused to take his wages until the entire staff had also received them.

“What have we achieved,” Sarah Turner pondered. “Getting Reading on the lips of everyone. We are a disaster that is not well-run and is a crisis club. I’ve learnt lots over the last year about football and finance that I never thought I’d know. I have learnt that Reading fans can come together and that we all want the same thing. There are so many different people from different backgrounds who have come together and worked.”

Millions now knew the plight of the football club, and many more were to find out just a month later when the January transfer window caused yet more heartache for supporters.

READ MORE: Reading FC set to lose Academy pair to Luton Town in blow

Similar to that warm Friday in June, on a cold Friday evening in January, news broke that fan favourites Nelson Abbey and Tom Holmes were on their way out of the football club.

"I have been informed about the deals, but I was not involved at the very beginning."

That very fact was to be the flash point as it emerged that deals had been done to sell players without the knowledge of key management staff. Supporters, already reeling from the news of redundancies sweeping through the coaching staff, had gone nuclear and it was clear that the following match was to be an unprecedented moment in the history of the club.

On 16 minutes, as has been the way all season, thousands of supporters streamed onto the pitch and halted the fixture with Port Vale, a newfound friend in the world of football.

Minutes and eventually hours passed before the decision was made to abandon the game, something which certainly didn’t feel like a unanimous success within the fanbase.

“The lowest point is probably the pitch invasion, in that it was needed,” said Sarah Turner. “It is depressing that we had to get it abandoned. Really good things have come from that protest, so although I wasn’t behind it, you can’t complain about what has happened since.”

For the following seven days, Reading were the hottest footballing story on the planet. You couldn’t turn on a radio, or television or flip open a newspaper without someone commenting on the Reading situation. We had gone nuclear.

That was in January. Now in March, what has changed? Unfortunately, very little. Results have improved on the field, with Selles’ squad working wonders, but the playing staff remain hamstrung. Yet more points were taken off the club on February 26, increasing the heat and instilling fear that more may follow.

If you’d asked me in June whether I would still be campaigning now, I’d have said no,” Caroline Parker said. “In my head, I had six months and I thought after the mass tennis ball protest in October that there was a change in the wind, and we were going to see a new owner coming in. I am surprised to still be doing it now. I can accept still doing it now if we were in a period of exclusivity or due diligence, but it’s still all so vague. Part of me wouldn’t be surprised to still see Dai as the owner at the start of next season. That would be worrying and depressing. We’ve got two months left of the season now so we will have to do our best to keep campaigning in different ways. We’re at a delicate stage, we can’t be upsetting Dai too much right now.”

These sentiments are shared by Sarah Turner, with STAR in the fortunate position to have regular meetings with the man tasked with finding a new buyer, Nigel Howe.

“I am surprised that we are still going on and that it hasn’t been sold. If you go back to October when we were told that Dai was selling, it felt like a really high point. Then we found out he was difficult in the sale process and didn’t really stick to his word, and we are still in this position. I just feel really stressed that we are running out of money and whether a buyer will come forward in the time frame.”

Reading Chronicle:

With just two months of the season remaining, fans are getting a cricked neck from switching their attentions between the pitch and the boardroom so vociferously.

From clown masks to moving billboards, red cards to MP meetings, nothing is off the table for those working away behind the name 'Sell Before We Dai.'

Nobody knows what the future holds for the football club, but one thing that can be guaranteed is that this group of campaigners will not stop until this whole horrible saga reaches it’s conclusion.

“The last eight months have been really stressful,” Caroline admitted. “I don’t want anyone to bring out the little violins because we’re volunteers and don’t have to do it but it’s been really hard work- like having another full-time job. In a good week, we’re putting in 20 hours each if not more. Some weeks it overtakes your life, and you never quite switch off. The good is seeing how much the fans have come together and how the campaigns have grown.

“It’s a really credible football campaign that addresses the wider issues of football ownership, it’s not just Reading. I think we’ve done quite and a good job of it and I’m proud to be a part of it. Would we be as far along had we not started? I don’t think we would be. I think we’d be grumpy fans tolerating it and staying away from games. I do think it’s moved the conversation and action along. I’m really glad I got involved but it’s been a whirlwind. None of us had done anything like this.

“I think it has reignited my passion for it [football]. I do feel really invested in it because it is like your work. It’s our sweat and tears and time away from our loved ones that have gone into it, so it’s important to everyone on the campaign team- they’re living and breathing it. I’m not much of a campaigner so I’m surprised at how invested I am- it’s really hard the switch off. It will be weird when it’s over, there will be a huge gap in my mind.”

“Even the people at the top of the club understand why the protests happen and we have been respectful in everything we’ve done,” Sarah concluded. “Although they don’t agree with protests, we have to protest, and they understand.”

One thing is for certain, June 16 won’t be a date forgotten by a handful of those in Berkshire.