Very little clutters Rob Couhig’s desk but there is a royal blue baseball cap to his left with a slogan promising to ‘Make Reading Great Again’ and a flashcard on his right with a felt-tipped reminder scribbled on it to be in the Championship by 2026.
Couhig, the club’s new American owner, denies responsibility for either. He is at a loss to explain the source of the promotion pledge, but the cap is the work of his wife Missy.
She had a pair made, for her husband and his business partner Todd Trossclair as they set out upon their latest project. And they were wearing them proudly while mingling with supporters before Reading played Tottenham in a friendly which attracted a sellout crowd of more than 22,000 to the Select Car Leasing Stadium.
‘The reaction was amazing,’ says 76-year-old Couhig. ‘We probably had five thousand people wanting to buy them. Missy tells me they cost too much to make… but we’ll see what we can do.’
The buzz around the place as head coach Noel Hunt prepares the team for their League One campaign, which began with a bump on Saturday in a 2-0 defeat at Lincoln, has been palpable since the protracted takeover was finally completed in May, signalling an end of the despised era of Dai Yongge.
Under Chinese businessman Dai, Reading crashed from the Championship play-off final of 2017 to 17th in League One in 2024. Eighteen points were deducted across three seasons, and they were burdened with a raft of EFL embargoes for various defaulted payments.
Rob Couhig is the new Reading owner after years of despair at the club
Former owner Dai Yongge (right) finally left the club this summer after a tortuous reign
Fans despised Yongge and even invaded the pitch during a match to protest against his ownership, which took the club to the brink
Little wonder Couhig, a New Orleans lawyer who owned a minor league baseball club in his home city – where he also ran twice for mayor – before venturing into football as owner of Wycombe Wanderers, was hailed a hero upon his arrival in Berkshire.
‘He’s a mini celebrity,’ says Joe Jacobson, the 38-year-old former Wycombe defender appointed as Reading’s co-chief executive officer. ‘I think he likes that deep down, even though he says he doesn’t. Lots of owners are hidden away but Rob is very open and he’s doing this for the right reasons.
‘He isn’t promising the Premier League in three years, but he is promising to take Reading to a better position so someone with deeper pockets can take it to the next level. If more owners thought that way, rather than rushing to the North Star as quickly as possible a lot of these problems wouldn’t happen.’
Which is precisely how Couhig set about his four years at Wycombe, helping them reach the Championship for the first time before selling last year to Mikhail Lomtadze, a Harvard-educated Georgian-Kazakhstani technology entrepreneur with a net worth estimated by Forbes at £4.35billion.
The Reading takeover was delayed. It collapsed in September and was pieced back together. Since May there have been unforeseen interferences, including a legal case he had long-since promised to try in Louisiana and the death of his brother Kevin, father of Pete who had been sporting director at Wycombe.
‘My best friend, a big soccer fan and the guy who got me started in all of this,’ says Couhig. ‘He told me I didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t make any money in English soccer. And from there it was “OK, hold my beer” as we would say in the United States.’
Things are moving fast and Reading’s new owner is in overdrive with a safari in Kenya, the fulfilment of a commitment to Missy to squeeze in between the first home game against Huddersfield and what is sure to be an emotional fixture at Wycombe, two weeks later.
When in England, he stays at the stadium’s Voco hotel, where he occasionally bumps into the club’s former owner Sir John Madejski. They pause to chat and compare notes before Couhig drives on, time a pressing factor as he reenergises the club with his ideas.
There’s a far brighter feel about the club these days and they can now eye a return to the big time
Reading made a late charge for the League One play-offs last season but ultimately fell three points short
He plans to transform the academy. It is Category One, producing stars such as Michael Olise of Bayern Munich and Jamie Gittens of Chelsea, and more whose sales have kept the club afloat through crisis, but he wants it to have a greater independence.
He is revamping the in-house media channel and not simply so he can tune in from New Orleans. ‘The future of this sport will be when people understand it produces content 24 hours a day, seven days a week,’ says Couhig. ‘I don’t think the league understands its value.’
A data analysis company has been signed up to aid recruitment director Brian Carey and he is appointing English football’s first head of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
‘You’ll say, what the hell do you need an AI head for, and that’s a great question,’ says Couhig. ‘I’m not 100 per cent sure. But I do know we need one. Nobody else has one, we’ll be the first. It’s the way the world’s going and why should I sit around and see what others do? Why can’t I be out there first?’
Reading’s potential since they reached Premier League for the first time under Madejski in 2006 has revolved around a vibrant local economy, at the heart of a tech hub near London.
Couhig’s accountants however were ‘absolutely staggered’ upon arrival. ‘We were still doing paper invoices. They had no cloud system. We’re sitting in the heart of the UK’s technological centre using systems outdated 10 years ago.
‘There’s no need for paper,’ he goes on, which explains the uncluttered desk. ‘We’ll have a dashboard on our phones showing us every pound in and out, why it’s allocated, where it goes against the budget, tickets sold, sponsors, what’s in the pipeline.
‘I am an impatient person, but we recognise there’s a period of development. The staff here have been burned so many times they’re almost afraid to take risks and we are risk-takers. That’s how you get ahead.’
Season ticket sales are up by more than a thousand, moving towards 9,000.
Reading are aiming to get back into the Premier League, where they had some glory days in the late 2000s and early 2010s
Michael Olise spent four years at Reading in his late teens, and his £50m move to Bayern Munich from Crystal Palace netted the club a vital boost in the form of a sell-on fee
‘The challenge is can we go from 9,000 to the peak of 15,000 when we were in the Premier League,’ says head of commercial Tim Kilpatrick, who has been at the club for six years and witnessed the depths of the crisis when Reading lived week to week, begging and borrowing to make ends meet.
A sell-on cut from Olise’s £50million move to Bayern from Crystal Palace kept was crucial to survival through last autumn and the sale of Sam Smith to Wrexham for £2m boosted the coffers in January.
‘We were just trying to buy time to get to the takeover,’ says Kilpatrick. ‘We closed off rooms and facilities to reduce the cleaning bill and certain buildings to reduce energy consumption.
‘The biggest change is that Rob’s thought process isn’t how do we save costs but how do we make money? For one building which was previously closed we’re exploring the possibility of hosting events and weddings to open up new revenue streams.’
Now for the football. As one of those involved in the anti-Dai protest groups said, fans are looking forward to a nice boring season after all the chaos.
‘Ah, they say that now,’ roars Couhig. ‘Then I don’t sign the right striker and they’re leading the pack. It’s fun. And it’s interesting for Reading to be on the right side of stories, not poor Reading anymore. It is truly a story on the up.’
