What If Reading Don’t Sign Anyone?

The Royals are yet to bring any new player in through the door, so how would next season go if that didn’t change?

We’ll get to the obvious elephant in the room at the end of the article.

It’s been a long, long time without League One football to keep us entertained. Well, not as long as last summer’s 20-year wait due to how we finished the 2022/23 season, but three months between the end of one season and the start of the next one is always a long stretch. Even with Euros football to keep us entertained, it really does almost feel like a lifetime ago when we last saw the Royals kick a competitive ball in action.

It’s been a weird summer as well: the possibility of a takeover rumbling on quietly in the background (almost too quietly, really), interspersed with some really rather nice kit launches and the occasional bit of news which was either bad, terrible or reprehensible. The elephant will need to continue waiting.

In the last couple of years, with Reading’s transfer ban in place, I’ve had much more of an interest in the pre-season fixtures than I usually would have. Pre-season fixtures really do, to me, mean diddly squat. They are there to get minutes into legs, improve player fitness, maybe try a new tactical system or tweak and give a run-out to some of the academy players looking to make a breakthrough into the first team. The result is meaningless.

The main source of interest that I have found from these fixtures in the last couple of pre-seasons has been triallists. Checking the line-ups and the benches, looking for that “triallist” notation or the surname of the player with the “(T)” marked after it, to indicate that they are a triallist.

For me, it always gave an insight into the areas of the squad that we were focussing on improving, the type of player we were looking at – both in terms of age and experience as well as their calibre and skill set – and trying to predict who would be successful and who really could be that player to improve the team.

That hasn’t been the case this year though, has it? Not a single triallist in these match-day squads. The closest we have come to this is waiting for Kelvin Abrefa and Tivonge Rushesha to sign their contract extensions, which, fortunately, they both did. It could well be the case that there are a few triallists lurking around the training ground, but I’m not nearly connected enough with social media to be ITK for these kinds of things.

What have we seen, then? Well, the academy players. A lot of them actually – some names more familiar than others. I don’t know why we aren’t getting triallists in; it could be anything from the business being frozen due to the ongoing takeover discussions, or maybe there is just no money in the pot. Maybe Mark Bowen’s position is under scrutiny at the moment. Who knows. But it does lead me to wonder – what if we don’t sign anyone then?

My first reaction is a bit of internal grumbling and swearing. I don’t know what it is, but the majority of football fans do seem to attach themselves to new signings coming into the club. A sign of progression, a plan, a statement of intent or a familiar name that you can’t wait to see how they settle into RG2. Certainly we had some absolutely masterful manoeuvres in the transfer market last summer: Harvey Knibbs, Lewis Wing, Tyler Bindon and Sam Smith all ranking highly in the player of the season awards.

Then I do a little bit of thinking. Only a little bit, mind. The hamster in that particular wheel isn’t accustomed to that much exercise so I don’t want to tire the poor creature out. We have a pretty settled team, all in all, right? I think we’d like to see us add a left-back, a left-winger, a back-up striker and a centre-back. Perhaps a defensive midfielder.

But otherwise, minus Paul Mukairu and Clinton Mola, we’ve pretty much got our first-team squad from last season available to us. For now, anyway. I haven’t seen many transfer rumours surrounding outgoing Reading players, but there’s still over a month for bigger and/or more financially stable teams to swoop in. Let’s hope that they don’t.

There’s a lot to be said for a settled team. It’s the first time… I’ll go ahead and say it, probably since the 2012/13 campaign that we’ve had a really settled team, at least that I can remember, without too many movers and shakers. For a club that seems to lurch from one crisis to another, against the backdrop of a young group of players getting to know each other, we certainly ended the season more strongly than we started it.

This could be promising for us, having that familiarity in place, to hit the ground running against teams like Birmingham City and Wrexham, two of our early fixtures, who annoyingly seem to be signing players every day.

The thing as well is that with a settled team, as I mentioned earlier, the gaps are clear. But they aren’t gaps so much as they are “areas where we can improve”. We have options, we’d just like to see others that could offer something a little different. This is why I think it is significant that we are seeing so many minutes from academy players in the pre-season.

We need a left-back? John Ryan. Left-winger? Adrian Akande. Defensive midfielder? Jay Senga. Centre-back? Michael Stickland or Abraham Kanu, take your pick. And we already know we have Jayden Wareham knocking on the door as a centre-forward. These are players who, in the academy side last year, achieved cup runs, cup success and European qualification. They ain’t half bad, you know.

I’ve written about it before, but you know what, despite our improvement in transfer acquisitions in the last year or two, we’ve seen it go wrong too many times bringing in the wrong type of player, so maybe promoting from the academy isn’t all that bad. It didn’t go so badly for Jeriel Dorsett, Michael Craig, Kelvin Abrefa or Kelvin Ehibhatiomhan last season, did it? Not to mention Nelson Abbey or Caylan Vickers.

I have the confidence in the environment, the management team and the capability of this squad to support the integration of new academy players in the rigours of first-team football. I don’t necessarily entirely like the fact that these opportunities are being almost forced to happen due to the circumstances around the club, and I do worry that these pressures could be debilitating for young players, but I believe they have earned the chance to step up.

We should be optimistic for the future if we can integrate the next generation into the first team. Perhaps maybe a tactical tweak will help us bring the best of the current crop available to us? (Spoiler alert: I’ll be writing about this next).

And this brings us full circle to the elephant in the room. With all things considered, at least there is still a team there. At least there is still a structure there. At least this team are able to continue playing in the division that they earned the right to stay in last season.

The same can’t be said for the Women’s side: reprehensible news that has been brilliantly covered by Pete, beautifully and thoughtfully described by Paul and rightly condemned by Sim.

When I consider this, I then think to myself: what does it matter if we can’t sign anyone? All things considered, is it ideal? Not really. Does it really matter? It probably doesn’t.