Reading Roars!

Reading Football Club are certainly ambitious, there’s no doubt about that, but how about this for a goal (excuse the pun), suggested this week by the club’s chief exec Nigel Howe:

I would say [the club] has the potential to be bigger than Arsenal because its catchment area is hugely beneficial…If this club started winning some serious stuff and got into the Champions League that would hugely move the Reading brand along and move the crowd on. 

It’s a gradual progression and it would take a few years to do it, but that has to be anybody’s ambition running an organisation like this - to get into the Champions League.  That might make a lot of people smile, but anything is achieveable.

That very much made me smile.  It’s more than a goal.  It’s a 60-yard-lob-over-half-the-pitch-while-the-keeper-was-adjusting-his-laces type goal.  So Reading have had a good season.  Make that two good seasons.  The Champions League, however, is seriously ambitious stuff. 

The domestic Big 4, the league within the league, have been looking pretty dominant lately, mainly, I’d argue, because of cash (Chelsea, Man Utd and now Liverpool), tradition/prestige (drawing top managers), and I suppose continuinity (Fergie and Wenger have been at their clubs for years).  Reading is an exciting club, but not prestigious, and their project has only just begun.  Also, it’d take an awful lot of cash to compete with the big boys.

I think the UEFA Cup is a realistic target for Reading, therefore.  The Champions League (a tournament increasingly dominated by the super clubs in Europe) is a realm almost impossible to reach.