INTERVIEW
Rob Couhig: My plan to fix Reading
The American businessman says he has ambitious plans but doesn't intend to 'bust the bank' following former owner Dai Yongge's mismanagement of the club
After all the starts and stops, the wrangling and negotiation, the ons and offs, when Rob Couhig finally sealed the deal to buy Reading it landed at an awkward time.
The takeover had been protracted – eight months of uncertainty, confusion and battling in the courts between first believing it had been done and the transaction completing in May.
But it was nothing compared to the protest-filled years when Reading fans saw their club dragged to its knees by former owner Dai Yongge.
Staff morale was at its lowest, but for Couhig there was no any given Sunday-type speech, swooping in and growling like Al Pacino about either healing as a team, or crumbling, and fighting their way back to the light, one inch at a time.
And not because at the point of the takeover, Reading only had six first-team players with contracts extending into next season.
No, Couhig was busy picking a jury for a corporate dispute in a courtroom in a small Louisiana town.
The 76-year-old has run many ventures over the decades, but his primary profession for 45 years was and remains trial lawyer and partner at a law firm, and the case had been long scheduled.
“It was weird,” Couhig tells The i Paper. “I’m buying Reading on a Wednesday, and the following Monday, I’m stuck in a small town in Louisiana for the next two weeks.”
The family jibe that got under his skin
For that fortnight, Couhig was up at 4am for calls with recently retired footballer Joe Jacobson, the new co-chief executive, and “the folks” at the club, as he calls them, finishing by 7am to get ready to try the case.
He was in court until five or six o’clock in the afternoon, the first hour afterwards back on calls with Jacobson – still up late in the evening in Reading – before preparing for court the next day.
“I missed that opportunity to come walking in as the big hero,” Couhig says.
Couhig is back in Louisiana speaking to The i Paper from his office, bright sunshine and tall trees the backdrop through wide windows behind him, wearing a flamboyant shirt and a cheeky grin.
He has a vibrance and energy – and, judging by his schedule, stamina – which would be impressive for a man half his age.
He sets out why he believes he possesses the processes, systems and knowledge to turn Reading around, leaning into artificial intelligence, technology, the UK’s Silicon Valley on the club’s doorstep, harnessing it all to potentially return them to the Premier League one day.
Before he comes to that though, he tells the story of how he got into English football ownership in the first place and attained the experiences that equipped him with the tools to fix Reading.
Couhig always looked up to his brother Kevin, he explains. Kevin, a successful businessman, was a “great high-school athlete” and taught himself about football when his sons were born.
Kevin’s sons went on to be collegiate footballers, footsteps followed by his grandsons.
At a Thanksgiving dinner several years ago, when the “60 or 70” members of the family get together in Louisiana, they were having a drink when Kevin, who was a Liverpool season-ticket holder and used to fly regularly for games, mentioned that English football is different, that Rob, owner of sports teams in the States, could never succeed there. The kind of jibe that hits different when it comes from a sibling.
“So I said: ‘Hold my beer’,” Couhig recalls, smiling.
What he learned at Wycombe Wanderers
Couhig wrote to several clubs, including Portsmouth, Plymouth Argyle, Oxford United and Grimsby Town.
He invested a little money in Yeovil Town, opening the curtain of football business.
Still, he had almost given up on the idea of owning a club when, on a car journey to the airport after one scouting mission, he told the broker that unless he knew of a club he could buy, that was it. The broker said that he should go to Wycombe Wanderers. So they did.
In five years, Couhig experienced promotion and relegation, and made history. He is fondly remembered by the fans after he sold the club to Kazakh billionaire Mikheil Lomtadze last year.
“We learned that the rules of business, like gravity, don’t change,” Couhig says.
“It doesn’t matter what the business is, you need to bring in more revenue than you spend, or you’re upside down.”
Reading’s ‘huge morale problem’
What shape was the business in at Reading when he took over?
“We found a lot of infrastructure problems, from a lack of maintenance, a huge morale problem among the staff,” Couhig says.
“They’re almost afraid to do anything because we’ll run out of money. We’re trying to help them come back. They’re good people.”
Couhig and his executive team, who are still in the process of going through every contract at the club assessing viability, were surprised to discover some ancient and inefficient ways of working.
They were confused, for example, when one of the first things they were asked for was an expensive purchase of new servers, wondering why, in 2025, they weren’t using the Cloud.
And the payments systems made it hard for people to pay them – which feels like a pretty fundamental part of any business.
“They’re literally sending out invoices – they don’t have a system to receive the money,” Couhig says.
“You’d think a club that was dying would streamline the system so if you were owed £500, you could get it. It was old-fashioned. All of that’s being radically redone.
“It was much like a guy who’s late on his mortgage payments selling the furniture to pay for the mortgage, rather than thinking that maybe the house is too big and we should get a smaller house.”
How he plans to modernise the club
Couhig has brought in two “high level” accountants he utilised at Wycombe.
One scrutinises every department and staff member, asking “why?”, determining if they need more or fewer, or the department at all.
The other is building a system to digitise and modernise the operations.
“We believe in three tenets: honesty, transparency and financial sustainability. To meet that, you have to know what you’re doing.”
Soon, Couhig and the other executives, and the “passive” investors who have come on board, will be able to wake up in the morning and check a dashboard breaking down economics, players, everything.
“The club will be able to be displayed on your iPhone,” he says.
Artificial intelligence can, Couhig believes, power progress.
“We’re huge into the development of AI and all aspects of it,” he explains.
“The analogy I use: 30 years ago, people didn’t understand personal computers. Half the guys, like me, thought: ‘I guess I can stack books on it.’ You need to grab hold of this technology.
“Literally three miles from the stadium is where virtually every high technology company in the UK has its main office.
“That’s one of the reasons we were so attracted to it. This is an opportunity to infuse high technology into the world’s greatest game.”
They will be “dramatically” changing the way the club presents itself globally through Royals TV and radio.
Couhig believes there is a big appetite for EFL football in the States.
“Short term, we have to get back that sense of confidence and cockiness: we’re here, we’re a real live football club,” he says.
“We’re not going anywhere, we’re not going to starve to death.”
And he has spent time with John Madejski, the former owner, over a few drinks nearby to the stadium, to help intertwine innovation with the club’s history and traditions – a past in which they were once one of the shrewdest-run clubs in the country.
Is the ambition the Premier League?
“Everybody who gets involved who tells you they don’t have that daydream of getting to the Premier League is not telling you the truth,” he says.
But, he insists, he is a realist. He appreciates that the step to get into the Premier League is harder than all the steps from non-league to the Championship.
“We have to stabilise ourselves in every way. We have to get to the Championship and prove we belong there.
“At that point, you can look around and ask: what would it take? In my most optimistic scenario, that’s probably two years away [being an established Championship side]. But more likely four or five.”
It will take time, although Couhig points out that when he stepped in at Wycombe, the club also had only “six or seven” first-team players under contract, and the following season the club won promotion to the Championship for the first time ever.
Reading finished three points outside the League One play-off places last season, despite all their problems.
Still, he urges caution to fans excited by the new investors that they have on board, even if they have “very deep pockets”.
Couhig is unable to say who they are due to an agreement with the investors, but all will be revealed in early July.
He does not want to make the same mistakes as Dai, who spent big chasing the Premier League dream.
“We’re not going to bust the bank in an effort to go up,” he says.
“The reason these people are investing is because of the way we do our business. We spend their money like we spend our own.
“We spend enough to succeed and try not to spend a penny more.”
