You can’t get treated as poorly anywhere as you can as a football fan, particularly if you are unfortunate enough to support Reading Football Club, who make it their mission statement to con their supporters (or should I say customers) with regular monotony. As you may have witnessed a couple of weeks ago on this blog, I went through a customer service nightmare in an attempt to buy a couple of season tickets, it would now appear that it was someone up there telling me not to be be so bloody foolish with money I don’t have.

Not content with putting the price of a pint of Best bitter in a plastic glass (“Best Bitter” now that’s ironic Alanis) up to a thumping £3.50 a pint, and charging £8.00 for a parking place in what will be a post match traffic jam, Reading have now sold their prize asset just hours before the transfer window closed for about £6.5m.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Siggurdson is to good for Reading, he is a star in the making, but the way Reading went about it is disgraceful, though not entirely unexpected. Reading you see, knew this was going to happen all along, but hid the information from supporters so that season ticket sales would not be affected, and when the deal went through, shock horror, it was too late to invest any of the money on any replacements of note, except a couple of has beens glad to be given another opportunity.

I was really looking forward to watching Siggurdson develop as a player this year before he went on to greater things, but instead I will be watching Ian Harte and Lee Hendrie trying to cling on to to their fading careers like old boxers wanting one last fight, it’s pathetic.

Why Reading FC are so financially poor is any ones guess, two years of Premiership frugality plus parachute payments should make them one of the stronger Championship sides, but apparently there is no money, so where has it gone? Rumours persist that John Madjeski has ‘financial issues’ but I am in no position to make comment about that. Others think he is being noble not baulking to wage demands of players, but as a business man he should know market forces dictate. He didn’t complain when he was earning a fortune selling a magazine that sold cars (Autotrader) and that was hardly brain surgery was it?

Anyway, if he carries on this way it is back to Bury and Rochdale and playing home games in a stadium that looks ridiculous with no one in it.