The last few years have seen fans across England protest about the owners of their clubs, but while bad ownership at the top of the pyramid generally equates to poor transfer windows and a lack of trophies, the stakes are much higher further down the system.
Bury were kicked out of the Football League altogether in 2019 and have had to effectively begin again as a Phoenix club in the ninth tier, while Bolton, Derby and Wigan have all had their very existence threatened in recent times.
Those ex-Premier League outfits managed to survive, but now another one is at risk and might not be so lucky, with lights at the end of the tunnel fading away time and time again in Reading.
A decade of dreams
This time 12 years ago, Reading claimed the Premier League Manager of the Month and Player of the Month awards through Brian McDermott and Adam Le Fondre after the club had ended January with wins against West Brom and Newcastle and a draw against Chelsea.
The Royals were in a relegation battle at the time, but were still very much in a Golden Era that had started eight years prior.
They had reached the top flight for the first time in 2006 by winning their maiden Championship title with 106 points to their name, the highest points-tally in the history of English professional football to this day.
They remarkably then finished their debut Premier League season in eighth, just one point off UEFA Cup qualification, with highlights including a stunning comeback against Middlesbrough on the opening day, draws with Manchester United and Chelsea, a win over Tottenham and a 6-0 thrashing of West Ham.
They were relegated by the skin of their teeth in 2008 but with a modern stadium, an excellent scouting network and what was becoming one of the best academies in the country, they were well-positioned to return to the promised land of English football and maybe even establish themselves there.
Another promotion on the back of another Championship title followed in 2012, and while they didn't have the quality to avoid relegation in their first season back, there remained an air of optimism around the club when a Thai consortium completed a takeover in 2014 to end a year of uncertainty caused by previous majority shareholder Anton Zingarevich failing to do so.
That feeling only increased when they reached the FA Cup semi-finals for the second time in their history in 2015, and it looked as if they were on the precipice of a new Golden Era when it was announced immediately after they beat Fulham to reach the 2017 Championship play-off final that wealthy Chinese businessman Dai Yongge and his sister had purchased the club.
However, what at the time seemed to be one of the greatest nights in the club's history would turn out to be perhaps the darkest.
On death's door
Fast forward eight years and Reading are now in the third tier of English football after multiple points deductions and transfer embargoes.
Yongge allowed the club to spend more on transfers and wages than they ever had before, and when that didn't result in promotion, financial ruin followed in the form of around €170 million worth of losses within five years. That led to unpaid taxes, unpaid wages and points deductions that caused the club to fall down to League One for the first time since 1999.
It briefly looked like the crisis would be coming to an end in the summer when former Wycombe owner Rob Couhig came extremely close to completing a takeover, so much so that he provided loans to help keep the club afloat, but Yongge backed out of the deal at the last minute.
With Couhig's loans having to be repaid, the club has since been funded largely by a sell-on fee of around €6 million received when academy product Michael Olise was signed by Bayern Munich from Crystal Palace.
The grim state of affairs off the pitch has been made extra painful by the fact that there have been real signs of potential on it.
Former Southampton coach Ruben Selles worked wonders to keep the side up comfortably in spite of a points deduction last season and has since got them into the current campaign's play-off fight.
With the side being built around academy products and shrewd signings - all free transfers - just as the ones that had reached the Premier League were, it was looking like the Reading of old were returning.
However, the ongoing crisis pushed Selles to leave for Championship side Hull in December and star striker Sam Smith has been sold to promotion rivals Wrexham now that the Olise money is running out, effectively ending Reading's own chances of going up.
At this point though, missing out on promotion is the least of the supporters' worries.
A broken system
Reading fans have spent the last two years concerned their club won't exist after two more and with good reason, because the other two that Yongge owned, a Belgian club called KSV Roeselare and a Chinese club called Beijing Renhe, no longer do. The former folded in 2020 and the latter in 2021.
While supporters have started a protest movement called Sell Before We Dai, have marched through their town, have interrupted matches by throwing tennis balls and have even caused one to be called off by invading the pitch though, the authorities have done next to nothing despite being largely to blame for the club being in this position.
Yongge was desperate to own a top-flight club back in 2016 but was forced to settle for the next best thing, a Championship side on the brink of promotion, after he failed to pass the Premier League's Fit and Proper Person Test when trying to purchase Hull.
Even though he was deemed unfit to purchase a club by the Premier League and was already running two others into the ground at that point, the Football League (EFL) - the governing body of the second, third and fourth tiers of English football - allowed him to acquire Reading.
Then, when he started doing the same to his new club, the EFL did little to help and instead punished them and their fans for their owner's wrongdoings by handing out points deductions that dropped them down a league.
Personal fines and strongly worded letters have been sent to Yongge as the crisis has grown more and more serious, but a disciplinary commission blocked a 12-month ban from football that would have effectively forced him to sell the club as they felt it was too harsh a punishment for his actions.
The Premier League aren't blameless either. A place in the top flight is now so sought after thanks largely to the obscenely lucrative TV deals that they've signed over the last decade or so that Yongge was happy to risk the entire existence of a 150-year-old club just to try and get a piece of the pie.
English football has a promised land so promising that reckless owners are willing to do whatever it takes to get there, and a governing body of the lower leagues that isn't equipped to deal with them.
Reading are potentially months from being the first former Premier League side to pay the biggest prize there is for that, and if things don't change, they won't be the last.
