April 5 – EFL Championship side Reading have been handed an immediate six-point deduction for breaking agreed budget restrictions after a previous breach of the EFL’s profitability and sustainability rules.
The club have been under a transfer embargo since the summer of 2021 as a result of the breach and now find themselves just a point above the relegation zone.
The club agrees a business plan with regulators following a breach of the EFL’s profit and sustainability limits in 2021. The initial breach carried a six-point penalty with a further six points suspended until the current campaign, but that has now been enforced.
A Reading statement said: “Despite radical changes implemented at first team level and right across the structure of the business to its very core – and a rigid adherence to a strict league-monitored wage structure and transfer embargo, the club accepts that it has not sufficiently satisfied certain elements of the planned budget and that, as a result, the independent club financial review panel has been unable to ratify that the club has met its forecast for compliance.
“We have worked closely with the EFL and the independent club financial review unit throughout the process in our aims to achieve the targets set out in the agreed business plan and every reasonable effort has been made to construct a competitive squad of players whilst avoiding further punishment.
“However, despite the substantial progress we have undeniably made and the lessons that have indeed been learned, as promised, we accept that the situation was never going to be easily or quickly fixed.”
Reading were relegated from the Premier League in 2013.
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