The English Football League (EFL) issued a statement on its official website at noon on Wednesday (April 16, 2025) Asian time, ordering dishonest Chinese businessman Dai Yongge and his elder sister Dai Xiuli, who have long owed loans to multiple banks but have been reluctant to repay them, to sell the ownership of the EFL League One club Reading within one week.

According to EFL's official statement, the authorities have reached the limit of their tolerance for the Dai siblings. The two stripped off various assets of the club, repeatedly owed wages to staff, withheld benefits due to staff, repeatedly owed taxes and violated the Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR), but they are still indifferent and the authorities ultimately became extremely exhausted with their antics.

At the same time, the two have promised to sell their ownership many times, but have repeatedly rejected almost every potential buyer's offer by saying that the offer did not cover the investment they had made or turning a blind eye to the offers, which is enough to show that the Dai siblings, Yongge and Xiuli, and their families, have been depleted of assets and have committed acts that can constitute deliberate destruction of a club.

In addition, according to the follow-up report of The Athletic, in fact, the company owned by the two, Dili Group (formerly known as Renhe Group), has been delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August 2024 for violating the Listing Rules, and Dai Yongge and Dai Xiuli have defaulted on loans of nearly 50 million yuan to several local banks in China, but have been reluctant to repay them and have been included in the Chinese government's blacklist of dishonest persons.

Based on the above signs, the EFL has listed Dai Yongge, Dai Xiuli and Reading's Chinese CEO Pang Dayong as "unqualified" in its "Directors and Shareholders Fit and Proper Persons Test" at the request of His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) of the United Kingdom.

Therefore, the EFL has issued a very severe ultimatum to the Dai siblings, requiring them to sell the ownership of Reading within 1 week (April 22).

Unless there is a temporary delay due to procedural issues, if the two fail to sell the club ownership before the above date, regardless of the final standing of this season, Reading will be stripped of its full professional club license by the EFL and will be expelled from the English football league system.

This decision has been approved by the English Football Association and the British Court of Arbitration for Sport.

In fact, Reading fans' dissatisfaction with the Dai siblings and Pang Dayong has already reached its peak several years ago.

Since 2022, fans of the EFL League One club have launched extremely large-scale protests against the malicious business practices of Dai Yongge and Dai Xiuli.

During this period, the fan organization even established a protest organization called "Sell Before We Dai".

Currently, the organization's online registered members even include fans of many other clubs, including fans of Premier League clubs who have voluntarily joined the protest against Dai Yongge and Dai Xiuli.

Dai Yongge acquired 75% of Reading's shares from Thai businesswoman Lady Sasima Srivikorn and former largest shareholder John Madejski in 2017, becoming the club's largest shareholder.

Soon after, Dai Yongge appointed his sister Dai Xiuli as a member of the board of directors. Later, his long-time business partner Pang Dayong was appointed as the CEO and joined the board of directors in the name of the sponsor.

At the beginning, the Dai siblings spent huge sums of money and signed a number of players in succession at several times higher than the market price as a way to realize the club's dream of successfully breaking through the difficulties and being promoted to the Premier League.

But contrary to expectations, these players are almost all players with poor performances and huge salaries, hence Reading has fallen into a club with financial problems that is bound by these players' huge contracts and declining values.

Coupled with the global economy becoming poor after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and the lockdown policy, it has become more difficult for the Dai siblings to transfer their funds to the UK.

However, despite the difficult situation, the Dai siblings did not cope well at all. In recent years, they have been repeatedly exposed for owing wages to staff and players, deducting players' work allowances during away games, and canceling food and accommodation expenses, causing the club to be relegated from the EFL Championship in 2023.

At the same time, they also privately sold the club's training ground to meet their purpose of stripping the club's assets, which attracted fierce criticism.

It is worth mentioning that, including this time, this is already the third time that Dai Yongge and Dai Xiuli have brought a well-known professional football club to the brink of bankruptcy and liquidation due to their mismanagement.

In 2011, the Dai siblings acquired and named Beijing Renhe through Renhe Group.

At the beginning, the Beijing Renhe won the Chinese FA Cup once and the Chinese FA Super Cup once. However, since 2015, due to overspending and poor management, Beijing Renhe has been relegated all the way from the Chinese Super League to the Second Division under the management of the Dai siblings, and subsequently even went bankrupt and liquidated in 2021.

In 2016, Dai Xiuli completed the acquisition of KSV Roeselare.

Before Dai Xiuli became a shareholder of the club, KSV Roeselare was a century-old club that had won the Belgian Second Division twice and competed in the UEFA Europa League once.

However, due to Dai Xiuli's poor management, the club was relegated to Belgium Third Division in 2019, then went bankrupt and was liquidated the following year.