Am I a bad man? Or at least a bad fan?

My soccer team, Reading FC, is in the midst of a miraculous turnaround since the start of the season. In January, less than two years after being relegated from the English Premiership, we sat second from bottom in the Championship. We had won just one home game in the first half of the season and we were hot favorites for dropping down to League 1.

But then our failing manager was sacked and replaced with the under-19s and reserve team manager, Brian McDermott. Within a few games we seemed to be a completely different team. We knocked Liverpool, a giant club, out of the FA Cup and proceeded to make a run all the way to the quarterfinals. Our league form was similarly revived, and we have won nine out of the last 12 games, climbing above mid-table to 11th.

Bad weather and FA Cup commitments mean we have two games in hand over the teams ahead of us with a total of eight games left in the season. Winning those outstanding games would put us in seventh, and that’s when it starts to get interesting.

The top two teams at the end of the year are automatically promoted to the Premiership, arguably the biggest soccer league in the world, where even the teams struggling at the very bottom can expect to reap tens of millions of pounds of TV money each year. The next four, third position to sixth, then play in a mini-tournament, with the winner taking the final promotion spot.

Without a bit of help, Reading cannot catch any of the top six teams. With a perfect run to the end of the season by all these teams, Reading and the Royals would still sit three points adrift of sixth place.

I’m certainly hoping for one of those teams, even my brother’s squad, Leicester City, to have a bad run and open up a slim chance that my club could somehow reach the playoffs. But, there is a bit of a darker side to my prayers, too.

Cardiff City, sitting fourth, is in a lot of financial trouble. They have debts of millions of pounds to investors and owe huge sums in unpaid taxes. At the very least there is a good chance they, as a company, could be put into administration (essentially, declared bankruptcy). At most they could cease to exist.

Administration would mean the Football League imposing an automatic 10-point deduction to Cardiff’s total, dropping them within the sights of not just Reading, but several other clubs, too. It would probably end their hopes of making it to the Premiership, where, ironically, the extra funds available might be enough to save them from the dire financial situation they are currently in.

Any good soccer fan always talks about a club going into administration as “bad for football,” and the possibility of the club vanishing entirely is a nightmare that no one wants. But, though Cardiff might argue that it is the current world financial crisis that has caused so much trouble, it is also surely worse to allow clubs to be completely mismanaged and get away with it.

This is not the banking world, it is the real world; and no club is too big to fail.

While Reading was sensibly managed to the very point that they struggled to compete with big spending clubs, the directors or Cardiff were betting everything, including the existence of their club, on hitting the big time.

It is not really a surprise that they are now is such a bad position. Chairman Peter Ridsdale drove Leeds United to the very brink just a few years ago, and now looks like he may have done exactly the same with his new club. Leeds had a long history in the top tier of English soccer, but after taking out huge loans leveraged against European success they crashed and burned when their dreams fizzled out.

Ridsdale seems to have worked the same magic at Cardiff, with the club having gambled on promotion by spending big on players–and once he has destroyed this club he will undoubtedly move on to ruin another. It is the cruel truth about professional soccer that those who really care about a club, those to whom it is their very reason for being, are at the mercy of reckless suits who–win, lose or draw–are certain to be making themselves very, very rich.

But at the end of the day I’m not sure if I’m just trying to justify all of this to myself. To make it seem that I’m not really such an evil person.

While I do not really want the club to be wound up, I want Cardiff to go into administration even if it leaves their fans distraught.

Whatever it takes, I want that shot at reaching the Premiership.

Tom Taylor actually used the word “soccer” throughout this column. Ask him about his betrayal of the Queen’s English at [email protected].