Reading FC

Reading's last three decades have mostly played out below the level the club spent the 1990s and 2000s trying to escape — shuttled between the Championship and League One, with no honour from a division higher to show for the years spent up there. What the club has instead is a habit of winning whichever tier it lands in: Third Division South champions in 1926, Fourth Division champions in 1979, promoted as champions again in 1986 and 1994. The furthest that habit has carried it are the two Championship titles either side of the mid-2000s, in 2006 and 2012 — the ceiling so far, one tier short of the top flight.

The founding date is set down as 1871, though the researcher Roger Titford places it more precisely: a meeting on Gun Street, Reading, in the winter of 1871–72. The name has not changed since. The nickname has, from an older one — the Biscuitmen, after the Huntley & Palmers factory that once dominated the town — to the current Royals, taken from Berkshire's standing as the Royal County. Home colours are blue shirts and shorts, white socks.

Reading play at the Select Car Leasing Stadium, renamed in 2021 from the Madejski Stadium it had been known as before. Cup silverware is thin on the ground — the Full Members' Cup in 1988, the wartime London War Cup in 1941 — and the academy has arguably done more for the club's name than either: Gylfi Sigurdsson, Shane Long, Hal Robson-Kanu and Alex McCarthy all came through it, and more recently Michael Olise, sold on before he established himself elsewhere. Locally, the derby against Swindon Town along the M4 draws more heat than the Thames Valley meeting with Oxford United; both have outlasted the older, now largely dormant rivalry with Aldershot Town.

The stadium holds 24,161.