“YOU know you are in trouble when the Vidiprinter needs to spell out your opponents’ score.”

One wag tweeted this bit of gallows humour after watching Wanderers collapse to their worst defeat in 32 years, decimated by a vibrant Reading team freshly relegated from the Premier League but gunning for an immediate return.

We are four months shy of a decade since Adam Le Fondre inspired the Royals to that result, which now stands as a monument as to where Bolton’s ludicrous financial gamble to return to the top-flight officially failed.

The team that took the field that day was assembled with more than £20million in transfer fees and the game played just a fortnight after the club had revealed losses of £50.7m for the financial year, the largest ever recorded for a team outside the top division at the time.

Freedman’s post-match assessment that some of his players were “not good enough” to play in the Championship only served to highlight the folly – and from that moment on playing budgets were savagely dismantled under Freedman and his successor, Neil Lennon, with relegation confirmed two-and-a-half years later.

Wanderers did, of course, briefly rise again. It was ex-Royals favourite Phil Parkinson who took the Whites back into the Championship at the first time of asking, keeping them there for a season against a backdrop of boardroom upheaval and then finally giving way as unpaid wages, player strikes and an absent owner made the job practically impossible.

Much of Bolton’s pre-Football Ventures demise will ring true for Reading’s fans, who are now directing their anger at the ownership of Chinese businessman and entrepreneur Dai Yongge, who has been in charge since May 2017.

Like Wanderers, a gamble on returning to the big time failed spectacularly. Financial Fair Play rules were still in their infancy when Bolton toppled out of the Premier League and forced some of the huge ‘write-offs’ but Reading were caught fair and square a few years later – £7m-plus deals for players like Sone Aluko or George Puscas standing out a mile.

A total of 16 points has been deducted in the last couple of seasons by the EFL under the current ownership, the latest three shaved off when he breached an agreement to deposit enough money into an account for the monthly wage will.

Ever since Wanderers and Bury dangled on the edge of a financial precipice in the summer of 2019 the EFL has taken a harder stance on clubs who do not pay their wages.

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire believes the league has few other options at their disposal than hit Reading with points penalties.

“It is disturbing and the EFL has clearly lost patience with Dai Yongge, there have been too many broken promises,” he said. “I know this is not a route that the EFL want to go down because they want to see positions determined by what happens on the pitch.

“When you have got an owner who consistently and flagrantly ignores agreements then there is no alternative. You can’t go after the owner and ask him to pay fines because they simply won’t pay them, therefore it hits the club instead.

“If you look at what has happened with other clubs who have had agreements, there have been similar sanctions. The EFL did have a wake-up call following the loss of Bury and they have very much tightened up the rules. The clubs are aware of the range of sanctions and the EFL take non-payment of wages very seriously.

“I think people focus on players, and they are well renumerated there is no denying that, but this is people working in the ticket office, cleaning the changing rooms, people are suffering in terms of a lack of certainty regarding their wages because they have standing orders, Direct Debits, they have to pay the rent like all of us. The EFL feels they have a responsibility towards everyone at the club.

“If the club gets relegated those people will not have a job. There is a correlation between the amount of employment and the division in which they operate. If you are in the Championship you have stewards and crowds at certain levels, in League One or League Two those things drop. From what I understand, the EFL ask ‘what are the alternatives to a points deduction when you are trying to incentivise an owner like Dai Yongge who simply either ignore or are unable to sign an agreement and stick to it.”

Just as Bolton found themselves in a mess when former owner Ken Anderson struggled to sell or find fresh investment at the start of the 2018/19 campaign, so Reading are stuck in a similar spiral.

“I know of groups and get approached often to look at clubs for potential investment and the first thing investors say is that if we put in money then we deserve a seat at the table, and that is not being offered by Dai Yongge,” said Maguire on BBC Radio Berkshire. “What he is effectively saying is that he wants people to give money to him in blind faith to allow him to pay wages because he is incapable. Why would anyone in those circumstances agree to those conditions?”

Wages were paid late three times last season, there were four late tax bills over the summer, the club will remain in a transfer embargo until 2025 which will mean six years without a transfer fee paid – all themes that Bolton’s supporters know only too well from their darkest hours.

Reading Chronicle reporter James Earnshaw is unconvinced that a solution is near.

“We have dropped from being third in the Championship, one kick from the Premier League in the play-off final to starring League Two in the face,” he said.

“We weren’t particularly well run before the current owner – we had a Russian who had no money whilst we were in the Premier League, then John Madejski had to bail us out of administration, then we had the Thais who compared to this lot were OK, they kept things ticking over but lost interest once they had taken land around the ground, which was their asset to develop.

“It was announced at half time in the play-off semi-final against Fulham that he (Yongge) had taken over and it has been downhill pretty much ever since.

“You can’t deny he put the money in – we smashed FFP – but wages were silly money and the owner had been getting bad advice on who to buy.

“Now we are in League One it feels like he has lost interest and it is like being in a slow-motion car crash. Everyone saw what was going to happen but you couldn’t stop it.”

A ‘sit in’ protest was organised by Reading fans during a recent game against Peterborough and observed by around 200-300 people but statements by various groups this week suggest patience is now very much at an end.

Whether disruption will occur on Saturday is still an unknown. Though Earnshaw believes support for Ruben Selles and his young team has been strong, he says anger towards the club’s owner will be evident this weekend.

“I think the atmosphere will be toxic,” he said. “I think they have hit the tipping point.

“Over the summer there was anger but it subsides as players started to come in and people thought ‘maybe it is a blip?’ “There was a sit-in against Peterborough for an hour-and-a-half afterwards, and, fair play, there were more people there than I expected but not enough to make a difference.

“But all we had to do was put money in an account for the EFL and he couldn’t even do that – so I think that people have had enough now. There is talk of throwing tennis balls on the pitch, sheer frustration.

“People are behind the team, basically academy players with an average age of 21, and we want to support them but unfortunately they are in the middle of something that is bigger than they are at the moment.”

Reading are not alone in their financial misery – Southend United face a winding up petition in court next month and Scunthorpe United’s fall from grace has been nothing short of catastrophic. Even with the EFL’s concerted efforts, the financial state of football outside the Premier League remains in a fragile and perilous state.

The Royals are arguably the most high-profile club in dire straits and though Wanderers will head to the Select Car Leasing Stadium aiming to take three points, there will be sympathy among the 1,5000 travelling fans and hope that they do not edge any closer to the edge of the cliff.