The recent travails of Reading FC, founded in 1871, have been held up as a case study as to why regulation of football is needed, after an ambitious owner overspent and underdelivered, leaving the club with unpaid bills, points deductions, relegation and the threat of collapse. “Football is currently organised as a casino and it attracts gamblers,” Greg Double told the Financial Times speaking as, part of the campaign group Sell Before We Dai, which has been urging a sale of the club. “We got a bad one.” Perhaps unintentionally, his reference to a casino echoes Susan Strange’s famous book Casino Capitalism which was one of the founding documents of the study of international political economy, suggesting from a non-Marxist perspective that risky speculation was endemic in capitalist economies. Reading was acquired in May 2017 by Dai, who made his fortune in China turning air-raid shelters into shopping centres, and his sister Xiu Li Hawken. The paperwork was signed just days before...