The news reported by Tom Garry that Reading have notified the FA that they cannot take up their licence to play in the Barclays Women’s Championship next season and will likely drop to the fifth tier has drawn me out of my break from social media.

This is devastating for the players, the staff and the youth players, all of whom will now struggle to find, play for and work for other clubs at their level ahead of the forthcoming season.

It’s also sadly not surprising.

Many will misidentify the news as an unintended and unfortunate consequence of Reading’s ownership crisis and it’s true that the current ownership and their poor communication and consideration shown to the women’s team have over-complicated, delayed and potentially scuppered a survival plan for Reading to continue in Tier 2.

But the challenges Reading are facing are not unique to them. This news should be a wake-up call to an industry that will likely underestimate its significance for the women’s game as a whole – or simply not even register it.

And I’m sorry, but we all hold responsibility.

Whether we are journalists, fans, sponsors, players, club owners, coaches, staff, the FA, broadcasters, NewCo officials, we have, in our collective haste, made demands for progress and implemented decisions that have made it close to impossible for women’s teams to survive and thrive without a men’s club stumping up significant cash – whether they want to or not. That dependency creates huge fragilities that may not come to bear now but could have devastating consequences later.

The clubs that have chosen or been required to take the path of sustained and continued revenue growth, cannot keep up with our collective demands – whether for undersoil heating or new salary or transfer records – because revenue growth is intentional, data-based, iterative and needs time.

The Karen Carney review called for “the game… to grow in its own right to reach its true potential and stand on its own two feet”.

But we are too impatient for that.

We seemingly would like that to happen – at some point – but only once we have become entirely dependent on men’s football for this next phase of “growth”.

Year on year, the cost of the requirements in a Tier 2 licence have increased at a rate disproportionate to club revenue or central distributions. As somebody who worked to implement those requirements, many felt arbitrary. They were often required with such short notice that they could only be soaked up by clubs that had men’s teams to beg from. It is as if the central strategy was to support women’s teams attached to big men’s clubs to force their hand to provide more support, using the speed at which the requirements are necessitated as a lever to force a quick decision. This, instead of introducing bespoke targets or requirements or incentives that supported women’s teams to be more generative and sustainable. This approach is not helpful for women’s clubs who have a rightful place in a Tier but who do not have a men’s club – or do not have a willing men’s club – to lean on for support.

The consequences of a strategy that forces the hand of men’s clubs, is that we are creating an entire women’s football ecosystem that is more dependent than ever on men’s football. And when a crisis in ownership happens, such as is the case at Reading, the women’s team will always be collateral damage.

But this is not just the responsibility of Reading’s ownership. This is the collective responsibility of all of us who demand women’s football to run before we can buy our own shoes.

I am devastated for the Reading players and staff. But I know that this is not a unique case. Unless we can make boring structural changes such as cost controls, means testing, caps on loan fees, narrowing distribution ratios between Tier 1 and Tier 2 clubs and incentivising revenue generation (which comes through happy fans and happy partners), I don’t see Reading’s story being the last.