With each team having financial problems, Maxwell claimed that both were on the verge of going out of business and that uniting them was necessary for the region to retain a Football League club.

Both sets of supporters promptly embarked on mass demonstrations against the merger, including protest marches and a 2,000-man sit-in on the pitch at Oxford before a match on 23 April.

Waller and his boardroom allies resigned under pressure from the rest of the Reading board on 12 May 1983, and at an extraordinary shareholders' meeting in July, Smee took over the club, ending the amalgamation plans.

Managed by Jim Smith, Oxford challenged for promotion throughout the season, while Maurice Evans' Reading team languished near the relegation zone for much of the year,[1] despite possessing one of the division's top-scoring forwards in Kerry Dixon.

[2] The colourful media mogul and former MP Robert Maxwell owned and chaired Oxford, having prevented the club's bankruptcy by buying it in 1982.

[1] On 16 April 1983, about a month before the end of the 1982–83 season, Maxwell told the BBC that he was close to acquiring a controlling interest in Reading, and that he was intent on merging that club with Oxford.

Jim Smith learned of the announcement shortly before kick-off at Doncaster's Belle Vue ground from John Ley, a journalist with the Oxford Mail, who had heard the news from another newsman by telephone.

[5] The two clubs would continue separately for the last few weeks of the 1982–83 campaign, and Thames Valley Royals would begin play at the start of the 1983–84 League season.

[6] The general public learned of the proposed merger in the late afternoon on 16 April, when it was announced by David Coleman on the television show Grandstand following the report of the day's football results.

Mark Jones, one of the Oxford midfielders, recalled that the room "went totally quiet", and that his first thought was that it might be hard to him to keep his place in the first team with Reading's players also on the books.

Ley, who accompanied the Oxford team on the bus ride home after the game, recalled that the players were almost silent, their victory over Doncaster overshadowed by "a feeling of incredulity, confusion, worry and fear".

[5] Before Oxford's match against Wigan Athletic at the Manor Ground on 23 April 1983, about 2,000 fans conducted a sit-in in the centre of the pitch, delaying the start of the game by half an hour.

Smee, who strongly opposed the merger plan,[3] had read the club's accounts the previous year, and so was aware of how the team's stock was allocated.

He knew that Waller and his boardroom allies, Leslie Davies and John Briggs, had not held a controlling interest in the club in 1982 and that a large number of Reading shares had then been noted as unissued.

His interest was therefore piqued when the Thames Valley Royals deal was declared "irrevocable" on the basis that Waller's faction controlled the majority of the shares in Reading.

[2] At the High Court on 3 May, Mr Justice Harman sided with Tranter and Smee, and handed down a new injunction forbidding trading in Reading stock until 13 June 1983.

Following a Reading board meeting on 12 May, Waller, Davies and Briggs resigned their positions, and returned the disputed unissued shares to the club.

[2] The club held an extraordinary meeting of shareholders in July 1983, at which a vote was taken to decide between Maxwell's takeover bid and a rival offer from Smee, supported by Tranter.

The team played in the First Division, then the top level of English football, for the first time during 1985–86, and won its first major trophy, the League Cup, in April 1986.

While Maxwell was able to keep his stakes in Derby, Oxford and Reading under a grandfather clause, the new rules prevented him from adding Watford to his football empire.