How Crawley Town’s crypto owners learned the oldest lesson in sport: Just win

They were not the first revolutionaries in these parts, as Crawley had been one of 10 ‘new towns’ created by the British government after the Second World War.

The idea back then was to move people out of crowded, bombed-out cities like London, 30 miles north of Crawley, to communities designed from scratch by master planners, with more room to raise families and build new businesses.

When they rocked up in West Sussex, the “crypto bros”, social media influencers and Web3 investors of WAGMI United were selling a utopian vision, too. They wanted “to reinvent broken legacy sports management models” and “take Crawley Town, the smallest club in the English Football League, to the Premier League”, turning them into “the internet’s team” along the way.

But two years, dozens of players, five managers, one racism scandal and the unlikeliest of promotions later, WAGMI United has learned a lesson that is as old as the hills.

“You’ve just got to win,” says Preston Johnson, who has just stood down as Crawley Town’s co-chairman but remains a key member of the ownership group he helped assemble.

Full disclosure, The Athletic had contacted Johnson because we felt it was only fair to recognise WAGMI’s success in getting Crawley into League One within the two-year deadline it set itself. After all, we had been among those who questioned what decentralised autonomous organisations and blockchain had to do with running football clubs.

To be fair, our doubts were more based on WAGMI’s chaotic attempt to buy another League Two club, Bradford City, five months earlier than its purchase of Crawley, but our concerns about how this self-styled group of “dreamchasers” would create a “supernode between digital communities” had not changed much.

But no sooner had Johnson and co arrived at Crawley’s Broadfield Stadium than their brave new world was turned upside down by some very old-fashioned ugliness.

“If you know a book about how you respond to discovering your manager has been accused of racist behaviour about a week after you arrive, I would love to read it,” says Johnson.

“We couldn’t have got off to a worse start. Only a few days in, we’re dealing with a scandal that is all over the media. That was in April and we had our first NFT (non-fungible token) drop scheduled for May.

“Obviously, we couldn’t do that in the middle of a racism storm. And at the same time, the price of Ethereum (the public blockchain and cryptocurrency platform WAGMI uses to make its NFTs) dropped by 70 per cent after Russia invaded Ukraine, which meant a huge reduction in the projected revenue for the club.”

We should probably take a break there to define a few terms and recap the details of the scandal that whacked WAGMI for six.

NFTs are unique pieces of code stored on a shared, computerised ledger known as a blockchain. These ledgers are the basis of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

The United States-based group’s plan for Crawley was to create, or “mint”, thousands of NFTs that collectors, fans and investors could buy. These tokens would enable their owners to vote on club matters and gain access to exclusive content, such as watching the team’s training sessions, or exchange for merchandise.

The storm hit on April 23, 16 days after WAGMI’s takeover had been announced, when Crawley manager John Yems was suspended following “serious and credible accusations” he had used discriminatory language and behaviour towards his players.

Yems, a gruff Londoner, had a reputation for being rude to journalists, but nobody outside Crawley’s locker room had heard about his casual use of racist language until the moment everyone heard about it.

The Football Association and Professional Footballers’ Association opened investigations into the claims, with the FA later charging him with racial discrimination and making racist comments on 16 different occasions over three years. Yems denied it and was cleared of racially segregating his players by an independent disciplinary panel, but was found guilty of 12 counts of racial abuse and banned for 18 months.

After criticism that his sanction was too lenient, the FA appealed against the decision and a second panel doubled his ban to three years.

WAGMI replaced Yems with Kevin Betsy in June 2022. It was a bold move because while Betsy was a hugely experienced player — with more than 600 appearances for 13 clubs in an 18-year career across the top six tiers of the English pyramid, including one Premier League match — he was a novice as a manager in the senior game. What coaching experience he did have was in age-group football with Fulham, England and Arsenal.

Sadly, fortune did not favour the brave, as Betsy’s boys won only one of their 12 league games, losing eight, and were dead last when WAGMI sacked him in October.

“Kevin Betsy came in, a guy we really liked, and he wanted a load of new players and his own staff, so we gave him what he wanted — and it was a disaster,” says Johnson.

“Kevin was the nicest guy but just not good enough. He’ll be better for it and I have no doubt he’ll be a great manager for someone else.

“Then we had another manager but he did not last long. It was tough, a really difficult time for everyone.”

The other manager was actually two, the first being the club’s recently retired right-back Lewis Young, for his second caretaker stint of the year, and the second was the permanent appointment of Matthew Etherington, the former Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United winger. Etherington was not very permanent, though, as he lasted just 32 days.

At this point, with the team in 20th and the fans unimpressed, WAGMI “found Scott and things started to get better”, as Johnson puts it.

Not straight away, though. Crawley won their first game under new manager Scott Lindsey but then none of their next eight. As winter turned to spring, Crawley were staring relegation from England’s fourth tier, and a return to non-League football, in the face.

Lindsey has proved an inspired appointment and led Crawley to promotion (Paul Harding/Getty Images)

But neither Lindsey nor his bosses blinked. By the time Crawley went to Swindon Town, the club he left to join the listing ship, for the last game of the season, his new charges had done just enough to beat the drop.

And this is where we really start the story for WAGMI 2.0.

“We just decided to trust in math,” says Johnson. “We made a conscious decision to get younger and more athletic. We are very data-minded, so we lent on that. We built our own database of players and used that.

“We made 17 signings, a completely new team, and our fans were going mad at us, understandably so, given the season before. They were telling us we had lost our minds signing these players from the sixth tier or who had been reserves for relegated teams.

“And they were right, up to a point, as we were looking for players who had been overlooked or under-regarded but had good underlying numbers for creating, or limiting, expected goals.”

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

But when every club in the country is sifting for gold in the same muddy streams, you have to really back yourself to keep at it, and this is perhaps where WAGMI’s mixture of “we’re all going to make it” (geddit?) optimism and the sports-betting backgrounds of Johnson and co-chairman Eben Smith came to the rescue.

Despite being widely tipped for relegation, Crawley were second after 10 league games. Their fortunes fluctuated over the next 20 games — they were 15th with 15 to play — but Lindsey’s lads came good when it counted.

They clinched seventh place and the final spot in the League Two play-offs with a 2-0 win over Grimsby Town in the last game of the regular season, then smashed Milton Keynes Dons 8-1 over two legs in the play-off semi-finals.

That set up Crawley’s first visit to Wembley, where they beat Crewe Alexandra 2-0 in the play-off final to clinch a return to English football’s third tier. Their goalscorers were two of their bargain-bucket summer arrivals, Liam Kelly and Danilo Orsi.

Orsi, left, and Kelly after their Wembley heroics (Paul Harding/Getty Images)

“Liam, man of the match at Wembley, is a good example of what we were looking for,” says Johnson. “He’s not the fastest or flashiest, but his numbers were really good, even at Rochdale, a team that got relegated. He had an enormous impact for us.

“And Danilo is another. He only scored two league goals for Grimsby the season before and was usually a substitute. But his xG (expected goals) numbers were great. You could see he was a very efficient goalscorer, he just had a limited sample size.

“I remember speaking to one of their directors who said they played better whenever he was on the pitch but the manager just didn’t rate him. We thought: ‘That’s our guy’. Not very fast, can’t dribble, doesn’t hold it up that well but is always in the right place at the right time. He scored 25 goals last season.

“Now we have to find similar gems for League One. The whole process starts again.”

The task of finding those gems grew even bigger on Wednesday, as Orsi moved to Burton Albion for an undisclosed fee. And, once again, Crawley will be the smallest club in the division, with probably the smallest budget. So, is it time to go back to the future with “the internet’s team” plan?

“Well, that was the problem we were trying to solve with our original strategy, taking a small club with a local fanbase and making it attractive to an international fanbase,” says Johnson. “That is what we wanted to do with the NFTs — I still think that strategy was solid and could have worked.”

The strategy — growing the club’s revenues by widening its fanbase — still is solid.

It is the tactics — flogging bits of computer code to speculators — that might have been the problem. But who knows? Maybe WAGMI United was just ahead of its time. The values of cryptocurrencies have been rising for two years and are not far off their historic highs.

Johnson is keener to talk about all the more tangible improvements WAGMI made at Crawley, even as it seemed like the place was falling apart.

“We did a ton in year one that just got lost in the noise,” he says. “We got the club’s community foundation properly integrated with the club, we built a fan zone, we got the team training on grass pitches.

“We set up a fan council, a good cross-section, that had my number. If I was awake, with the difference in time zones, I would answer immediately. It fizzled out because of what was happening with the team, but it worked for a while.

“We cut the price of our tickets and our gates went up from 2,300 in year one to 3,600 last season. We’ll have one of the cheapest season tickets in League One next season.”

The club are attempting to buy Broadfield Stadium from the council (Steve Bardens/Getty Images)

His group did get a lot right. But having raised expectations (and hackles) with their early pronouncements, the good stuff got swept away when the results went south. His next goal is for the club to become a homeowner — they lease their stadium from the local council.

“We’re not miles apart on the price and they understand the value of having a thriving football club in the town,” he says. “Talks have been positive and amiable. We’ll get something sorted.”

Listening to Johnson now, he sounds like a different owner from the one he was projecting to be two years ago. He sounds like… an EFL club chairman, which is ironic given his decision to stand down.

“Our ground holds about 5,900 and we had four games last season when we effectively sold out with more than 5,000 fans in there,” he says.

“But when the gates are just 2,000, we’re running at a loss. We’ll get an extra £800,000 from the EFL next season, thanks to promotion, but all of that will go on the playing budget.”

See? If those are not the words of an EFL club chairman, they are a very good impression of one. But, most of all, Johnson sounds like a man in a good place, even if there were a few detours along the way.

“Our experience has been the opposite of a straight line,” he says. “How do you go from the hellish season we had in year one to gaining promotion in year two?

“At the end of our last game of the season against Grimsby, the fans invaded the pitch and started singing to us. It was incredible.

“I just had this moment of peace and it was because the fans had found joy in the club again. It was very moving because before I felt like we had somehow ripped out all the happiness of following the club.

“I remember saying to Eben that no matter what happens in the play-offs, the fans have felt joy again and I was OK with that. But then we won three more games, 10-1 on aggregate, and I feel even better!”

(Top photos: Johnson and his team celebrating their Wembley success. Crawley Town FC)