Web3 in League Two? Crawley Town and the ‘crypto bros’

The turf at the People’s Pension Stadium was relaid at the end of the season but was struggling to bed in. Then came the Jubilee weekend and, as one club official put it, “boom, it just sprang up”. The green shoots timed their arrival well. Crawley Town’s new American owners followed this week, making their first public appearance and rolling out their pitch for a different way of running a football club.

Preston Johnson and Eben Smith are the founders of Wagmi United, the “crypto bro consortium” (not their term) who made their money in cryptocurrency and used it to buy Crawley in April. They got a lot of coverage – equal parts confusion and consternation in the main – and then got some more as the scandal of the manager John Yems’s alleged racist behaviour became public.

Yems left the club soon after, and Johnson and Smith were in Sussex on Wednesday to reveal their own hire, former Arsenal Under-23 coach Kevin Betsy. But the question of quite how the owners plan to use the power of “Web3” to turn Crawley into a global football player was not far behind.

“A lot of the world whether it be football, sport crypto or whatever is living a more digitally native life,” says Johnson. “We think there’s an opportunity for the remote fan to attach themselves to a club as a result. We want to offer unprecedented access to local as well as remote fans and technology gives us that ability to do it in a way that hasn’t been done before. That’s the macro vision.”

Johnson is a large 30-something man with a bushy blond beard and, on this day, a pair of designer slip-on shoes with a big picture of a water tower on them. He’s a professional gambler turned crypto investor and he is confident in his idea for Crawley.

The club will soon offer