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In April 2022, US cryptocurrency investors WAGMI United (We’re All Gonna Make It) became the new owners of League Two side Crawley Town with one clear objective: reaching the Premier League.
Preston Johnson and Eben Smith are the co-founders of WAGMI, and in the 15 months since their takeover of Crawley, things haven’t exactly gone to plan.
Preston Johnson, for his part, sees stunts like inviting YouTubers to train and play with the first team as the only way to achieve WAGMI’s wildly ambitious aims, and points to social media growth and money raised for charity as positives. He says WAGMI came into a club that weren’t paying their utility bills, had huge debts and were then immediately hit with the news that boss John Yems had allegedly created a culture of racism at the club.
Yems was banned by Crawley almost immediately after WAGMI arrived and is now suspended from football until early 2026.
“Ultimately, I think the main thing is that if you’re winning football matches, then the local supporters don’t care as much about what content we’re putting out or what unique strategies we’re trying,” Johnson explains to FourFourTwo.
“The slow start didn’t allow us to dig into our overall thesis and strategy of building an international audience for a local club that loses millions of pounds a year and has no way to generate additional revenue to sustain itself.”
Johnson doesn’t regret his decision to sit in dugout for a defeat to Stevenage in late December, hours after manager Matthew Etherington and his assistant, Simon Davies, had resigned just 34 days into their reign. He is quick to reject reports that he tried to make a substitution but misunderstood the rules.
For him, the Yems case undermined the season but progress has been made off the pitch, with improved training facilities, a higher average attendance, cheaper tickets and a healthier financial position. In fact, he intends to double down on WAGMI’s vision.
“I think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made is not trusting the numbers and the data right away, and putting too much stock in traditional football scouting and recruitment – trusting football people.”
This is one major point of conflict between WAGMI and parts of the fanbase. To both sides, the balance seems off between “The Internet’s Team” and the grassroots club who have spent only three years of their history above the fourth tier. Supporters feel that their owners don’t understand the game beyond the numbers. Johnson believes wholeheartedly in the data and feels criticism has occasionally gone too far.
When he became the face of the takeover, he spent a lot of time in the town, even in a local pub, buying a pint for any fans who wanted one. Treatment for a melanoma – eventually successful – meant he had to go back to the USA soon after. However, he feels that such a high level of engagement early on means that when he and WAGMI withdrew in January, after Etherington’s departure, the Sidemen issue and the dugout incident, it was viewed in a worse light than it would have been for more distant owners.
“I was constantly online, which is also part of the fun and an interesting aspect, for the fans to interact with me regularly,” Johnson says. “I’d always answer DMs. But they turned quickly when we weren’t winning, and you start getting threats.
“Some fans reached out to me in a private fan group chat, saying, ‘There’s groups of fans coming together that want to fight you and they know you’re staying at the Sandman hotel’. So, I left the next morning and went to London instead. That’s probably over the line. I know that this is their life, their football club, but it affected me from an emotional standpoint, for sure.”
Whatever the future holds for Crawley Town in 2023/24, the relationship between its owners and fans needs to improve if they are to achieve any success.
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Crawley have already had five permanent managers in the 15 months since new owners came into power – but there’s plenty of other issues involving the club
