A respected football finance guru has suggested that the takeover of Crawley Town by cryptocurrency investors could be "too good to be true".
Last week saw the League Two side announce that WAGMI United LLC had completed the purchase of the club. The company are to use non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as an ownership model, allowing people across the world to make decisions on the club, while also generating valuable revenue streams. NFTs have no physical form but can be bought or sold.
Upon their ownership being confirmed, co-founders Preston Johnson and Eben Smith vowed to build a "worldwide community of fans" despite the club having little reach outside Sussex and boasting average attendances this season of just 2,249 - the second-lowest in the EFL.
Kieran Maguire, the respected football finance expert behind the popular Price of Football Twitter account and podcast, has big concerns over the deal.
"It's a highly volatile, unregulated and easily manipulated market," Maguire told the Argus. "If you want to buy into it in those circumstances then good luck to you is my view. There is nothing wrong with new people coming in, if they want to engage with fans that is great.
"If engagement means you have to buy fan tokens, I think they said you can vote in the new directors. But if something sounds too good to be true, it generally, in my experience, tends not to be true.
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"That's the reservation, what exactly do you have to do? How many tokens do you need to buy before you can influence the board of directors? Also what on earth are you doing trying to influence who the board of directors are? I do think letting people loose with a series of tokens does seem a strange way to run a business. You want professionals in charge, not people who own digital cartoons."
Those concerns have been echoed by the Crawley supporters' alliance. Sam Jordan, chair of the group, said fans are sceptical: "The biggest fear for me, and I'm not massively into cryptocurrency or NFTs, is where is the money going to come from if we don't succeed with the budgets they're looking to spend and their experiment doesn't come off? We are interested in talking to them (new owners) because it's our football club. Managers and players come and go but fans are always going to be there and it's really important that we're comfortable."
Crawley are firmly mid-table in League Two this season, with the play-offs out of reach and relegation not a concern. That allows them to put down plans for 2022-23. Manager John Yems, for now, appears happy to go along with his club's new direction of travel.
Speaking to the Athletic, Yems admits he has little knowledge of the crypto world to which his club is now a part of. “I ain’t got a clue,” Yems said. "But how many people in football know what their owners do?, or where they get their money from? Every club has got their traditional revenue streams. Other clubs have got different ideas for additional revenue streams, and this is ours.”
