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’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.
