Just 16 months ago, Crawley Town were staring into the abyss of relegation from the EFL. Now, they’re taking on the challenge of League One. So, how did it happen?
Ask anyone where the town of Crawley is and they’ll probably give you one of three answers.
“Near Gatwick Airport?”
“Do you mean Croydon?”
“There’s no such place; please get away from me.”
Nothing puts a town on a map quite like football, though, and Crawley Town have rarely had as much attention as they’ve been getting over the last few months.
The 2024-25 EFL season is less than two weeks old, but Scott Lindsey’s side have won two out of two in their first League One campaign in almost a decade, while they’re set to face the only other team from Sussex in England’s top four divisions, Brighton & Hove Albion, in the EFL Cup second round next week.
In 2024, only Arsenal and Manchester City (both 17) have won more games than Crawley (16) in England’s top four tiers, though that does include their three League Two play-off victories in May.
The skies over the Broadfield Stadium weren’t always this bright, though, even relatively recently.
First, a brief history lesson. Crawley Town were founded in 1896 but didn’t make their first appearance in the Football League until 2011 when the never-dull Steve Evans led them to the National League title with a record points total that wasn’t broken until Wrexham managed it in 2022-23.
Crawley went straight up to League One and spent three years in England’s third tier before relegation back to League Two in 2015, where they remained until last May.
The club was bought by WAGMI United in 2022. The group of American investors – described in some areas as ‘crypto bros’ when they tried to buy Bradford City the previous year – had the aim of turning the club into “the internet’s team” via ideas related to NFTs and social media influencers, ambitiously suggesting they were eventually “going to take Crawley Town to the Premier League.”
It was a difficult start to say the least when they had to deal with the fallout of manager John Yems facing allegations of discrimination. Yems was suspended by the club before departing two weeks later, and was ultimately banned from all football-related activity for three years for 12 breaches of anti-discrimination rules.
That meant the owners had to make their first managerial appointment, and given their desire to utilise data to find advantages over other clubs with bigger budgets, they turned to inexperienced but highly rated Arsenal youth coach Kevin Betsy heading into the 2022-23 season. Despite an impressive EFL Cup win over Fulham, league results were dire under Betsy and he was gone by mid-October 2022.
Their next permanent appointment of Matthew Etherington was an even worse match, with the former Tottenham and West Ham midfielder lasting just three games as both parties quickly accepted it had been a bad fit.
Then came Lindsey, surprisingly snapped up from fellow League Two side Swindon Town. Ben Garner’s former assistant had taken over at the County Ground after Garner’s departure at the end of the previous season and won 10 of his 25 league games in charge (D8 L7) before Crawley came calling.
It wasn’t exactly an overnight success, with the Red Devils winning just six of their 22 league games under Lindsey to end the 2022-23 campaign (D6 L10), but it was enough to secure their safety ahead of Rochdale and Hartlepool United, with Crawley picking up a vital 2-0 win away to the latter in their penultimate away game.
Despite ultimately being happy with a 22nd-place finish, there was little optimism from the outside looking in heading into 2023-24. Some key players had left and were replaced with the likes of midfielder Liam Kelly, relegated with Rochdale the previous season, striker Danilo Orsi, who had scored just twice in 24 appearances for Grimsby Town in League Two in 2022-23, and defender Laurence Maguire, brother of Manchester United’s Harry, who arrived on loan from National League Chesterfield in search of regular football.
In June 2024, the club’s co-owner Preston Johnson explained to The Athletic their approach to recruitment.
“We just decided to trust in math,” he said. “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.”
On paper, their tag as favourites to go down was justified. On the field, though, it wasn’t.
Crawley’s band of misfits comfortably stayed clear of the relegation zone all season and even managed to sneak up into the play-off picture, grabbing the last spot with a 2-0 win over Grimsby on the final day, including a goal from former Mariner, Orsi.
Despite finishing eight points behind MK Dons in the league, Crawley beat them 8-1 on aggregate (3-0 at home, 5-1 away), the largest two-leg winning margin in the history of the EFL play-offs.
That took them to a first ever appearance at Wembley Stadium in their 128-year history, and they didn’t disappoint there either, beating Crewe Alexandra 2-0 thanks to goals from Orsi and Kelly to seal one of the unlikeliest promotions in recent memory.
Kelly had gone from being relegated with Rochdale to winning man of the match in all three of Crawley’s play-off games, while Orsi went from scoring two in 24 at Grimsby to managing 23 in 48 for Crawley.
They had done it all playing dominant football, too. Not including the play-offs, only Notts County (65.1%) and MK Dons (57.9%) averaged more possession than their 57.1% in League Two in 2023-24, while only the same two teams recorded more sequences of 10+ passes and averaged more passes per sequence than Crawley.
They were aggressive off the ball too, with only four teams winning the ball within 40m of the opposition’s goal and then having a shot on more occasions than Crawley’s 58.
Unfortunately for the club, once the promotion celebrations had died down, reality kicked in. Johnson admitted on a recent club podcast that during the previous summer it had been difficult to convince players to join due to the poor performance in 2022-23, so many insisted on release clauses in their contracts, which were inevitably triggered this summer by clubs with more money to offer.
That led to another year of high turnover in players, not ideal for a club on the crest of a wave. Of the 11 players who started their play-off final against Crewe, only three were still at the Broadfield Stadium when 2024-25 kicked off. Corey Addai, Will Wright, Maguire, Kelly, Kellan Gordon, Adam Campbell, Klaidi Lolos and Orsi were among those to depart, so Crawley effectively had to start again.
Despite that, it must have been easier to convince players this summer than 12 months earlier. Several of the new arrivals have mentioned in their first interviews that they were eager to join the club after seeing their play-off exploits, a world away from having to convince non-league players to sign a year ago by offering them release clauses.
Defender Josh Flint has come in from the Eredivisie, winger Armando Junior Quitirna arrived from Fleetwood with recent League One experience, midfielder Max Anderson and Ghana international goalkeeper Jojo Wollacott were signed from the Scottish Premiership, and former Plymouth and Ipswich midfielder Panutche Camará has returned after four years away. Many others have again been plucked from non-league or from the bench of teams lower down the pyramid who Crawley feel have been underrated to this point, with the club backing Lindsey to build another team greater than the sum of its parts.
Their League One campaign has begun as well as could be expected, with a 2-1 home win over Blackpool followed by a 1-0 win away at Cambridge United at the weekend.
An example of Crawley benefitting from finding hidden gems was Ade Adeyemo’s late winner at the Abbey Stadium on Saturday. The 26-year-old had never played in the EFL prior to joining the West Sussex club last season, and was turning out for Cray Valley Paper Mills in the Isthmian League South East division just over a year ago. However, in the last week, Adeyemo has scored against Swindon in the EFL Cup, and now also has a winning goal in an away game in League One to his name.
While their promotion was hard-earned, there is an argument that Crawley somewhat overachieved last season. Only four teams in League Two overperformed against their expected goals by more than their 14.4 (73 goals from 58.6 xG), while no-one overperformed their xG against by as much as their 4.4 (67 goals conceded from 71.4 xG against).
One area they can improve on is errors. While it has been a strong start to the season, the goal they conceded against Blackpool was entirely avoidable, with Wollacott waiting too long to clear the ball and hitting it against Tangerines striker Ashley Fletcher and into the net behind him. That followed on from last season when, of teams in England’s top four tiers, only Notts County made as many errors that led to goals as Crawley (12). That is the risk that comes with wanting to have so much of the ball, though.
There will be bumps along the way. No-one expects them to make it back-to-back promotions, but even survival this season would represent something of an achievement. The Opta supercomputer gave Crawley a 45.5% chance of going down at the start of the season just two weeks ago, but that has already reduced to 18.1% after the first two games. In fact, they even have a 3.1% chance of reaching the play-offs again, and a 0.3% likelihood of automatic promotion.
There is inevitably a danger of bigger clubs sniffing around the manager, too. Lindsey was the favourite with some betting companies to replace Ryan Lowe at Preston North End just a few days ago before the Championship club turned to former Sheffield United boss Paul Heckingbottom, but that kind of interest is something Crawley fans will likely have to get used to.
Under Lindsey, Crawley have gone from undesirable to a force to be reckoned with. How far can they go? We’ll have to wait and see, but at least the people of the town might soon no longer have to say to the rest of the country: “Do you know where Gatwick is? Well…”
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