What Owning a Football Club Taught Me

When I got the text asking if I wanted to help buy Crawley Town, I said yes immediately. The money was wired in less than 24 hours.

People ask me why Crawley, and why football. The honest answer is that it was a passion decision. I played football from the time I could walk until I decided to focus on my career, and I still can't watch training without wanting to get on the pitch. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I didn't, and that's exactly why it taught me so much.

You are borrowing someone else's history

Crawley Town has supporters who remember switching ends at halftime back in the National League days so they could always stand behind the goal. When you buy a club like that, you aren't buying a company. You're taking temporary custody of something that means a great deal to a lot of people who were there long before you.

We understood that from day one. The worst thing we could be was a negative mark on that history. Everything else followed from taking that seriously.

Sit with the supporters

Of the roughly 40 games I've been to, I watched about 90% of them from the South Stand or in the away end. The atmosphere is better than any owner's box, but that isn't the main reason. I don't see myself as anything other than a supporter with more capital on the line. I don't deserve special treatment, and if people are frustrated, they deserve to be able to tell me to my face.

They did. The first season's highs were real. We beat Fulham, a Premier League side, 2-0 in the cup, with Coinbase filming a commercial and ESPN and the New York Times in the building. I ran onto the pitch afterwards, which taught me very quickly that English football is not American sports.

Then we started losing. We tried things no club had tried, and when results don't follow unconventional ideas, nobody gives you credit for the ideas. The low point was Doncaster. We were getting beaten, the club was all over the news for something unrelated to the football, and the away end turned on me to the point where stewards asked me to leave the stand.

I hid on the train home with my hood up. A supporter recognized me anyway and walked over. He told me he hated me, then asked if I wanted a beer. We drank the whole ride back. By the time we got off, the anger had mostly gone. Most problems between people get smaller when you're actually in the room together.

Knowing what to do isn't enough. Timing is the job.

We went into the second season knowing exactly what had gone wrong. What we didn't have yet was a recruiting and player identification system ready to act on it, and we couldn't make the moves we wanted until the January window.

In January people were telling us we'd screwed up a second season and to get out of their club. Four months later we were in the playoffs. Nothing about the plan changed in between. The system finally caught up to it.

I've thought about that a lot since. In companies and in markets, being right too early and being wrong look the same for a while.

Culture is built in the moments nobody plans

The game that defined our second season was Grimsby. We were down 2-0 at halftime and won it 3-2 with a goal deep into stoppage time. After that the identity was set: you play until the final whistle, you play aggressive, and you represent the town.

Then the playoffs. We beat MK Dons 8-1 on aggregate, and suddenly a club that usually drew three or four thousand people was walking out at Wembley. I had to fight back tears at the end of that final. If you'd asked those players a year earlier whether they'd be promoted at Wembley, I don't think any of them would have believed it. None of us expected it. We just showed up every day and made the best decisions we could.

Hire people who only want to talk about the work

The first time I met our manager, Scott Lindsey, he didn't ask about the weather or my flight. He opened his laptop and showed me 30 minutes of film: the decisions behind each player option, the channels runners should have used, the things he'd drilled in training that were finally showing up in games. That was all we talked about.

You could tell immediately that the work was the only thing on his mind, and it showed up in the results. The best leaders I've been around since have had the same thing. They care about the craft more than how they come across.

The hardest part is the goodbyes

What nobody tells you about owning a team is how often you lose people you care about. Players get better offers, loans get recalled, and the club has to balance a wage budget against a squad. To the outside it looks simple: just keep the players who did well. Inside, it's contracts, guarantees and competing offers, and it's a hard call every summer.

My rule has been simple. If you gave your time to Crawley Town, you're family, and my door stays open long after you stop wearing the shirt.

I came in a fan who happened to have capital on the line, and that's what I still am. Crawley Town will be my favorite football club until the day I die.