Dubbed the Manchester City of non-league football, Crawley can take their ambitious agenda forward with victory at Torquay
Tomorrow afternoon Crawley Town play Torquay United hoping to become the sixth non-league club to reach the fifth round of the FA Cup. It would be, on the face of it, an extraordinary achievement, redolent with the kind of aspirational romance that is the essence of the FA Cup's carefully tended magic. Dig a little, though, and Crawley's rise, which included a thrilling defeat of Derby County in the last round, starts to look like a more modern kind of good news story, not so much a tale of pluck and luck as a narrative of calculated investment and highly ambitious administration.
Crawley arrive at Plainmoor as the most bullish of underdogs, top of the Blue Square Premier League and awash with fresh riches provided by as-yet unidentified overseas backers. Last summer Crawley spent an estimated �500,000 on new players, more than all League Two clubs combined. Torquay's record signing is the �75,000 paid for Leon Constantine in 2004. Crawley spent at least three times that on the striker Richard Brodie. They were also, wrongly as it runs out, linked with a bid to sign Robert Pires.
"If we were in the fifth round now we'd want to be in the sixth round," says Crawley's manager, Steve Evans. "That's the nature of the players we've got and the owners. We have highly ambitious people who have invested huge sums of money."
Evans is a key part of the Crawley story, not just in their rise to Football League club in waiting, but also their air of boisterous ambition. Crawley have been called "the non-league Manchester City", but this seems a little unfair on City, who at least try to make friends. "If I was a lifelong Luton fan I wouldn't like Crawley Town either," Evans says, shrugging off both Crawley's unpopularity among their Conference peers and an abrasive touchline presence that has made him a bogeyman for some supporters. "I think a lot of those other clubs' fans would like me as their manager. As Sir Alex [Ferguson] says, if other teams' fans don't like you, you must be doing something right."
Evans built his reputation around a successful but stormy on-off stint at Boston United between 1998 and 2007, which included promotion to the Football League in 2002. It didn't end well: Boston went bust and Evans was convicted of tax evasion in 2006 and given a suspended prison sentence, something he has since refused to discuss in public. "There are about a hundred clubs who have gone into administration since I was at Boston and I don't hear any of their managers getting named," he says now. "I said sorry then, I'm not going to say sorry now. I don't think if somebody makes a mistake and then learns from it, they should have it brought up 10 years later."
Twice in administration in recent times, in the summer of 2009 Crawley received massive investment from a lifelong fan and local businessman Bruce Winfield and a collection of associates. Suddenly, a club with home gates that hovered around 600 (doubled this season) had been transformed from basket case to Sussex heavyweight. Winfield has supported Crawley for 40 years and still walks around the club's Broadfield stadium with the air of a local enthusiast rather than a man who has transformed expectations at this most unheralded of clubs.
"It was an emotional decision," he says of his intervention. "When you get to a certain stage you have to say, 'What do you do with your money? Do you give it to charity? You'd be better off investing in BT, but if you look at your share certificates every year, you haven't beaten Derby County."
The unspoken fear is that Crawley's rise could lead to catastrophe once the current lump-sum investment (close to �1m) runs out. Winfield, who says there is more money to come, has set his sights on sustainable development. "It's not a gamble," he says. "The players are on sensible wages. There will be no debt. We have funded player acquisition, signing-on fees, agents' fees. The rest of it, with the FA Cup run, we'll probably break even."
This will be good news for the club's Hong Kong-based backers, one of whom is, according to Winfield, a banker, the other "in the restaurant business". Between them they own "less than 40%, maybe 35%" of the club, with the rest owned by Winfield and various others.
"Why would anyone put money into a football club?" Winfield says when questioned on the motives of his backers. "If you look at very wealthy people, you're not necessarily looking for profit. The guy at Man City isn't going to get his money back. Once you're seriously rich it is a different mindset."
Crawley certainly have that, not to mention a sense of overleaping ambition that makes today's match seem like no more than a staging point towards greater glories. As Evans says, in a manner that can only be described as compellingly Crawley: "Torquay stands between us and a place in history."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/jan/28/crawley-steve-evans-fa-cup
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