Previously, I would not have paid any attention to this story... Bought for $2.9m a year ago, expected to sell it for $25m... top offer so far of $6,200...!
How much would a first edition Real Mad Red signed by the publisher go for?
That would be priceless! :-) Although I believe that any remaining issues were put to good use a couple of years ago when certain commodities were unavailable in the shops owing to pandemic panic buying! :-)
I'm hoping a reserve/u23 team is set up this summer ideally as that would give more game time to players who aren't that close to the first team and also provide a good bridge to the first team from the Foundation Academy. I'd enter this team into the Sussex cup rather than the first team and also maybe look to enter them into one of the local county leagues (either Southern Combination Div 1 or Combined Counties Div 1). Having a decent academy system in place is crucial I feel to make the club more sustainable in the long term, look at how much it's worked at Brighton.
Also I'd love to see a women's team created too in the near future, either as a standalone club or as a merger with Crawley Wasps. The women's game is only going to grow in popularity over the next few years and the Euros this summer in England will hopefully be a big boost, also it would give me another group of players to support throughout the season too.
Probably a few left who remember Crawley playing in one of those leagues (Metropolitan).
I'd hate it if we had to do this (Chelsea u23 etc) so why would I want to inflict on someone else ?
Jim Baker
Another option, and one that would probably be better in the long term, is to look at the youth leagues and see if we can enter the team in that. One or two people I was talking about this at Dorking said they think the reserve players don't benefit as much from playing in the county league because of the far lower quality of opposition in comparison to the National League South
Steve, I've had many a rant over the EPPP and how it will destroy youth football for clubs such as Crawley.
The club stick, say, £100k a year into a youth team and apart from a little local goodwill we get sod all from it. By some happenstance we find a decent player.Any professional club with an academy can poach our youth players for nothing.
The idea the club had to have an u23 team made up from players not retained by other academies and playing friendlies wasn't a bad one (a similar thing works for Brentford) but the covid outbreak seems to have put paid to it.
Maybe that idea evolving into a league with teams such as Woking, Aldershot and Wimbledon etc. could be made to work and not cost a fortune.