Carlisle United's League Two rivals Crawley Town have been taken over by a group of US cryptocurrency investors.

WAGMI United LLC, who earlier this season failed in a bid to buy Bradford City, have been announced as the new owners of the Sussex club.

It was today confirmed that the group have bought the controlling stake of previous owner Ziya Eren.

The group have claimed to be out to create a new model of sports club ownership.

But critics of the approach have highlighted the unregulated and volatile aspect of the crypto market as a matter for serious concern.

WAGMI stands for crypto community mantra 'We're All Gonna Make It'. Their bid for Bradford had involved a plan to rely on non-fungible tokens [NFTs] as an ownership model.

An NFT is a digital asset bought and sold online and said to be non-interchangeable.

Preston Johnson, WAGMI United co-founder, said: “Crawley Town Football Club is a club with more than 125 years of rich history that we revere and respect.

"However, a conventional approach to ownership hasn’t worked, and the club is losing hundreds of thousands of pounds while its fans suffer through year after year of uninspiring results on the pitch.

“We think the club can do better and our fans deserve better. Sports are supposed to be fun and bring communities together.

“At Crawley Town, we’re going to shake up the status quo, try out some new ideas, and build a worldwide community of fans new and old that can be excited to cheer on the Red Devils together — stretching from West Sussex to anywhere in the world with an internet connection.”

The investment group also pledged a new era of “unprecedented transparency and accountability” to supporters of Crawley.

They said they will outline their plans to supporters soon, whilst they have already said fans will get to vote on who the directors should be if the new regime "underperforms" by failing to achieve promotion in two seasons' time.

WAGMI's Eben Smith, in an interview with the Washington Post last year, explained the idea to take over an EFL club and insisted there was little "downside" if the idea failed.

He said: "If you want to run an English football club in a conventional way, you can guarantee yourself that you’re going to lose £300,000 to £500,000 pounds a year with no pathway to growth and no way to get out of it because there's a town right next door.

“So we are going to try a bunch of unconventional stuff but will be pretty much led by the numbers from an analytical perspective. And our hope is that it works. There’s not that much downside if it doesn’t.”

Crawley are 13th in League Two and host Barrow this weekend.

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