Crawley Town

Football arrived in Crawley through a works club rather than a civic project, and by 1896 the town had enough of a following to formalise it as Crawley Football Club. The line was broken once: the original side folded in 1935 and had to be rebuilt from nothing three years later, and it took until 1958 for the club to settle on the name it carries now, Crawley Town.

The badge colour explains the nickname — The Red Devils — and little else about the club has stayed that settled. Money trouble followed promotion: turning fully professional in 2005 left the club roughly £1.8 million in debt within a year, and administration was only avoided because creditors chose to keep it alive. The recovery came fast. Crawley won the Conference Premier in 2010–11, reaching the Football League for the first time in its history, then beat Crewe Alexandra in the League Two play-off final at Wembley the following season to climb into League One. That first spell in the third tier lasted until 2014–15, when relegation sent the club back down.

The pattern repeated in 2023–24: another play-off final against Crewe, another win at Wembley, this time 2-0, and another return to League One — undone almost immediately by relegation back to League Two the season after.

Home games are played at Broadfield Stadium, opened in 1997 and expanded in 2012 with a new covered stand on the east side to meet Football League ground requirements; the stadium carried sponsors' names for years before reverting to Broadfield ahead of the 2022–23 season. Matches against Brighton & Hove Albion and Lewes are known locally as the Sussex Derby.

No one at the club is spoken of quite like Dannie Bulman. He came through four separate spells between 2006 and 2022, wore the captain's armband, and was on the pitch for the 2011 promotion that took Crawley into the Football League in the first place — a player the club itself calls a legend, and one whose name outlasted every manager who tried to move him on.