Crawley Town's new owners reveal why they chose Arsenal u23 coach Kevin Betsy as the new manager and why they delayed the announcement

Preston Johnson, Logan Matthews and Allman joined Hunter Orrell (@hunterorell) live to discuss how and why they chose Kevin Betsy as the new manager, what announcements will be next and why there was a delay in the announcement of the new manager.

Here are the highlights of the discussion (you can listen to the whole discussion in the twitter link below):

The interview process:

Preston: “We ended up speaking to a total of 12 candidates. You know, we probably had over 50 that came across our plate. We wanted to kind of funnel through.

“And sift through those 50 to to get to you know 11 or 12 that we thought had real potential. They could do some positive things with the club.

“One of our priorities was going to be how the potential manager wanted to to play football, right?

"The style of play we want to be more aggressive when it comes to style of play. We want to actually play football less. League 2 long ball just, you know, kicking it up the pitch and praying and so that played a massive role into who we we took interviews with and from there and I'll kind of let Logan get into more details. You know we we asked quite a few questions on strategy and and kind of general assessment of players and recruiting. And you know how we can kind of be collaborative and how they incorporate data and analytics to their approach, because that's the foundation of everything we're going to do. “

Logan: “One of the requirements was that the coach had to play attack of an aggressive football and that was that was a quick filter for a lot of people, especially those with League One and League 2 experience. It's not often seen at this level, so that was a huge one to Preston's point about being analytically driven and you know, have experience dealing with data that was definitely a focus of ours too, and in sort of a broader sense that came down to a manager being open minded because if they're familiar with data in this sort of new movement in football.

"Then we were pretty confident that they'd be open minded to other crazy ideas like having a Twitter spaces after you announced the manager, and so it was. It was also like those two sort of pillars were were the the main points that.

“But nevertheless implements that we just talked about that like structure of club, evaluating current players. How do you evaluate players? What are you looking for in players? We've talked a lot about the B team that we want to rule out, so we spent a lot of time discussing that with them. And another thing that we were really keen on because of all that was player development. And so you know, you can kind of connect the dots on how we ended up with with Kevin too and all the success at English youth levels and all the way up there and then at a massive club like Arsenal. So yeah, those were kind of the the main pieces that that we touched on."

On structure and using data

Preston: “Something that was pretty crucial for our vision and I mentioned it briefly, just being collaborative with with the manager with scouts.

“With actual data itself is that there isn't one person that has like final say that just kind of over reaches everybody else, right?

"We want it to be a process where I've kind of talked about it before with our whole approach is that there's this formula. And yeah, I test scouting has a piece of that. We think data will have a big function there as well, but all these opinions we want to take in and and utilize to to optimize our decision making and so from there I think our structure.

" I know it's different in English football, but in America and everyone's gonna yell at me for bringing up American sports. But quite frankly, you know, the general manager and and the head coaching are different positions. It's like really hard to be efficient and be the one that's doing all the recruiting and talking to agents and working deals with players and actually doing the scouting.

"Actually, and so one thing we wanted to be clear with our candidate and then Kevin obviously was as open minded and on board with this was that, you know, we have separate positions. You know he's our manager. He does a lot of the head coaching day-to-day. We have a great assistant in Dan Micciche that's coming along with them, but it's a collaborative approach.”

On Kevin Betsy:

Logan: “There's so much we can talk about in terms of positives that that Kevin had. But player development, the success he had at Arsenal, I know that they brought towards the bottom of the table the previous season and now I think they finished third.

“And it's really all those boxes that we talked about earlier that he checked just across the board. I mean, you definitely want success and ultimately, you know managers that were available to us kind of fell into three buckets, which is that inexperienced manager or inexperienced in first team management. So a little bit more of a wild card. And then you know you have some with some experience, some success and some failure, and those with a lot of experience which you know we heard a lot about

“So we just felt like the upside, and, you know, Preston and I are sports betters. We talked about variance a lot and the highest variance play is definitely that first bucket. And. And yeah, Kevin, just checked all the boxes otherwise too.”

Preston: “The first thing I think Logan said after we we spoke with Kevin was something to the nature of just how methodical and detailed and nuanced he was on everything.”

What announcements are next?

Tom: “I think since the since the takeover it's been, I'm sure Preston and Logan will agree, a bit of a baptism of fire. We've had lots of stuff to to deal with in quite a short space of time. But yeah, now we've got the managerial side of things sorted with Kevin and Dan. I think that would really allow us now to kick on off the field.

“As you said, there's been a lot of questions, sort of surrounding ticketing kit and stadium news sponsorship. And I suppose that the message I can say is, you know, rest assured just because there's not necessarily news in the public domain that it's not being worked on, we've got a really great team of backroom operational staff who have been at the club a long time and a good at what they do. And yeah, I think in terms of some of those questions specifically that people were asking, we should announce on season tickets, imminently sort of 24 to 48 hours. Will then be confirming our preseason calendar later this week and then yeah, as we go into June hopefully and that start date for Football League, confirming things like kit, all that other stuff.”

Why the delay in announcing?

Preston: "There's people that wanted us to respect the holiday. We had the chance to lock in Dan Micciche as well, the Under 18 coach for Arsenal at the same time, and that when that presented itself we said let's take the weekend to get it done. We get Kevin and Dan, boom, announce it Monday. Call it today. That's the ultimate reason for it, so I know our our, our social media guy, Stafford had some fun with you guys, but we were just excited about the prospect of getting Dan locked up sooner rather than later.”

Have you seen?

Arsenal under-23s manager Kevin Betsy named new Crawley Town boss: Reds fans react to the appointment

Arsenal legend pays tribute to coaching pair as they takeover at Crawley Town

Kevin Betsy: All you need to know about Crawley Town's new manager - including the Liverpool, Borussia Dortmund and Tottenham stars he helped nurture

Crawley Town name new manager – and a familiar face stays in the coaching staff

Crawley Town confirm released and retained list

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