The ongoing saga of Crawley Town, Colchester United and Matthew Etherington

Etherington left Crawley in December last year, so why do his former club *still* think they deserve compensation for him joining another club?

Football can be an insular world at times, but it’s an insularity that we all buy into at some point or other. But there are times when that insularity can run head-first into the outside world, and at that point things can start to become… complicated. Crawley Town had a complicated time of things last season, with three managers and finishing in 22nd place in League Two, just three poinsimts above the relegation places. This season has been… better. Much better, at points.

But since the start of October the team’s recent trajectory has been in a downward direction. On the last day of September, a 3-0 win against Grimsby Town took them to second place in table, but since then they’ve gone into freefall again. October brought four defeats and a draw, and by the time Halloween came around they were 14th. What could possibly have brought about such an abrupt turnaround in form?

The third of last season’s Crawley managers is still with the club, but it seems to have been a close thing. Scott Lindsey kept them up last season and had got them into the promotion places. Small wonder he’s popular. But then, on the 5th October something happened which rather changed the equation, when Gillingham sacked Neil Harris. Lindsey’s name was almost immediately linked with the job.

This was no surprise whatsoever. After all, He played for Gillingham, his dad played for Gillingham, and his first coaching position was as a youth development coach with Gillingham, where he established Development Centres in and around Kent for young children while also working at the club's Centre of Excellence in Canterbury. He’s believed to have lived in the area for the last thirty years.

But then, when Gillingham finally got round to making an announcement, their new manager was not Scott Lindsey. He had, by all accounts, been interviewed for the position, and with those lengthy connections we might have expected this to go through, but it didn’t. The new man is instead the former Spurs, Birmingham and Leicester player Stephen Clemence, son of the late former England goalkeeper Ray, in his first managerial position after having been coaching at various clubs since 2010 after retiring at 32 due to injury.

Of course, any conversation about why this decision was eventually made would ultimately be speculation. But it wasn’t the only managerial drama they were involved in this week, because elsewhere the involvement of one of last season’s failed managerial experiments was causing a fuss as well. Etherington lasted only 34 days and three games—one win and two defeats—as the club’s manager before leaving at the end of 2022 for reasons that were never fully explained.

Etherington joined Colchester United as an under-21 coach, but after a pretty calamitous start to the season themselves Colchester sacked their manager Ben Garner following a home defeat on the 21st October which left them one place off the bottom of League Two. Etherington was appointed as caretaker-manager, and duly took charge for their 3-2 win at Grimsby Town, but on Friday 27th the club put up a statement in which they said:

At 3.34pm today, (Friday 27th October), I received a call from Eben Smith, who informed me that Crawley believe Matty is still bound by their contract until May 2024. Consequently, if Matty manages any of Colchester's games, a buy-out fee would be owed to Crawley.

Personally I don’t agree with the Crawley position but given that we have less than twenty four hours before the game against Accrington, which is 250 miles away, I requested Crawley's permission for Matty to lead the team for this specific match while we seek legal counsel regarding the contract.

Consequently, Etherington did not take charge of the team for their trip to Accrington, but on Monday Crawley issued a statement of their own, and it somewhat helpfully included the exact contractual point upon which they were relying upon to get money out of a manager who’d been out at their club for 32 days, almost a year ago:

"The Manager shall not be permitted to bring his Agreement to an end early under this clause to take up employment at or be otherwise engaged by another football club playing in the same or a lower league as the Club is playing in at that time. No buyout will be permitted in such circumstances."

This doesn’t sound like a contractual clause that would get very far in court. It sets no specific time limit (it is presumed that it refers to May 2024), with the mention of ‘no buyout’ may even imply that they’ve been continuing to pay his wages since the end of last year. What else could he ‘buy out’? Quite asides from anything else, if Crawley haven’t been continuing to pay him since then, they’d presumably be in breach of contract themselves.

If they haven’t, it can only be presumed overly onerous to put a clause into his contract saying that he couldn’t work at ‘another football club playing in the same or a lower league’ for almost a year and a half’, given that this is 99.9% of the entire football industry, and that it doesn’t even refer to coaching or management. He could take a job in the tea bar at another club and still be considered in breach of contract, under these terms.

Later in that statement, Crawley do mention that, “We have no problem if he is an under-21 coach at Colchester and if Matthew asks us permission to reassume that role, we'd be happy to grant it.” Well good for you, but it isn’t your choice. A simple application of the man on the Clapham omnibus test indicates that he isn’t in your employment.

They could sue Etherington from breach of contract, but that’s a different matter to being able to prevent him from earning elsewhere, while unilaterally being able to decide someone’s future employment in no way sounds like a reasonable contract clause, especially in professional football, an industry which for most people is the only thing they know how to do. We should also look back to what was said at the time of Etherington’s departure in December 2022. Does that give any clues away?

Director of Football and interim CEO Chris Galley said: “It has become clear to all involved parties that this partnership is not the right fit to carry the club forward and achieve our goals. As a result, we have mutually decided to move in a different direction. We wish Matty and Simon well in their future endeavours.”

Oh. ‘Mutually’, eh?

Was it also ‘mutually decided’ that Crawley would have a right of veto over where Etherington worked for the next year and a half? There’s no mention of ‘compensation’. What, ten months on from his departure, are Crawley expecting compensation for? For having created a workplace environment that he couldn’t hack working there for five weeks before jacking it in? Do they claim a significant role in his development as a coach? How much are they expecting for these 34 days?

The company accounts, finally published for the 2021/22 season in September, offer a few hints as to why the club could do with some ready money. The club lost £1.4m, but that required the write-off of a £1m from a previous owner, and the crypto-bro owners had to put £2.4m into the club in order to keep it afloat. But even if they are in need of cash, this can potentially come with unforeseen consequences.

How do other managers and coaches feel, when they read this sort of thing? Does it make Crawley Town feel like a more attractive proposition or a less attractive one? Because all may be well with regard to Scott Lindsey at the moment, but the likelihood that it won’t be forever.

Crawley have had eleven full-time managers since Steve Evans left in June 2012. This isn’t an especially high turnover in this age of the itchy trigger-finger, but it does suggest that the odds are in favour of the club needing a replacement for him in the next year or two. Even if they were to get some degree of compensation for Etherington, would that few thousand pounds be worth it, if staff they wished to hire at some point in the future didn’t want to deal with them because they didn’t like the look of what had happened to Matthew Etherington after he left there.

Of course, Colchester United don’t owe Crawley Town a penny. There is no contract between the two clubs, and they are not bound by the terms of what may or may not have been agreed between Crawley and Matthew Etherington when he left the club. A second statement was subsequently posted by Colchester in which they confirmed that after having taken legal advice they would be reinstating him into his position:

Following a thorough review of the contract and the events that transpired during the ten months since Matty's departure from Crawley, I have made the decision to reinstate Matty as our first team's Interim Head Coach with immediate effect.

So, it’s now down to Crawley Town to decide whether they intend to take the matter further. Their legal case looks shaky. It’s a clear restraint of trade and it feels like a complete overreach to claim that they hold this right until May 2024. The devil may be in the detail that hasn’t been made public by Crawley’s statement, but on the basis of what they have made public it seems like pretty thin gruel. But taking this matter to court would be expensive, and with no guarantees of winning. Is that a gamble that they could even afford, at the moment? Sometimes, it’s just better to move on.