Kazim-Richards vows to haul Crawley out of League Two as he confronts coaching's glass ceiling
Relegation battle hides the rebuild, says Crawley boss
Crawley Town sit bottom of League Two after seven games, but head coach Colin Kazim-Richards is adamant the warning signs are misleading. Alongside his assistant Julian Gray — the pair who arrived in April and somehow steered the club to safety on the final day of last season — the 40-year-old insists a wholesale squad overhaul means results are the last thing to catch up.
"The results are not showing the work we've done; it's more a case of when the process is going to start showing," Kazim-Richards says. "We've got 16 new players, eight, nine debuts and different connections. So loads of ins, loads of outs, and trying to get over the mentality of last season. It's not a task that is just a week, two weeks, or a three-week process.
"As players you don't really understand what it entails as a manager. You're trying to churn out results within trying to do the process that you want. The recruitment, gelling people character-wise, mentality-wise, implementing a new structure, implementing a new standard within the club, and not just the football side. But it ultimately falls down on the results. We know that, and it's something that we're working to change."
An Arsenal bond forged across generations
The partnership at the heart of Crawley's project was built on shared roots. Both came through the Arsenal academy, albeit at different times: Gray was part of the first-team squad from 1996 to 2000, making a single appearance, while Kazim-Richards, seven years his junior, never broke through but watched from afar and found his role model.
"He's someone that we would look at and be like: 'Raa, I want to be like Julian,'" Kazim-Richards says. "He was from where we're from and was in an Arsenal first team. But the way he was playing, that aura, that silkiness, but also that fight."
Gray, whose playing career took in Crystal Palace, Coventry and Fulham, has since coached at Arsenal's Hale End academy and at Birmingham. The 47-year-old believes those experiences translate directly to Broadfield Stadium.
"You learn different things, and you also want to challenge yourself," Gray says. "I always believe that I'm coaching to help the players be better and pass on my knowledge and experience. It's the same whatever age group I coach. It's my job to improve the players. Whether it's 1% or 10%, that depends on them. First and foremost, I have to understand them, and that's always been a big thing for me. I need to know what they need, and for the best way to give them that information."
From turmoil to new ownership
Crawley has been a club in crisis in recent years. John Yems, manager between 2019 and 2022, was handed a three-year ban from all football-related activity by the Football Association after being found guilty of 12 breaches of anti-discrimination rules — the longest ban ever issued to a participant in English football for discrimination. Last year brought a change of ownership at Broadfield Stadium, with KB Sports and Leisure, headed by Raphael Khalili, taking charge. It was Khalili who hired Kazim-Richards from his post in Arsenal's academy.
In doing so, Kazim-Richards became only the third black head coach across the top four tiers of English football, alongside Nuno Espírito Santo at West Ham and Lee Grant at Walsall. The appointment was not made lightly: Kazim-Richards insisted Gray join him as assistant when he discussed the role with Khalili.
"Of course there is a glass ceiling"
Kazim-Richards is blunt about the landscape for black coaches in the English game.
"Is there still a glass ceiling? Of course," he says. "There's a lot of black coaches who are good and deserve an opportunity, 100%."
The conversation turns to Jermain Defoe, the former England forward sacked by National League side Woking after just four months and six games in charge. The two did their coaching badges together, and Kazim-Richards is wary of the narrative such episodes feed.
"I haven't spoken to Jermaine. What I will say is, there's a lot at this level and below that goes on that you might not expect," he says. "No way is it a slight to say Jermain is a black manager and he fails. White managers fail all the time, too. But it's going to be written like that because it's Jermain Defoe and he's a black man and he speaks out on some stuff, right?
"If you look around now, there's a lot of young black coaches that are in the academies, in non-league, that are doing well."
The Championship dream
Kazim-Richards, who represented Turkey through maternal heritage and played for both Fenerbahce and Galatasaray, is leaning on decades of experience in what is his first managerial role. He is "100% committed" to the project and to the owners' core ambition of reaching the Championship.
"Short term it's about getting results, and then being able to get us up there," he says. "You're not just going to do it with the click of the fingers – if that was the case, Crawley would have done so already.
"Do we need time? Yes, we do. I see this as the start of the journey, but I believe we can go far and achieve those objectives. We'd love to be given that time."