Sports
‘No they didn’t’: Inside the Jets’ shocking deadline day trades of Sauce Gardner, Quinnen Williams
Additional reporting by Jeremy Fowler, Stephen Holder and Dan Graziano
AT A STONE church on a hill, in a pastoral town only two miles from their training facility, the New York Jets paid their respect to a franchise icon Tuesday morning in Madison, New Jersey. More than 400 mourners packed into St. Vincent Martyr for Nick Mangold’s funeral Mass, 10 days after the beloved center died because of complications from kidney disease at age 41.
Jets general manager Darren Mougey was among the last to arrive, walking purposefully into the church as a bagpiper filled the crisp autumn air with strains of sorrow. Mougey wore a dark suit and the expression of a man whose mind was racing. Five hours remained until the NFL trade deadline at 4 p.m. ET, and he was sitting on a couple of blockbusters.
Mougey stood in the back of the church (“A beautiful service,” he would say later) and slipped out before it was over, heading back to the office for urgent business. Back at St. Vincent, about three dozen of Mangold’s former teammates from the Jets and Ohio State congregated outside the church after the Mass, exchanging hugs and wiping tears. The casket was placed in the hearse, bagpiper playing again. A solemn moment.
Minutes later, a news flash on social media: Jets cornerback Sauce Gardner traded to the Indianapolis Colts.
Word slowly spread through the crowd of mourners. One of them was Darrelle Revis, a Pro Football Hall of Famer who, once upon a time, was traded by the Jets in his prime. He refused to believe his old team had parted with one of its young stars.
“No they didn’t,” Revis said matter-of-factly, when informed of the trade. “You’re joking.”
Somebody showed him Gardner’s social media post, bidding farewell to New York. Revis shook his head in disbelief. It was real, and it was stunning.
And it wasn’t the team’s only shocking move as the Jets (1-7) pulled off two major trades. They dealt Gardner and defensive tackle Quinnen Williams for four draft picks and two backup players, blew up the core of what once was a top-five defense and fueled a torrent of conflicting emotions in their locker room. This is a story about how the Jets, trying to overturn years of misery, culminated months of planning with two potentially franchise-altering moves in less than two hours.
Tuesday night, Mougey, who had barely slept the previous two nights, was hoarse and drained. He lost his train of thought during a video call with reporters. He apologized, adding, “I’m running with half a brain here.”
TO PREPARE FOR the trade deadline, Mougey and his staff met weekly, starting in Week 4. They discussed the roster in-depth, assigning potential trade value for each player. They studied contracts and comparisons from around the league, adjusting based on the ebb and flow of the season. The goal was to anticipate as many scenarios as possible. They were confident this would eliminate any recency bias.
Three weeks before deadline day, the Colts called and everything changed.
Initially, the Jets had no interest in moving Gardner, team sources said. After all, he’s only 25, a two-time All-Pro under team control through 2030 after a record-setting four-year, $120.4 million contract extension in July.
The Jets told the Colts it would take a Micah Parsons-like deal, the same team sources said — i.e. two first-round picks and a quality starter. Another reference point was the Jalen Ramsey trade in 2019, when the Los Angeles Rams dealt two first-round picks for the star corner.
The Colts weren’t biting.
That shifted a few days before the deadline, as the offers “kept getting richer and richer,” Mougey said. The Colts, coming off a loss after a blistering 7-1 start, were hoping to bolster their chances of a Super Bowl run and coveted an outside cornerback.
The market was drying up — they checked into Deonte Banks of the New York Giants and New Orleans’ Alontae Taylor — and perhaps that drove up the price for Gardner. Anticipating January home games, they wanted to prepare for visiting passing attacks that would look to exploit the comfy indoor conditions at Lucas Oil Stadium.
By Monday, they let the Jets know they “could potentially do” a deal that included 2026 and 2027 first-round picks, a Colts team source said.
The Jets didn’t shop the Colts’ offer to other teams, but they were emphatic about having mercurial wide receiver Adonai Mitchell included in the package, according to a Jets team source. Mitchell, a 2024 second-round choice, was buried on the Colts’ depth chart, but the Jets had positive scouting reports on him and a glaring need at receiver.
By the time Mougey left for the funeral, the trade was close to the goal line. He probably could’ve pushed it across early that morning, but he hit the “pause” button out of sensitivity to the day’s events.
The first-year GM didn’t know Mangold personally, but he’s keenly aware of what the team’s 2006 first-round pick meant to the franchise. He sees Mangold every day in the Jets’ fieldhouse, where mural-sized photos of Ring of Honor members hang from the rafters.
So Mougey made the two-mile drive to St. Vincent, hoping word of the looming deal wouldn’t leak. The last thing he wanted was a news alert disrupting the mourners, and in that case the Jets did a good job keeping both trades under wraps, so good that rival executives were surprised when the deals were announced.
“I did not expect this at all,” said an AFC executive who had dealt with the Jets.
GARDNER AND HIS brother, Allante, also one of his agents, were notified by the Jets around the same time — 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday. Sauce got a call from Mougey, Allante from Nick Sabella, the Jets’ senior director of football administration. They had no inkling that one of the biggest NFL trades of 2025 was in the works, according to Allante, who called it a sound business decision by the Jets.
“They couldn’t turn it down, and Ahmad [Sauce] deserves to be on a winning football team,” Allante said.
Recalling his conversation with Sabella, Allante Gardner said, “It was almost like he was saying, ‘This is going to hurt, but we have to do it for the future of the organization.'”
Sauce was supposed to be part of that future.
Only four months earlier, the Jets had locked in arguably their most popular player with an extension that made him the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback. Gardner loved the idea of playing his entire career in New York. He proclaimed his desire to help change the losing culture.
Coach Aaron Glenn, too, was giddy, saying Gardner and wide receiver Garrett Wilson (four-year, $130 million extension) were “foundational players.”
“I want them here for a long time,” Glenn, who has significant say on personnel decisions, said at the time.
For the Jets, with 14 consecutive non-playoff seasons (the longest active drought), the extensions provided a feel-good vibe at the start of training camp. It’s highly unusual for a team to flip a player so soon after extending him, but Mougey and Sabella structured Gardner’s deal in a way that allowed them to escape with minimal cap ramifications — only $13.75 million in signing bonus, with rolling guarantees that will be absorbed by the Colts.
That decision wasn’t an accident; Mougey said they wanted to make it a tradable contract, just in case. In essence, it made Gardner more desirable. As a different league source said, “If Sauce didn’t have an extension, do Jets get two [first-round picks]? Probably not.”
The Jets didn’t sign him to trade him four months later, but the landscape changed because of their subpar record and the desire to buttress their rebuild with draft capital. Though no one ever criticized Gardner publicly, there was internal concern about his ball production (three interceptions in 55 games) and high penalty rate (14 in his past 25 games).
Gardner is considered the most flawed of the elite corners, with one NFC executive saying, “Never been a huge Sauce fan, so that was a great deal to me that you just couldn’t pass up.”
An AFC executive added, “[The] lack of interceptions and penalties have always been the issue with [Gardner], but otherwise a really good player.”
Glenn praised Gardner’s talent but also suggested the change of scenery might be good for him. In his post-trade comments, he made it sound as if no player is untouchable.
Thirty years ago, Glenn’s coach and mentor, Bill Parcells, expressed the same sentiment to him when trade rumors were swirling. The Hall of Famer told Glenn, a young corner at the time, that he’d trade his wife for the right price. That always stuck with him.
Jets owner Woody Johnson recently called Gardner and Wilson “great talents,” saying their contract extensions were important to the organization. Try to imagine Johnson’s reaction when, only two weeks after making that comment, his top football lieutenants informed him of their plans to trade Gardner.
Actually, it wasn’t what you might have expected.
Johnson, known in the past for meddling, was pragmatic and professed his faith in Mougey and Glenn, according to a Jets team source.
FOR THE JETS, trapped in a losing vortex for the better part of two decades, history always repeats itself.
Twelve years ago, first-time GM John Idzik wanted to accelerate the rebuilding process, so he traded his most valuable asset for first- and fourth-round picks. And so Revis, arguably the greatest cornerback of his generation, was traded to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on April 21, 2013.
And there Revis was Tuesday, paying respect to Mangold, only two miles from where one of the most shocking trades in team history was going down. Once he absorbed the news, he praised the move.
“I guess this is kind of a similar path for Sauce,” Revis said. “In this situation, I think the Johnson family is trying to look to the future, getting these draft picks for him. It’s been a tough year, really tough for the organization, but I think the future is always bright and you can always turn things around.”
With the returns for the Gardner and Williams trades, the Jets hold five first-round picks over the next two drafts — two in 2026, three in 2027.
“It starts with trying to find a franchise quarterback,” said Revis, who played with Tom Brady on the New England Patriots’ 2014 Super Bowl championship team. “I think those guys have been trying to do that for the last couple of years.”
For the last 50, but who’s counting?
TWO WEEKS AGO, Williams learned from a reporter that he was on the verge of 100 games in a Jets uniform — 98, to be exact.
“You hear that?” he said in a joking way to a teammate at the next locker. “I never thought I’d make it.”
He didn’t — at least not with the Jets.
In that moment, Williams had to know there was a chance he’d be traded by the deadline. His camp had made it known that the former All-Pro coveted a change of scenery, league and team sources said.
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Williams, who went 27-2 in two playing seasons at Alabama, was worn down by losing. He arrived in 2019, was drafted No. 3, and the closest he came to a winning season in New York was 7-9 as a rookie. In fact, he experienced more losing than just about every player in team history.
Of the 73 players with at least 100 games played as a Jet, the lowest winning percentage belongs to current long-snapper Thomas Hennessy — a .300 mark from 2017 to present. Williams (.306) would be right behind him, second on the list.
“I think the world knew I was frustrated being there so long and still losing,” Williams said Wednesday at his introductory news conference with the Dallas Cowboys.
Williams foreshadowed his feelings with his infamous tweet in February, saying, “Another rebuild year for me I guess” — his response to the news that quarterback Aaron Rodgers was being released. That social media post didn’t sit well with folks in the organization.
The losing, coupled with a subtle position switch (he was used primarily as a 3-technique tackle instead of his usual spot at nose tackle), fueled his unhappiness. His usual production wasn’t there; he had only one sack — coincidentally, a takedown of former teammate Rodgers on the first play of the season (a 34-32 home loss to Pittsburgh).
Unlike the Gardner deal, the Williams trade came late and fast. Talks with the Cowboys intensified Monday, Jets team sources said. The Jets made it clear to Dallas that they had to be blown away to part with one of the league’s best defensive tackles. Another team, reportedly the Jacksonville Jaguars, made a strong push. It was an ideal situation for the Jets, who had two teams interested.
After returning from the funeral, Mougey finalized the trade — Williams for a 2026 second-round pick, a 2027 first-round pick and backup defensive tackle Mazi Smith.
Here was the clincher for the Jets, a team source said: They negotiated the right to get the better of the Cowboys’ two first-round picks in 2027, as Dallas has its own selection and the Green Bay Packers’ pick from the Parsons trade. That could have huge ramifications in the Jets’ favor if Dallas (3-5-1) has a losing season in 2026.
With a stockpile of draft capital, the Jets have the resources to trade up for a quarterback in ’26 or ’27 or use the picks to pry a veteran away from another team. They wanted flexibility. Well, they got it.
“More than anything,” Glenn said, “we want to make sure we build this team in our vision.”
JETS WIDE RECEIVER Allen Lazard checked his phone Tuesday and saw a text from a close friend. It simply said:
“OMG.”
Lazard figured it was a trade, so he checked X and saw the Gardner news. The Williams news broke a short time later.
The entire locker room responded in an “OMG” kind of way to the blockbuster moves. Edge rusher Jermaine Johnson posted on social media his support for the organization, but added, “I’m sick.” Running back Breece Hall said, “It sucks, but it’s the nature of the business.”
Glenn, charged with motivating a team that saw two of its best players traded for draft capital that won’t help it win in 2025, addressed it briefly in a team meeting. His message: Change in the NFL is a constant; change creates opportunity. Will his players buy it? There could be an answer Sunday (1 p.m. ET, CBS) when the Jets host the Cleveland Browns (2-6) — a game that could have huge draft implications.
Two miles down the road, on a blue-sky Tuesday, former Jets from the 2000s and 2010s were grappling with a different kind of shock. Only 15 years ago, Mangold anchored an offensive line that helped the Jets to the AFC Championship Game — their last playoff appearance.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Revis said.
The Jets have taken part in the circle of recovery and renewal for a half-century, trying to overcome the past while looking forward to a brighter tomorrow.
And so Revis, one of the best to ever wear a Jets uniform, did just that.
“With all these draft picks, I can kind of see the chess moves being made on the board,” he said, his voice competing with the tolling bell atop St. Vincent.
Germany’s Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin deliver an error-free routine for the lead heading into Monday’s free skate.
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Sturla Holm Lægreid may have had one of the most bizarre Olympics moments of all time, revealing he had an affair on his now ex-girlfriend, but his time at the 2026 Milan Cortina Games continues to go well regardless.
The Norwegian biathlete went viral for a tearful confession, saying that he cheated on his ex-girlfriend and regretted it after winning bronze during the 20-kilometer biathlon.
But Lægreid has won two medals since, including his third on Sunday when he captured silver in the men’s 12.5-kilometer biathlon pursuit.
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Sturla Holm Laegreid, of Norway, reacts after he won bronze as teammate Ingrid Landmark Tandrevold comforts him after the men’s 20-kilometer individual biathlon race at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Anterselva, Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
It’s been quite the week for Lægreid, though, as he explained through a levy of tears that he has had the “worst week of his life” due to the weight of what he did in his love life.
“Six months ago, I met the love of my life and the most beautiful and kindest person in the world,” he said after his event to NRK in Norway. “Three months ago, I made my biggest mistake and cheated on her, and I told her about a week ago.”
NORWEGIAN OLYMPIAN REGRETS REVEALING AFFAIR AFTER WINNING MEDAL: ‘NOT THINKING CLEARLY’
Sturla Holm Laegreid of Team Norway competes in the Men’s 20km Individual on day four of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Anterselva Biathlon Arena on Feb. 10, 2026 in Antholz-Anterselva, Italy. (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
He was crying and hugging friends after the race, and followed his initial comments with more during a news conference.
“It was the choice I made,” he said about revealing the information on the broadcast. “We make different choices during our life, and that’s how we make life,” he told a room full of reporters. “So, today I made a choice to tell the world what I did, so maybe, maybe there is a chance she will see what she really means to me. Maybe not.”
Lægreid said one day later he “deeply regrets” revealing that very personal detail about his life on live television, exposing a private matter in one of the most public ways possible.
“I am not quite myself these days and not thinking clearly,” he said in a statement on Wednesday. “My apologies go to Johan-Olav (Botn), who deserved all the attention after winning gold. They also go to my ex-girlfriend, who unwillingly ended up in the media spotlight. I hope she is doing well. I cannot undo this, but I will now put it behind me and focus on the Olympics. I will not answer any further questions about this.”
Lægreid remained in headlines throughout the week, though it was due to his performance at the Milan Cortina Games, securing a bronze medal on Friday in the men’s 10km sprint.
Gold medalist Martin Ponsiluoma of Team Sweden, Silver medalist Sturla Holm Laegreid of Team Norway and Bronze medalist Emilien Jacquelin of Team France celebrate after the Men’s Biathlon 12.5km Pursuit on day nine of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Anterselva Biathlon Arena on Feb. 15, 2026 in Antholz-Anterselva, Italy. (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
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The Norwegian is a six-time world champion, and though this is something entirely different in terms of adversity, he is clearly still performing well not the biggest world stage in Italy this week.
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MACCLESFIELD, England — Sam Heathcote is out on the field, handing out training bibs on a cold January morning. He’s no stranger to this: At 28 years old, he has been a footballer all his adult life, plying his trade in English soccer’s lower leagues. His proudest moment came a few weeks ago when he helped Macclesfield, a sixth-tier semiprofessional club, defy all odds in the FA Cup to knock out Premier League side Crystal Palace.
It was one of those magical days in football — an all-time Cinderella story — and it’s really hard to overestimate how unprecedented that result was. There were 117 places between Macclesfield and Palace in the English soccer pyramid when they met on Jan. 10, and Palace were the tournament’s defending champions. Never before during 154 years of the FA Cup — a competition, just like NCAA’s March Madness, known for its “David vs. Goliath” upsets — had a result delivered such a shock. Fans had streamed onto the field at the final whistle; players were paraded on shoulders. It was a scene that everyone at Macclesfield replayed in their heads again and again.
Those memories were fresh for Heathcote on this brisk morning, although it’s not the kind of training session you would expect. It’s on a concrete pitch at a grade school just outside of Manchester, and all the players in the session are 10 years old. Most of Macclesfield’s squad have second jobs: There is a property developer, a lawyer, a podcaster and a gym owner. Their captain, Paul Dawson, supplements his wages packing boxes for a friend’s candle company.
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Heathcote, their 6-foot-2, no-nonsense center back, is a gym teacher, and on this particular morning, his day job is in session.
“Aubrey, everyone’s gone for red. You’ve gone for orange,” Heathcote says to one of the children.
“I like the color orange!” Aubrey, seemingly unaware of soccer’s strict two-color system, replies.
“Well, fair enough,” Heathcote says as Aubrey sticks resolutely to orange. Life comes at you fast as a semiprofessional footballer.
Macclesfield’s 15 minutes of fame is not over yet. The upset victory meant they won a place in the FA Cup fourth round and a date with Premier League side Brentford on Monday (Stream live on ESPN+). The question is whether they can do it all over again.
Brentford can learn a lot from Palace, whose manager, Oliver Glasner, said afterwards that his players “never showed up.” But what can they and other teams learn from Macclesfield?
LESSON 1: Find a purpose
If one person in the small town of Macclesfield were to teach a class on resilience, the football club’s 48-year-old owner, Robert Smethurst, would be a good place to start. He bought the club six years ago, just as it went out of business. English soccer’s pyramid can be a cruel system and Macclesfield had been on the losing end for years, tumbling down the league pyramid as unpaid tax bills and debts of £190,000 ($258,554 USD) piled up, causing players to go on strike.
Despite growing up 8 miles from the club’s stadium, Moss Rose, Smethurst had never been a fan of the team, nor had he ever been to see a game. He never realized the scale of the problem: Debt collectors had already taken pretty much anything of value. There was no kitchen equipment. Copper pipes were removed. There was a gap where an air-conditioning unit had been. The playing squad had left. Why did he do it?
The truth is, Smethurst doesn’t actually remember buying the club. Macclesfield was on its knees, but so was he. After selling his online car business for more than £10 million ($13.6 million) a couple of years prior, he felt he’d lost any sense of purpose.
“Being bored at 12 o’clock, what do you do? I opened a bottle of wine,” Smethurst tells ESPN. “For me, that then got worse. It went into addiction. I was drinking more and more and losing the person I was.”
It was a friend of Smethurst’s who had spotted Macclesfield, recently out of business, on a real estate website called Rightmove. Without much thought — and in a cloud of his alcoholism — he asked his solicitor to send a £500,000 ($680,267) offer.
“I can’t really remember it because I just thought it was fun for me,” Smethurst says, barely paying a second thought to it until he got a call days later to say the sale had gone through. That’s when reality hit.
“I was like, ‘What the hell have I bought?'” he says. “When I finally came round a little bit, came to have a look at it — I’d never even seen it — I realized that it had been ripped apart. The whole place was just s—.”
If the stadium was bad enough, the club’s wider predicament was even worse. After going out of business, a club has to be recreated, starting at the very foot of English soccer’s pyramid system. Forget the sixth-tier where they are now. Macclesfield Town were entered into the North West Counties Football League — the ninth and final tier — where attendances often rank in the low hundreds.
Smethurst’s drinking didn’t stop until a year later. “I put myself into recovery,” he says. He did the steps, learned more about why he drank and realized he had a purpose that he was leaving unfulfilled. Around the same time, he was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“I went into recovery and kind of came out there with a great mindset,” he says. “I was really fighting for my life, but also wanting to make a difference … Everything that I’ve done with the club was about: ‘How can I build something special after recovery? How can I change people’s lives?’
“I started on that journey. I spent about £4 million ($5.4 million) of my own money doing it all up, new pitches, new bars, a gym for the community, all that kind of stuff.”
Macclesfield earned three promotions in four seasons, winning three league titles along the way. The trophies are proudly on display inside the club bar. They did so, primarily, by being the biggest spenders in each of those divisions. Anyone you speak to in Macclesfield will readily cite the club’s facilities and Smethurst’s financial backing as the primary reason for going from the ninth tier to beating Crystal Palace.
Smethurst is the first to admit that the club’s relative financial might got them through the first three divisions. Now that they’ve found their level in the sixth tier, it is the town’s togetherness — and outside investment — that can take them further.
“People like the fans can come and talk to me and access and come and meet me in the office,” he says. “I’ve been out for a coffee with fans before. It’s a different thing. We’re all in this together. I’m accessible to everybody. If anybody wants to come and talk to me, they can. If they want to take my number, they can. If they’re worried about anything, they can call me.”
LESSON 2: You always have each other
John Rooney should really have been worrying about the tactics board. It was an hour before the FA Cup clash with Palace, and Rooney, brother of Manchester United legend Wayne Rooney, taking his first steps into football management at Macclesfield, was worried about something else entirely.
The team gathered in the home dressing room, but one player’s locker was left empty. It was for their 21-year-old striker Ethan McLeod, who died in a road traffic collision on Dec. 16 — just one week after Macclesfield got the dream draw to face Palace, and less than a month before the big game.
Rooney had spoken to McLeod’s parents the night before the Palace game. McLeod’s father had wished the team luck and said they would be in attendance. Now, as the team counted down the minutes to kickoff, Rooney was worried that passing on that message would add too much pressure.
“I was questioning myself, do we tell them or do we not?” Rooney tells ESPN.
Ultimately, he decided against it. The grief was still fresh. Rooney knew his players genuinely wanted to win it for Ethan, whose image looks over the pitch at Moss Rose and whose number was retired. That kind of message could wait until after the game.
The incident happened on a Tuesday night after a last-gasp 2-1 win over Bedford Town FC. McLeod, who had just started to get a run in the team, was an unused substitute.
“Something I’ll never forget that will live with me for a long, long time is the selflessness that he had,” striker Danny Elliott, Macclesfield’s top scorer, says. “He was a striker, I’m a striker. For most of the season, I think it’s fair to say that he was kind of second to me. That night against Bedford, he didn’t actually get on the pitch, but I scored a winning goal in the last minute. As a 21-year-old striker, I know that I would have probably been a bit disappointed to not get on the pitch, but he was the first person to come and celebrate with me. He was really happy for me.”
McLeod would typically have travelled back with the rest of the squad on the team bus, but on this occasion, it was easier for him to drive back to his hometown, Wolverhampton. He got in his car and drove ahead. The team bus left minutes later, but was soon held up in standstill traffic. When they passed the incident, they realized it was a major crash. They didn’t give it much more thought until Rooney, who returned home at 6 a.m. in part due to the traffic, got a call to say it was McLeod’s car in the fatal collision.
Rooney, who had now been awake for nearly 24 hours, decided his players should hear the news from him. He called them all, one by one.
“The players were breaking down on the phone, and after that, I’d pick the phone up, tell someone else and — and then someone else,” Rooney recalls.
“I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been for him,” Elliott said of his manager. “I have the utmost respect for him. That was actually his birthday as well, so I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
The following night, the team met at their Moss Rose stadium in the club bar and sat for hours. “We sat in the room and cried together for a few hours,” Elliott says. “But also, the beautiful thing about football is that it continues.”
Macclesfield canceled their game the following weekend to, as Elliott put it, “grieve as a group.” They lost two of their next three games. The FA Cup third-round date would be the fourth.
LESSON 3: Ignore the odds
All Crystal Palace’s players had to do was look to their left to see the warning sign. It was written on the side tunnel, the last they would have seen before they stepped out onto the field for the FA Cup tie. It read, in capital letters: “DREAM. BELIEVE. ACHIEVE. AGAINST ALL ODDS.”
Maybe Palace players never paid much notice. The pitch had been freshly thawed from a snowstorm days earlier. Macclesfield captain Dawson, on top of his job at the candle company and youth coaching, made time to help club staff shovel snow off the pitch earlier that week for a league game — much to the ire of his manager, Rooney.
“I was on the shovel until the gaffer rang me,” Dawson says. “He wasn’t very happy. I told him that I was just sat on the tractor all day, which I hadn’t. I just lied.”
Dawson’s hard work had paid off, but it still would have been below the standards that Premier League teams are used to. Before the game, Dawson walked out onto the field and met his opposing captain, England international Marc Guéhi (who would sign for Manchester City later in January). Dawson later told British radio station TalkSport: “Franny [our assistant coach Francis Jeffers] turned around to Marc and he goes, ‘Pitch all right for you?’ He replied, ‘No, not a bit of me this.’ From that moment on I thought, ‘You know what? There’s something here for us.'”
As it turned out, it was Dawson who scored the game’s opening goal. He had been bleeding from his head just eight minutes into the tie from a clash with Palace defender Jaydee Canvot, meaning he donned a bandage around his forehead for the rest of the game. When Macclesfield were awarded a free kick 30 yards from Palace’s goal, Heathcote helped him rearrange the dressing before the ball was floated into the box, which Dawson duly headed home.
“I have to be honest, I’ve watched it several times. I don’t actually remember it happening,” Dawson says. “When a big moment like that happens, it just erases from your memory. I don’t really remember much of the game until I’ve watched it back.”
Scenes in the dressing room 🍾
Macclesfield FC players and staff sing Adele’s Someone Like You after their FA Cup victory over Crystal Palace 🎶 pic.twitter.com/by44M82ZFx
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) January 10, 2026
What happened next only added to the Cinderella story. Macclesfield went in at halftime with their highly unlikely 1-0 lead, and manager Rooney told his team to calm down: If they just didn’t concede in the second half, then they would pull off the upset. You can imagine the shock when forward Isaac Buckley-Ricketts made it 2-0 in the 61st minute, prodding the ball past the Palace goalkeeper.
There was still time for Palace to spoil the party. Macclesfield’s two-goal lead was cut in half after a free kick from Palace winger Yéremy Pino, whose £26 million ($35 million) transfer fee last summer is 26 times larger than Macclesfield’s entire player expenditure. When that proved too little, too late, the customary fan pitch invasion followed. Soon, Dawson was hoisted onto two fans’ shoulders.
“The next minute I was in the air. My calf had a cramp!” he says. “I was trying to stretch it, but everyone kept patting me and singing.”
Dawson reunited with his teammates in the changing room, McLeod’s spot still vacant. They linked arms and sang Adele’s “Someone Like You.” McLeod’s parents came to join the celebrations, and Rooney passed on the message he had agonized about before the game.
“I will always remember that they were part of this day with us,” Rooney says. “To have his family around to be part of that day with us meant a lot to me.”
Opta, the leading data provider in world soccer, have a live global power ranking of 13,000 teams across world football. Palace were 19th prior to that FA Cup clash; Macclesfield were 6,879th — around the same level as Mons Calpe, who are third in the Gibraltar Premier League, and similar to Ghanaian minnows WaleWale Catholic Stars FC.
Next up in their FA Cup odyssey is Brentford, another Premier League side who, at the time of writing, are ranked 13th in Opta’s system. Macclesfield were the first team to beat a club five leagues above them. Lightning would have to strike twice for it to happen again.
But who would bet against it?
“I’m a football fan. My whole life has been football, so the Premier League for me is what I always watch,” Rooney says. “We know lots about them … Listen, we’re not going to be naïve. We’ll treat them like any other game, like we did with Crystal Palace.
“As we do with teams in our own league, we treat every team with respect, and I’m sure they’ll treat us with that respect as well.”
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