Ask a Crystal Palace fan what price they would have paid at this time last year to win the FA Cup. Would they have taken a run of 11 games without a win, Eberechi Eze and Marc Guéhi sold, Oliver Glasner disillusioned and on his way out of the club, and a probable relegation battle ahead? Almost certainly, yes.
But equally that Palace fan would be within their rights to ask why there should be a pay-off at all. This isn’t like Portsmouth winning the FA Cup in 2008 while living beyond their means under Alexandre Gaydamak, going into administration in 2009-10. It’s not like Wigan winning the FA Cup as they were relegated in 2013 having been sustained in the Premier League by Dave Whelan.
It’s not even like Leicester who were forced into cutbacks and relegated, two years after adding an FA Cup to their 2016 Premier League title (and were fined on their return to the Championship for Financial Fair Play breaches in their promotion season of 2013-14). There is no suggestion at all of Palace having overstretched; rather they have been chewed up by the economic realities of the modern game.
There is no real villain here who has exploited the club for his own ends, even if Steve Parish may regret working with John Textor, whose Eagle Football Holdings seems to specialise in alienating fans of each of the clubs it owns. There has been no foolish overspending – even if the idea that the fees paid for Brennan Johnson, Yéremy Pino and Jaydee Canvot exceed those recouped for Eze and Guéhi is not immediately easy to justify.
If he has any self-awareness, Parish may also be regretting his comments during Covid when, rejecting the idea that Premier League clubs should help out those lower down the food chain, he said that “supermarkets” were not bailing out “corner shops”. That sort of financial Darwinism cuts both ways.
None of which changes the fact that Palace have done everything by the book. This is the modern way. Identify young promise and mid-range talent, buy it, develop it, sell it on, replace. That’s how it’s meant to be. It’s how Brighton, Brentford and Bournemouth do things. It’s the reality of existence for the Premier League’s mid-ranks. It makes sense. It’s an accommodation to the economic environment.
But there is a ceiling, and Palace pressed against it pretty hard. In all but one season since their return to the Premier League in 2013, Palace have finished between 10th and 15th. In mid-December they were fourth in the league and favourites to win the Europa Conference League, even if they had failed to qualify automatically for the last 16. Something truly spectacular seemed possible.
That they were even in the Europa Conference League rather than the Europa League, of course, had been the first intimation that all would not be entirely well after the FA Cup win; the decision to demote them for Nottingham Forest may have been technically correct but it felt a demonstration of how modern football will snuff out romance wherever it can. Textor did, at the deadline, part-own Palace and Lyon; that the beneficiaries were Nottingham Forest, with whose owner, Evangelos Marinakis, Textor enjoys a close business relationship, only heightened the sense of grievance.
But since losing 3-0 at home to Manchester City on 14 December, Palace haven’t won. They’re 15th, only eight points clear of a resurgent West Ham in 18th. It’s true that is also only nine points off fifth place and probable Champions League qualification, but nobody at Selhurst Park is looking in that direction at the moment. How then, has it come to this? Is there anything Palace could have done differently?
A player of Eze’s quality was always going to leave, as Michael Olise had the previous summer. Perhaps the timeframe has been compressed, but that’s always been true: Champions League players want to play for Champions League clubs. Guéhi falls into a similar category, but the difference is that, with his contract expiring, Palace had to accept a relatively low fee rather than risk losing him for free in the summer.
Perhaps there were issues of communication, but none of that can have come as a surprise to Glasner. Or indeed to the other players, notably Jean-Philippe Mateta, who now seems to have been unsettled by the manager’s announcement of his own departure.
What seems to have caused the frustration is a perceived failure to build on the FA Cup success but, in truth, it’s not clear what Palace could have done differently. In financial terms winning the FA Cup may bring a short-term boost in exposure, but little more. Palace made around £7.5m from playing in the Conference League.
They would have roughly doubled that in the Europa League, but even that is far from life-changing money – although the Europa League is clearly the more attractive competition and offers the possibility of Champions League qualification and a significant boost to revenues. Perhaps they could have been more ambitious while remaining within PSR, but with the decoupling from Textor, Parish can hardly be blamed if he envisaged a quiet summer.
And that perhaps is the major issue. For Palace fans, winning a first trophy was the achievement of a lifetime ambition. It’s a day that will endure forever in the collective memory of the club and, less intensely, of football more generally. It feels like it should make some sort of long-term difference to the club’s status, but financially nothing much has changed.
Palace will probably end up, once again, finishing between 10th and 15th. And that means that the cycle of sourcing talent and selling at a profit goes on, just with the added fatigue of playing in European competition, and with the FA Cup success having underlined just how good some of their players were, making them even more attractive to predators.
It’s very hard, bordering on the impossible, even with an FA Cup success, without an enormous injection of cash, for a club to climb from being a top-15 side to a top-10 side, let alone a top-eight side or a top-six side.
And the risk of collapse, of one sale prompting a flurry of departures, the example of Leicester is ever present. Money is destiny.
