Crystal Palace in crisis: will Steve Parish get the Eagles flying again? | OneFootball

Eight months after winning the FA Cup, the captain has gone, the manager is leaving and the leading goalscorer wants out

Rewind, but don’t go too far back. Because it doesn’t take long for the picture to be very different indeed. Just 54 days ago, Crystal Palace captain Marc Guéhi thumped home a late headed winner at Craven Cottage that catapulted the Eagles to fourth in the Premier League with more than a third of the season gone.

They had European football for the first time, were Carabao Cup quarter-finalists, and had beaten Liverpool three times in 81 days during a club-record 19-game unbeaten run. Still alive was the feeling of a club living its wildest dreams, having won the FA Cup and the Community Shield — and made Wembley shake, twice.

For fans, what the future might hold was a giddying thought. Then the wheels fell off. It is hard not to look back on that Guéhi goal and wonder: did Palace peak in that moment?

In two months of tumult since, Palace manager Oliver Glasner has announced he will step down in the summer, Guéhi has been sold to Manchester City, and Jean-Philippe Mateta has made it clear he wants to leave this month. Palace have not won since early December, becoming against Macclesfield the first FA Cup holders to crash out to non-league opposition in 117 years.

Slipping into the relegation zone looks unlikely, but their buffer is just eight points. They must get February right, with Nottingham Forest, Burnley and Wolves all to come.

Oliver Glasner has said that he will leave at the end of the season

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“The club is in transition,” Glasner admitted last weekend, “and, yes, it is a tough period for everyone.” It didn’t have to be this way, though. With better planning and shrewder investment in the squad, their crowning moment could have proven a catalyst for more.

Chairman Steve Parish must now decide what the club ultimately strives for. Premier League survival to keep the bills paid? Or a second coming of that magical period when a club on the peripheries for most of its 121 years began bullying the big boys and achieved silverware and European football?

If the Eagles are to soar so high again, a chastening couple of months have demonstrated the Palace needs rebuilding. Properly.

Glasner’s successor

In his first of two extraordinary interview outbursts in the aftermath of the January 17 defeat at Sunderland, Glasner insisted he and his players had been “abandoned completely”, informed 28 hours before the game that Guéhi had been sold. In the second, he launched a thinly veiled critique of the board’s perceived lack of ambition, claiming they were content with “42 points”, just enough to “not get relegated”, and added: “Crystal Palace is fine to end the season like this, with Oliver Glasner, with another manager — I don’t know, I don’t care.”

Whether or not this was him begging to be sacked, Glasner always has perspective once he’s cooled down and was right to state his team were never as good as their 19-game unbeaten run implied, just as they are not as bad right now as an 11-game winless run suggests. He and Parish cleared the air over dinner in London last week, the same setting at which the Austrian informed the chairman in October he’d be leaving in the summer, not signing a new deal.

While most fans are hurt by that decision and some feel disparaged by him announcing it early, they love Glasner. Achievements on the pitch during his tenure have been groundbreaking.

Yet the best manager in the club’s history is also ruthlessly ambitious and wants to be tested at the highest level, in the Champions League. By June, Parish will have had seven months to decide his successor.

The club admire the work of Andoni Iraola at Bournemouth

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They like Andoni Iraola, but Bournemouth to Palace may feel a sideways step. Could Sir Gareth Southgate be tempted back to the club that made him, or, after England, has he knocked management on the head? Thomas Frank, if he’s sacked at Spurs? Michael Carrick, if Manchester United have grander plans? Whoever it is needs to make Palace greater than the sum of their parts.

In the meantime, it is time to “focus on the football again”, says Glasner. “That’s what we’re paid for.” Certainly, he must turn form around to keep himself hot property for Europe’s elite clubs this summer. They face Bosnian side Zrinjski Mostar for a place in the Conference League last 16 and, judging by the teams involved, ought to win the whole thing. The new manager would then walk into a Europa League club.

Shape of the squad

The evolution of the squad will determine whether the Eagles are gazing upwards or peering down.

Palace, with their place in the English football pyramid and their fertile catchment area of south London, have always been a selling club, so sporting director Dougie Freedman’s resignation last March serves as the most damaging loss they have suffered in years.

Freedman signed Championship talents such as Michael Olise, Eberechi Eze and Adam Wharton. Of the £119m made when Olise (to Bayern Munich, 2024) and Eze (Arsenal, 2025) were sold, £92m was profit. Wharton has a number of major European clubs lining up ahead of the summer, when his sale could raise as much as £100m.

And Palace must continue to blood their own. Wilfried Zaha gave more than a decade of outstanding service; fellow academy product Aaron Wan-Bissaka raised £50m when sold to United in 2019.

A number of big clubs are interested in signing Adam Wharton this summer

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A changing of the guard is already in motion. £35m is a lot to splash on off-form Brennan Johnson but his arrival this month was enabled by selling Eze. A striker is needed if wantaway Jean-Philippe Mateta leaves. Nottingham Forest have tabled a £35m offer after Juventus and Aston Villa explored a move then retreated. Mateta has been a fine goalscorer, even if he has been wasteful this term. He’d be a big miss and needs carefully replacing.

A task for the next head coach: get midfielders scoring. When playing there, Wharton, Will Hughes, Jefferson Lerma, Daichi Kamada and Justin Devenny have one goal between them in two years. More than anything, Palace are crying out for squad depth, and it is this which should have been addressed when in their pomp last summer. Right wing-back cover is needed for Daniel Muñoz, and though signing another Guéhi is nearly impossible, bringing in a promising centre-back is not.

Will they dream big?

Previous co-owner John Textor could not be accused of failing to dream big, but Palace will feel they are on firmer ground since Woody Johnson bought his 43 per cent stake in the club in July.

While alignment is needed between Johnson and the other shareholders, it is Parish who runs the show day-to-day. A big part of the club’s future is the much-delayed expansion of Selhurst Park from 26,000 capacity to 34,000.

Yet the Palace rebuild must be driven by recruitment. Parish must work with transfer consultant Iain Moody and sporting director Matt Hobbs to replace Glasner and improve the squad.

Glasner is leaving because he demands one thing from himself: “100 per cent, every single day” — an admission in black and white that he feels he has achieved all he can at Selhurst. He wants a new challenge, where his own fierce ambition is matched by his employers.

Woody Johnson bought a 43 per cent stake in the club last year

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Parish was willing to sell Guéhi to Liverpool on summer deadline day. Midway through his medical, Palace U-turned on his £35m sale. They deserve immense credit for making him one of the world’s best defenders, but they knew long ago they’d have to sell him, not lose him on a free. It is one thing accepting his replacement will be a downgrade, quite another not having adequate cover lined up.

The ingredients were there in the summer to start building something greater than top-flight stability, to overtake rivals Brighton in the fast lane and into a sustainable slot alongside Villa and Newcastle in the Premier League’s aspirational upper-middle class. Now there’s the sense of a missed opportunity.

Like all clubs, Palace’s spending is restricted by their revenues, but they are a selling club. Without reinvesting well — with method, strategy, a sense of direction — there is no hope of climbing the ladder.

The Glasner era has raised the ambition of the players at the club and also the ambition within the fanbase. The board’s ambition, too? That may only become clear after he has left.