Oliver Glasner is already loved at Crystal Palace – will he become their greatest manager? | OneFootball

The Eagles are going places after a slow start under Austrian boss

In just over a year in charge of Crystal Palace, Oliver Glasner has cultivated a reputation for placing huge demands on his players — a culture in which availability, application and smart decision-making are the very least he expects.

While practising the pole vault in the gym during a PE lesson that morning, he suffered an injury.

Ried’s final game of the season was that night, and Glasner had no choice but to pull out. He missed the 1-1 draw away to FC Braunau and received a fervid rollicking from manager Klaus Roitinger, who could not understand why he had felt pole-vaulting his way through the morning was a responsible way of preparing for a game in the evening.

Such idiosyncratic anecdotes are locked away in Glasner’s past now that the Austrian is managing at the highest level, in charge of the Eagles and having led Eintracht Frankfurt to Europa League glory in 2021/22 by knocking out Barcelona.

Whenever interviewed during Glasner’s time at the helm, Palace players have all spoken about how intense his training sessions are.

‘Intense’ is a word that keeps cropping up when discussing what Glasner is really like with those who know him personally.

Eddie Nketiah celebrates scoring Palace’s third goal in the FA Cup win over Millwall

Zac Goodwin/PA Wire

Even though bargaining power is such that there can be sound reasons why clubs sometimes choose to complete the bulk of their business at the end of a transfer window, Glasner was disappointed that Steve Parish, Dougie Freedman and the board left it until deadline day to make key signings in the summer. He said publicly, on multiple occasions, that it had made his job difficult, and was open about wanting business done early in January. When Romain Esse was signed from Millwall on January 18 — a whole 16 days before the window shut — he complained again, in his press conference.

There were colourful disagreements and arguments with sporting directors when he was manager of Wolfsburg, as well as at Frankfurt, who he felt did not adequately replace key centre-back Martin Hinteregger when he left. The signing of Manchester United’s Victor Lindelof never got over the line.

Glasner’s ire in those moments serves as a warning to those on the board at Palace. Relationships are rosy right now, but as a German source who knows Glasner made crystal-clear: “He can become very angry when things do not go his way.”

Faith in his methods

Anger was not his coping mechanism for Palace’s slow start to the season. Instead, he appeared to shoulder some of the blame — after all, the effects of injuries in the early months were made worse by Glasner choosing to shrink the size of the first-team squad last summer with a view to working with a smaller group of players.

It took until beating Tottenham on October 27 for the Eagles to finally win a first Premier League match of the season and clamber out of the relegation zone.

A keen skier, Glasner had visited his family in Austria during that month's international break and, while up in the Alps, family members had remarked that his mind was so preoccupied by Palace’s rotten start that it was as though he wasn’t even there.

Glasner believed the team were not getting just rewards for their performances in those early months and reassured his downbeat players after a 1-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest on October 21 that their luck would soon change.

It was a period further disrupted by various individuals’ involvement in the Copa America, Euro 2024 and the Paris Olympics over the summer, fracturing Palace's pre-season. Time and time again, Glasner has come back to this when speaking to the media.

“We had 12 players starting [training], [at the] earliest, 10 days before the start of the Premier League campaign,” he explained. “We had six players 10 days before, one player starting one day before. Ismaila Sarr, for example, was not allowed to train with Marseille in pre-season; he had to train individually. We had four signings on deadline day already after three games.

“Then we started training together in the middle of September. How could we expect everything would be fluid?”

Glasner has challenged Steve Parish and the Palace board over transfer strategy

AFP via Getty Images

Eventually it clicked. Jean-Philippe Mateta started scoring, Dean Henderson started keeping clean-sheets — currently six on the bounce, away from home — Sarr emerged as a crucial player and clear £12.7million bargain, and Adam Wharton overcame pain post-groin surgery.

Having started the campaign in ‘relegation form’, Palace are now above Tottenham and United in the league and FA Cup quarter-finalists — and a decent number of people’s wildcard picks to win that competition for the first time.

Destined for great things?

Already, he is being touted as one of the Eagles’ best-ever managers; many supporters believe the 50-year-old is well-placed to leave (whenever he does) as the outright best, ahead of even Steve Coppell, provided the front-foot brand of football on show at Selhurst Park continues.

Rumours in recent days of RB Leipzig lining Glasner up as their preferred replacement for the under-pressure Marco Rose have unnerved a fair few Palace fans. Leipzig are owned by Red Bull, as are the club where Glasner first cut his teeth as an assistant manager: Red Bull Salzburg.

But Glasner seems settled — only ‘on the move’ in the sense that he has a penchant for repeatedly punching the air when Palace score and darted out of his technical area and down the touchline to embrace Daniel Munoz when the Colombian stole a November 1-1 draw with Newcastle deep in injury time.

Glasner appeared curt and straightforward this time last year, but the subsequent 12 months have shown him to be philosophical and friendly.

An avid user of the English-translated metaphor, both when it makes his point clearer and when it does not, he often stays behind after his weekly press conference to chat about all manner of subjects, from train strikes to skiing to cinnamon rolls. And when Glasner was in charge at Frankfurt, he could regularly be seen sipping coffee and perusing the newspaper at cafés across the city, “just like your ordinary neighbour”, as one local puts it.

The 1922 novel, Siddhartha, by the Nobel Prize-winning German writer Hermann Hesse explores the meaning of life and became a favourite of Glasner’s in his formative years. He referred his son to this book when didn’t know what to study at university, explaining that sometimes in life it can take a little longer to recognise what it is that makes you happy.

The former Arsenal and Fulham right-back Moritz Volz was so inspired by a guest-speaker talk Glasner gave on football tactics and man-management while studying his coaching badges in Germany that he personally organised to meet him again over dinner. That same natural charisma is clearly felt by his players.

Tactically, he is “pragmatic” and “flexible” but has seldom needed to show so at Palace, where his 3-4-2-1 system has worked a treat. At Frankfurt, it was only after failing to win any of his first eight games that he ditched a back-four and went to a three.

Glasner is described by Stephan Reich, a journalist and author of books about Eintracht Frankfurt, as being “very, very ambitious, maybe a bit too ambitious”, but it seems to be working. He may not admit it himself, but he and his coaching staff have made Mateta, Wharton, Will Hughes and others tangibly better players, while also promoting youth by trusting Asher Agbinone, Justin Devenny and Caleb Kporha.

Palace are 12th and yet to shake off that adage that they are allergic to any other position in the table, but under the Austrian’s tutelage there has been genuine progress, not to mention wins at Anfield, Old Trafford, 4-0 at home to United and 5-0 at home to Aston Villa. “My philosophy is easy - it’s scoring goals,” he said in his very first interview.

Glasner isn’t worried by much that he can’t control. “The guy who puts the most pressure on me is me.”