Why the manner of Glasner’s inevitable Palace departure matters more than the timing | OneFootball

Here’s a question: how much longer can Crystal Palace realistically keep Oliver Glasner as their manager?

And here’s another: how much does it actually matter?

The quick, obvious answers are ‘Probably not that long’ and ‘Massively, obviously’. But we’re not so sure. About the second bit, that is.

Palace are quite clearly punching with Glasner as their manager. He has delivered the greatest day in the club’s history via the FA Cup win in May at the end of the club’s best ever Premier League season.

He lost Michael Olise in his first summer, and Eberechi Eze in his second, and has ridden out those departures with something apparently approaching effortless ease.

But it’s that very evolution that leads us to think Palace can be absolutely fine in a post-Glasner world too.

What matters is how his departure happens, and what Palace do next.

Because Palace already exist as a club that can sell themselves to players as a stepping stone to success at the very top of the game. Olise is flourishing at Bayern Munich, Eze at Arsenal.

That’s been a long-understood part of life for clubs outside the Premier League’s elite. The shop window of being able to show you have what it takes in the toughest and deepest league in the world.

Bournemouth, Brighton and plenty more have played this game as expertly as Palace now do.

But you don’t hear it talked about as much with managers. There’s more resistance to the idea of managers working their way up the food chain like that. Managers tend to get pigeon-holed more readily. They’re ‘not a big-club manager’, or they’re a firefighter, or they’re a scrapper, a battler, a bloodier of bigger boys’ noses but somehow not quite cut out for a job with the actual big boys.

It doesn’t help that this is very often proved right whenever such a manager actually gets a chance somewhere bigger. David Moyes remains perhaps the most flawless example of the genre, but we’ve seen it as well with Graham Potter or Nuno Espirito Santo and right now with Thomas Frank becoming apparently more interested in real Tottenham fans than real Tottenham managers.

But what Glasner has done at Palace has felt slightly different. It’s felt more like a manager succeeding in a big club manner, just at a less fashionable spot. There is a lot less of the plucky underdog about Glasner and Palace than those other managers and clubs with which he draws inevitable comparison.

That’s evidenced further in Glasner’s strikingly big-club complaints about Palace’s summer recruitment after another post-Europe letdown at the weekend. He’s very pointedly not happy just to be competing. He was ready to walk if Marc Guehi’s sale had been sanctioned at the last moments of the transfer window.

It feels like Glasner’s move from Palace, when it comes, will be to a top-tier destination and with a higher than average chance of success.

For Palace, those things turning out to be true feels far more important than when specifically the inevitable realities of football’s food chain strike.

If Palace are looking to appoint a replacement for Glasner because he’s away to manage one of the top clubs in the world, it opens up every opportunity for them to strike gold again with their own next appointment. And the bigger success Glasner makes of that move when it comes, the better it also becomes for Palace.

We’ve spoken before about all but a tiny sliver of clubs with outlandishly exceptional circumstances being selling clubs and that there should be no stigma attached to that. The same is equally true of stepping-stone club.

More clubs should absolutely lean into the idea. We can’t imagine Brighton enter into any negotiations with any prospective signing without unsubtly dropping names like Moises Caicedo and Alexis Mac Allister. And fair enough, too.

Bournemouth are in that position too, as are Palace themselves when it comes to players.

But it’s a harder game with managers. We can’t all be Vincent Kompany and show…something at Burnley that convinces Bayern Munich you’re their guy. Most managers will need a helping hand, a stepping stone, somewhere between Genuine Elite Superclub and Massively Relegated.

Glasner’s success with Palace has every chance of becoming a double-victory for the Eagles even after he’s gone, a prime example of what the future could look like for other Palace managers yet to come.

Which is why it’s absolutely vital they don’t do anything really stupid like let him talk to Spurs when Frank pays both a real price and banter price for losing to Brentford at the weekend.