The line between stability and stasis can often feel tissue paper-thin. Spot the difference between Crystal Palace’s 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons – 14th place in the league, eliminated at the first hurdle in domestic cup competitions, six home wins, eight home defeats, one victory against a top-six club (Manchester United away), unbeaten against the bottom three. Given the absence of supporters at Selhurst Park, perhaps Palace should be applauded for ensuring that fans missed nothing new.
Not that consistency was any cause for great alarm. Roy Hodgson managed during a period of relative austerity. Those budgets were self-inflicted: between 2013-14 and 2018-19, they sat fifth in a Premier League net spend table. Money was not spent with wanton disregard for financial sense, but Palace did prove themselves incapable of selling players at high prices. During that half decade, only two players left Selhurst Park for a fee of greater than £5m.
A repeated pattern of cause and effect was engineered. It began with a regular turnover of managers – Pulis to Warnock to Pardew to Allardyce to De Boer. Each arrived with a transfer list and the managerial short-termism (only Pardew lasted longer than 30 matches) decreed that those lists were stuffed with developed players at peak age. They were signed on contracts that extended long beyond the managers who signed them and so Palace had a swell of expensive fringe players. In 2019-20, they had the ninth-highest wage bill in the league.
Last season, that strategy came home to roost. Hodgson was the oldest manager in the league, eventually winding down after a 45-year coaching career. Palace had the oldest average starting XI in the Premier League, but that statistic hardly covers the full extent of that issue. Of the 17 oldest teams selected last season, Palace had 16 of them. Of the club’s 11 most regular starters, 10 were aged 28 or over and eight aged 30 or above.
And so to the crossroads. On 30 June, the contracts of 11 players expired and all have left the club. They include a number of senior first-team players: Gary Cahill, Patrick van Aanholt, Mamadou Sakho, Andros Townsend, Nathaniel Clyne and James McCarthy.
Hodgson has also left, replaced by Patrick Vieira, who was not the club’s first choice but whose profile and philosophy suggests a deliberate lurch in ethos from Hodgson’s pragmatism. There is enough work to fill two summers, let alone one effectively shortened by major international tournaments.
Football clubs survive through effective succession planning; Palace are having to draw and launch a new red-and-blueprint for the first team in a matter of months. But uncertainty provides an opportunity to pivot from short-termism to a more sustainable, enduring strategy. They bought the best young player in the Championship last summer in Eberechi Eze and may well have done the same with the signing of Michael Olise. Marc Guehi is an extraordinarily highly-rated central defender and Joachim Andersen was the best centre-back of the relegated clubs and is only 25. More will be needed, but more will come.
Underneath the typical noise of a summer transfer window, with its tedious social media clamouring and self-serving leaks from agents, sits the jewel in Palace’s crown.
Last July, the club’s academy was granted Category 1 status, news that coincided with an announcement of upgraded academy facilities that the club expect to be completed this summer. The aim is to create a pathway between community and academy, youth teams and first team that the club believe can fuel its next era.
This matters at Selhurst Park. South London has established itself as one of the most prolific hotbeds of young footballing talent in Europe over the last decade. Palace – despite being the only Premier League club south of the Thames and within the M25 – were on the outside looking in. Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Jadon Sancho, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Emile Smith Rowe and Declan Rice are just five players who were born in south London but were developed in academies north of the river.
Category 1 status could change that. No longer will Selhurst Park be the natural habitat of ageing Premier League players but a breeding ground for the next generation of south London footballers that can be developed and either sold for significant profit or form the backbone of the first team. There are high hopes that David Omilabu, an 18-year-old striker born and raised in south London as a Palace fan, may be the next. The appointment of Saïd Aïgoun from Paris Saint-Germain as a development coach has been celebrated by supporters as much as any new first-team signing.
Wherever there is systemic change there is risk; the name of Frank de Boer still causes a Pavlovian wince in SE25 and its environs. Vieira is only in his second first-team job in Europe. The squad is still thin. Palace’s wages-to-turnover ratio is 93 per cent in its latest accounts, as per football finance expert Kieron O’Connor, although there are mitigating circumstances. The long-term injury to Eze is a huge blow.
But what choice did Crystal Palace have? They have one of football’s best production lines on their doorstep. They have a new manager, new players, new academy facilities and a new identity. They are aiming to establish unbreakable links between the composite parts of that identity and, even if it takes time and comes with inevitable setbacks, they will be mightily better for it. Most importantly of all, Crystal Palace are exciting again. Right now, that alone is enough to get Selhurst jumping.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3BXiAjl
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