At the end of the 2016/17 season, Crystal Palace unexpectedly announced that they had parted ways with manager Sam Allardyce, who was only 6 months into his two and a half year deal at Selhurst Park. After an uninspiring yet comfortable season in which Palace finished 14th on 41 points, Steve Parish, the Palace chairman, was now forced to look for a new manager. His choice suggested he was willing to take actual risks in order to give the club a chance at more than mediocrity.
On the 26th June 2017, Frank de Boer was hired as Crystal Palace manager. Despite a disastrous spell at Inter the season before, in which he only lasted 85 days, there was a sense of positivity around the appointment. De Boer spoke in interviews of his intentions to turn Palace into a side that would dominate opponents in the same way his former club Ajax do; “We are not naive. I want to play dominant when we can be dominant. But we want to dominate with and without the ball. You can be dominant without the ball by trying to move the opposition where you want them to go.” Hiring a manager with a possession heavy attack minded philosophy was quite an obvious departure from the direction embarked upon by the club under his aforementioned predecessor Sam Allardyce, whose first and only goal when hired was to avoid the drop playing stodgy, difficult-to-beat football. This appeared to be a statement of intent from Palace; they were no longer settling for being a lower midtable side, staying up by any means necessary. They could build towards taking the fight to their rivals rather than fending it off.
I’m sure you’re well aware of what happened next. After Palace had the worst start of any team in Premier League history, Frank de Boer was sacked after only 4 league matches. Palace sat bottom of the Premier League with 4 losses, and 0 goals scored. You have to question the quality of the recruitment process and the confidence the Palace higher-ups have in their own decision making if they terminate their chosen candidate after a measly 4 matches. Following this very brief attempt at steering the club in a new direction, Steve Parish hired Roy Hodgson. He followed in the footsteps of Tony Pulis, Neil Warnock and our friend Sam Allardyce as experienced British managers hired by Palace who conventionally operate with a more defensive style of play.
Terrified at the prospect of relegation and the huge financial hit it would represent for the club, Parish again settled for finishing lower midtable without worrying too much about how exciting the team was to watch on the pitch. 4 years on, Hodgson has comfortably kept Palace up every year, finishing 11th, 12th, 14th and 14th again in those years. However, Hodgson has now left the club, retiring after a 45 year managerial career, and a lengthy list of released players are following him out the door.
I honestly cannot recall seeing a Premier League clubs’ release list with as many first team players as this. As well as multiple important first team players including Andros Townsend who played over 2000 league minutes last season, it includes the likes of Mamadou Sakho, whom Palace spent £25m on during de Boer’s only transfer window, and Wayne Hennessey, who has made 110 league appearances since joining in 2014. Crystal Palace have had the spine of their squad ripped apart.
Many observant football fans have been pointing at Palace’s rapidly ageing squad for years, and the loss of multiple key players will only serve to make the desperately needed rebuild more difficult. Replacing a dozen or so first team players that represent 12,000 Premier League minutes in a single summer, during a pandemic and the financial strain that imposes, will be an extremely difficult task. Even if they are ridding themselves of largely ageing players who are on the decline, they’re getting nothing in return, and many of the players that remain in the first team picture at Palace aren’t much different.
This, of course, was avoidable. Since Palace’s promotion back in the Premier League in 2013, their lowest league finish was 15th in 2015/16. Consistently avoiding being sucked into any real relegation fight for 8 seasons in a row is no mean feat, but it has all been incredibly short sighted. Palace have been sleepwalking into their current squad situation for years. They could have stuck with the risk they took on de Boer, or perhaps undergone a more effective recruitment search when looking for a shiny new attack minded manager. Instead, they have negated to take any real risk with a potential for a loss in performance in the short term in order to look toward top half finishes or even european qualification in the longer term. Their transfer activity is a further manifestation of this.
Contrary to popular belief, climbing up the table does not always require spending more on transfers than your rivals. According to transfermarkt, Crystal Palace’s net transfer spend over the last 5 seasons (16/17–20/21) sits at -£56.86m, the second lowest of all 20/21 Premier League clubs, trailing only Southampton (-£22.68m). This would suggest that Palace have been punching massively above their weight simply by being able to function as a Premier League club while comparably spending so little on transfers. However, this tells only a small part of the story.
Some of you may be familiar with the studies of Stefan Szymanski, who analyses the business of football. One of his major findings is that the wage spend of a club in relation to their competitors strongly correlates with their league performance. The more you pay your players, the higher you tend to finish. Seems obvious, right? Importantly for us and for Palace, it correlates much more strongly than transfer spend; there are exceptions of course, some teams are more efficient and luck/variance have a part to play. In the long run, though, teams tend to get what they pay for in terms of wage spend. If you’re going to use spending to predict league performance or retrospectively assess how efficiently a club is spending, you’re better off going by their wage bill rather than their net transfer spend.
Through this new lens, their stagnant league positions don’t appear to be quite as impressive. Courtesy of @SwissRamble on twitter, we can see here that Palace had the 9th highest wage spend of all Premier League clubs in the 2019/20 season (20/21 accounts are not yet publicly available so these are the most recent ones we have). As we know, their league position has remained fairly stagnant, but their wage bill has continued to rise over the last few years in comparison to their positional rivals. Where is this extra money going? How can they be spending noticeably more than teams finishing close to them like Wolves and Brighton, only to not obtain better results and have a squad with far worse long term prospects? Perhaps signing players such as a certain 33 year old free agent centre back from a big 6 Premier League club is more expensive than it’s worth. There might not be a transfer fee attached, but those kinds of signings are definitely not ‘free’.
Speaking of which, we’ll now jump back to the squad Palace sat on top of in 2017/18, and then run through the transfers they made in each window following the hiring (and firing) of de Boer to try and understand how they reached their current situation.
This should have been the point that those in charge of recruitment and squad building at Crystal Palace identified an imminent problem in the squad, and immediately tried to start rectifying it by focusing on replacing those that would soon age out of the team with younger players. The majority of their first team players were hovering around their theoretical peak, and most of the others were the wrong side of it; this was a team trending in the wrong direction. The only U24 regulars in the squad were Loftus-Cheek and Fosu-Mensah, two loanees from top 6 clubs that played roughly half the minutes available and were not converted to permanent transfers. Did these players really make Palace much better as a team? Were they absolutely required to avoid a relegation scrap? If not, what’s the point? Why develop other clubs’ players for them?
Palace’s big signing in the 2017 summer transfer window was Mamadou Sakho from Liverpool for £25m. In hindsight, this was an abysmal transfer. Sakho was a decent centre back by all means, but Palace paid far too much for him and he spent half his time at the club injured. They also recouped 0% of the transfer fee they spent on him; he’s a member of the aforementioned large Palace exodus this summer.
To be honest, you wouldn’t have needed hindsight to know this would be a bad transfer. He had incurred constant injuries at Liverpool (he was halfway through a ligament injury when Palace signed him) and at 27, he was already at his theoretical peak, further contributing to the squad age issue. Even ignoring those concerns, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the improvement he would theoretically have been providing for Palace – even if he was able to stay fit – was absolutely not worth the fee they paid, especially considering they haven’t spent more than that on a player since. I won’t spend this long talking through each individual transfer, but I feel that Crystal Palace’s signing of Sakho is a good example of the outcomes produced by short sighted and imprecise recruitment.
The only player Palace sold in 17/18 was Steve Mandanda (remember when he was at Palace? Me neither) who went back to Marseille for a small fee after an underwhelming single season in Selhurst. Jairo Riedewald was Palace’s other summer signing, joining from Ajax for around £8m. Two more came in once January rolled around; Alexander Sorloth from Midtjylland, also for around £8m, and Jaroslaw Jach from Zaglebie Lunin for £2.5m. Again, using hindsight, it’s hard to call any of these transfers successful, but they were the kind of gambles Palace needed to make. It would also be harsh to label them as unsuccessful; Jach may never play a Premier League game but he’s still technically at Palace and only represents a small financial loss, Riedewald has finally broken into the first team over the past year, playing the most league minutes he has over one season since 15/16 when he was still with Ajax. We’ll get to Sorloth later.
Without the benefit of hindsight, it’s easier to be optimistic about these signings. Jach was 23, Sorloth 22 and Riedewald 20; signing these younger players that had the potential to become regular starters and will have some resale value whether they succeed or not is exactly the way to avoid the situation Palace find themselves in now. The problem is that they didn’t do it enough, and tended to be impatient with the younger players they did gamble on. Sorloth in particular looked a very gifted striker who might’ve made quite an impact in the Premier League if Palace had given him more than 600 minutes worth of playing time to in which to make that impact.
Moving on to 2018/19, free transfers dominate Palace’s dealings. Vicente Guaita and Max Meyer join the club for a grand total of £0, while Yohan Cabaye, Damien Delaney, Bakary Sako and Jordan Mutch all leave for the same figure. Jordan Ayew also joins on loan; Palace already have three strikers (Benteke, Wickham, Sorloth) on the books, so it’s hard to see why they feel the need to loan another one in. 22 year old Meyer, once lauded as a wonderkid, is a move that makes more sense. Giving first team spots to younger players is exactly what Palace needed to do. Of course we know that Meyer didn’t work out in the end, but it’s easier to sympathise with Palace in this situation. Guaita is not so young, but that’s less of an issue for a keeper, especially considering how good of a shot stopper he’s shown himself to be.
In their only signing of the summer involving a transfer fee, Cheikhou Kouyate was signed from West Ham for just shy of £10m. He was a similar signing to Sakho; 28 year old defensive player with Premier League experience. He did cost less than Sakho and hasn’t had the same injury issues limiting his playing time, but all the other criticisms apply. Not to mention, they could’ve just given minutes to Riedewald rather than adding another peak age, high wage player to the squad. Perhaps few of the signings Palace have made from 2017–2021 are massive blunders when you put them under a microscope individually, but it’s the general failure to understand the impending squad crisis and address it immediately that’s so troubling. Crystal Palace are running out of time now. Can they start taking positive strides in the January window?
No, of course they can’t. Bakary Sako is brought back in on a free transfer just six months after Palace released him. He’d play 30 Premier League minutes across the second half of the season before he was released for a second time a year on from the first. Alexander Sorloth is sent to Gent on a six month loan. This is understandable considering Sorloth has struggled for first team opportunities, having to compete against three other strikers for the starting spot. It immediately becomes less understandable when he’s replaced by Michy Batshuayi, who comes in on a 6 month loan from Chelsea. Why? He did up scoring 5 goals across 750 minutes, but why couldn’t Palace and Hodgson afford these opportunities to our friend Sorloth? Why take a punt on a young striker, and then loan in Ayew and Batshuayi rather than giving him genuine opportunities?
This is further evidence that when Palace actually do take the plunge and sign a younger, more raw talent, they don’t give them the opportunities to allow that gamble to pay off. Frank de Boer’s 4 match run as manager is another example of this; Crystal Palace are far too scared of relegation to take any sort of risk, to venture even just a short walk away from their 14th placed comfort zone.
The big headline for the 2019 summer transfer window was of course the sale of Aaron Wan-Bissaka to Manchester United for £50m. In the midst of a failure to recruit and develop younger players to sell on, Palace had a diamond drop out of their academy, and they cashed in. Wan-Bissaka is still the most expensive departure in Palace history, selling for around double that of Yannick Bolasie, their next most expensive sale. At last, just in time to narrowly avoid catastrophe, a huge cash injection to fuel a rebuild of the squad. Another chance to recruit some talented young players and transition the older, soon to be out of contract ones away from the first team. Or so you’d think.
Crystal Palace’s big money signing of this window was James McCarthy, signing from Everton for a whopping £3m. Jordan Ayew was converted into a permanent transfer for £2.5m despite underwhelming performances in which he amassed 1 league goal over his loan spell. Victor Camarasa came in on loan from Real Betis, and a certain free agent centre back by the name of Gary Cahill made the short trip from Chelsea to Selhurst on, that’s right, a free transfer. Sorloth left for another loan, Trabzonspor this time, to try (and succeed) to rekindle his quickly faltering career. There are no excuses for this transfer window, it’s just bad, plain and simple. Forget about rebuilding the whole team using the Wan-Bissaka money, they didn’t even bother to bring in a new right back to replace him. As for the signings they did manage to make, McCarthy was 28 and had massively struggled with injuries throughout his career. Ayew was 27, and was anything but prolific in front of goal the previous season. Camarasa was a short term fix in midfield and was not converted into a permanent transfer. Gary Cahill was 33, had not played football for a year, was 33, was undoubtedly given massive wages, and was 33 years of age. In case you didn’t get that, he was old. A £50m sized gift from one of their own gave Palace a last ditch chance to save their squad, and they avoided blowing this opportunity by not bothering to take it at all.
Funnily enough, the summer 2020 window is arguably Palace’s best showing from the ones I’ve gone through here. Alexander Sorloth is finally freed, signing for Leipzig as alluded to previously for £18m. Once again, as he goes out the door, Michy Batshuayi comes in, embarking upon his second Palace loan spell. Talented, versatile young defender Nathan Ferguson is snatched from West Brom on a free transfer. How about that, sometimes you can get a decent prospect of a player for free! Eberechi Eze, who had been linked with the likes of Spurs and Arsenal, arrives from QPR, signed for around £16m. It becomes a hattrick of championship signings when Jack Butland comes in as a backup keeper for just shy of £1m. Once again, it’s too little too late, but signing two talented young players promised to make the inevitable rebuild over the next couple of years slightly less painful. Eze has settled into the team nicely, but Ferguson incurred a hamstring injury in September that he is still recovering from. He is yet to play a single Premier League minute, and his return date from injury is still unclear. Perhaps Palace really have suffered constant bad luck, and their processes might not have looked so inadequate without this misfortune. Then again, they also signed Nathaniel Clyne on a free, so maybe not.
The only notable business of the January window was the signing of striker Jean Philippe-Mateta on an 18 month loan from Mainz. Mateta looked a very capable striker by all means, but this is yet another example of an unnecessary signing for a squad already encumbered with strikers. The presence of Benteke, Batshuayi, Ayew and Zaha meant Mateta only started two league matches in the first six months of his loan. Palace just can’t resist loaning in an unnecessary extra striker.
So here we are, up to date in the summer 2021 window. The Eagles have just announced the signing of Michael Olise, another very impressive young player from the Championship that could’ve easily been picked up by a bigger club, and only cost around £8.5m. Perhaps less impressive was the appointment of Patrick Vieira to replace Hodgson; not necessarily an awful manager, but the experience he does have isn’t cause for much excitement. It’s especially underwhelming considering they came so close to appointing Lucien Favre a few weeks earlier.
At the time of writing, Crystal Palace have a squad of only 20 players, and despite losing all those older players at the end of their contracts, the average age is still just below 28. It includes Mateta, who is of course only on loan and has barely played so far, Jaroslaw Jach, who I’ll remind you is yet to make his Premier League debut after 3 and a half years at the club, Jacob Montes, a 22 year old American with less than 500 senior minutes played, all in the USLC (the effective second tier of football in the US) and Nathan Ferguson, who’ll need to recover from his year long injury before making his Premier League debut. This is obviously not a squad that is capable of handling a 38 match Premier League season, and there will inevitably be a fair few more signings made before the transfer window slams shut (if you’re reading this article and certain released players have renewed their contracts, or new players have been signed from elsewhere that I have not mentioned, please keep in mind I unfortunately cannot tell the future. This is an exploration of how they arrived at this mammoth rebuild, and an assessment of their situation at the time of writing). Unless they can pull off the best rebuild of any club ever, Palace are pretty likely to go down in the next couple of years. The question I’m interested in is, will they accept their fate and continue to rebuild for a likely drop down to the Championship in the next few seasons, or will they plough on with their ‘survival or bust’ philosophy?
Thanks for reading! This wasn’t a short article, so cheers for getting all the way to the end. A huge thank you to Ronan (@ronanmann on twitter) for providing the visualisations for this article and helping with the writing too. If you don’t already, follow him and myself (@spagyama) for plenty more writing & data vizzes in the future.
