Five reasons Crystal Palace can thrive this season
Start how you finished, lads, will be the message inside the Crystal Palace dressing room at Brentford on Sunday afternoon. If only it was as easy as that.
Palace ended last season with a flourish under Oliver Glasner, winning six of their final seven games to put their players in the spotlight as a result.
Adam Wharton went from a Championship player in January to an England international by June, joining teammates Eberechi Eze, Marc Guehi and Dean Henderson in the Euro 2024 squad, while Michael Olise was a Bayern Munich player by the time that tournament was over.
That was the sad inevitability of Palace’s end-of-season success, a feeling other clubs around them know all too well, whereby the bigger teams will dangle the prospect of European football and bigger salaries to distract players from the fact game-time may be more limited and the grass may not be greener.
With that in mind, Palace have another two weeks before they can truly settle and work out their lot for the campaign ahead. Olise has gone, while Eze is a target for Tottenham and Manchester City, and Guehi is open to a Newcastle move despite a fourth bid being rejected this week.
The hunch would be that Eze stays and Guehi goes, but Glasner seems unflustered by the interest in his captain, who looks set to play against Brentford despite his uncertain future.
“Well, yes, Marc trained today with us, we talked together,” Glasner said on Friday.
“I have no other information. I have to look at my bank account to see if something has come in but it doesn’t look like [it] so we plan with Marc.
“He’s our player, he’s our captain, and I can’t tell you anything else.”
With or without Guehi, keeping Eze should be the priority, which in turn would increase optimism around another top-half finish.
Eze enjoyed his best Premier League return last season, scoring 11 times despite making 11 fewer appearances than the season prior – when he scored 10 – and the majority of his goals came after Glasner arrived in February.
Having fleeted between left wing and No 10, Eze’s role could well depend on whether new signing Daichi Kamada starts from the off for Palace.
“Daichi is a player who is creative and who can score goals,” Glasner said. “He knows how we want to play, so it made it a little bit easier to integrate him in the way of playing. From the first day, he understood it, because we worked together for two years.”
The Japan international could be the closest thing to an Olise replacement Palace have, and having impressed in pre-season – scoring last weekend against Nantes – it seems likely Kamada will start alongside Eze at Brentford in a 3-4-2-1 behind the striker, almost certainly Jean-Philippe Mateta.
That in turn gives Palace options off the bench – including Jeffrey Schlupp, Odsonne Edouard and Jordan Ayew – while fellow new arrival Ismaila Sarr provides more pace out wide in contrast to Kamada’s strength of playing down the middle.
“It’s different if Daichi plays there. It’s different if Ismaila plays there,” Glasner said, when asked about replacing Olise.
“It’s different if Odsonne plays there, like he did against West Ham in this position. It’s different if Jeffrey Schlupp plays there – but they all have their strengths.
“One is quicker, one is more of a technical player, and one is more of a striker. It’s now about adapting. It’s not about replacing Michael one to one and having the same type and quality, because we would have had to spend more money than we got from his sale.”
Without Olise, Palace face an almost Aston Villa post-Grealish season whereby it is time for the other players to step up, and as Glasner says, adapt to this new scenario and figure out their own way forward.
With Eze, that becomes easier, likewise if Mateta – crowned Palace’s player of the season last term – picks up where he left off.
Mateta’s hat-trick on the final day of last season took him to 13 goals in 13 games under Glasner, more than any other player in the league could boast from the end of February until May.
That transformation propelled Palace up the table and shook off the cobwebs that were multiplying under Roy Hodgson. After eight-straight bottom-half finishes, 10th was their best placing since 2014-15.
The hope will be therefore that the foundations are there for a repeat, at the very least, and in that regard Kamada and Sarr could be the current unknowns that go on to deliver, on top of the fact Wharton will only get better.
Stability is crucial, though, meaning Palace will also need Fulham’s interest in Joachim Andersen to cool to ensure a season that boasts promise isn’t hampered from the outset.
All this before the race for Wharton next summer. Shall we start the bidding at £100m? If that sounds foolish, 12 more months and the price other midfielders have sold for in recent years says otherwise.