Crystal Palace seemed ripe for the vultures and uncertainty over their Europa fate only reinforced those concerns, but Arsenal and Liverpool have floundered.
While Crystal Palace assemble a crack legal team comprised of Ronnie Radford, Ricky Villa, the Crazy Gang, Bert Trautmann’s neck and Dave Whelan’s leg in preparation for having their fate drawn out ludicrously long by numerous different stakeholders desperate to besmirch the actual Magic of the FA Cup, it is at least heartening to see the vultures kept at bay by the Eagles so far.
Three players have been released and two more have left for nothing, each exchanging niceties with free agent Walter Benitez on their way out of Selhurst Park.
Fulham are the only other Premier League club with an entirely neutral net spend this summer, but while the Cottagers tend to keep their powder dry until a late dash, Palace have been forced into the newly-created role of Schrodinger’s Transfer Option: Europa League football might be locked within, but new signings may have to join before having that confirmed either way.
It is a preposterous situation largely not of their own doing, which has at least extricated Palace from John Textor’s multi-club shambles but will ultimately likely be dragged in front of an arbitration court in Switzerland about a week before the season starts, while probably somehow involving Evangelos Marinakis because he is messy and lives for the drama.
Palace chairman Steve Parish expertly alluded to the farcical circumstances in his welcoming quotes to back-up keeper Benitez, who he described as “an excellent addition to our squad” ahead of “what promises to be a busy season, competing on multiple fronts, in 2025-26”.
He probably wasn’t talking about their defence of the FA Cup, a tilt at the Carabao or the upcoming shot at Community Shield glory.
When Palace do put this sordid ordeal behind them they will hope to plan their maiden continental tour post-haste. But in among the Ryanair confirmation emails will be an increasingly bizarre number of messages from Premier League chairmen floating player-plus-cash deals.
Quite how this wonderful, trophy-winning squad has been deemed to have useful and desirable composite parts who are simultaneously only worth trying to sign by dragging their values down with part-exchange proposals is a mystery.
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But Arsenal and Liverpool reportedly throwing fringe squad members into bids for Palace’s crown jewels has only added to the absurdity, especially when the player offered by the former does not appear to actually exist.
Eberechi Eze might suffer for being one of many transfer plates Arsenal are masterfully spinning – and not one the Gunners feel is most precious. If Parish was “genuinely astounded” by the lack of suitors in the England international last season then his last few seasons of output not prompting a rush to trigger his £68m release clause must be bewildering.
Yet Arsenal are undoubtedly interested, with PSR-friendly ‘separate deals’ mooted first before the peculiar reveal of the ‘determined’ Andrea Berta’s internal machinations: inserting a ‘promising defender’ into talks as a ‘makeweight’.
The Sun website – yes, we know – does not divulge the identity of the Arsenal spare part but does disclose that ‘he is an emerging star who’s played a handful of games for the first team’.
And it feels like a slight problem that literally not one single actual human person exists who matches the criteria of being an ’emerging’ Arsenal defender who has ‘played a handful of games for the first team’.
Jakub Kiwior is the usual fodder for such speculation but 68 appearances for the club rules him out, while teenagers Maldini Kacurri and Josh Nichols have both been used just once by Mikel Arteta so hardly fit the bill either. Do they realise Ayden Heaven has left? Is David Grondin still emerging?
Once those negotiations have been navigated, Palace might briefly entertain parting with captain Marc Guehi for about half his £50m price tag when Liverpool blind them with the irresistible sheen of Ben Doak in return.
The Liverpool tax has been successfully imposed on Brentford and Bournemouth but crucially never in those vanishingly rare but often reported part-exchanges, and especially not to extract the best players from the Bees and Cherries.
These are ultimately minor conveniences in the bigger picture at best for Palace, who might have expected to spend these weeks fending off bidders for Adam Wharton, Jean-Philippe Mateta, Daniel Munoz and others along with crossing their fingers over Eze and Guehi.
Expensive intra-Premier League transfers have perhaps never been quite so ubiquitous yet Palace have been trapped in a state of beneficial limbo.
“No player has come to me and said they want to leave,” Oliver Glasner said ahead of the final game of last season. “My wish is to keep the squad together and get some profiles we don’t have in the squad to help the squad improve.”
His addendum that “we are very well prepared, we learn from the past and get the deals done quickly” looks mightily naive in July but should not be judged too harshly in hindsight.
But the Austrian might prefer this predicament to the disarray of 12 months ago, when a chaotic pre-season threatened to thwart the greatest campaign in Palace history before it even began.
“We had 12 players starting [training], [at the] earliest, 10 days before the start of the Premier League campaign,” Glasner said in January. “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,” he added.
The future of Glasner was ‘seriously considered’ when Palace equalled their worst start to a Premier League season after eight matches. Then it clicked all the way to glory at Wembley.
It remains to be seen precisely how far that Eze goal will help the Eagles soar, but nonsensical offers have helped push him and Guehi closer to being passengers and drivers of this Palace train.