Crystal Palace will look to upset Premier League giants Manchester City in the FA Cup final this weekend.
For Manchester City, winning the FA Cup would be a consolation after what striker Erling Haaland described as a “horrific” season. They were dumped out of the Champions League in the play-offs by Real Madrid, and sit fourth in the Premier League after a dismal run mid-season.
Crystal Palace are 12th in the league and struggled early on under Oliver Glasner, but have found their rhythm in the second half of the year. Their front three of Eberechi Eze, Ismaila Sarr and Jean-Philippe Mateta have been firing on all cylinders since January.
Kick-off is at 4.30pm, and as has been tradition for as long as living memory serves, the games will be broadcast by both BBC and ITV. This will be welcome news to fans, who over the past decade have become used to either forking out for various sports streaming subscriptions, or gaming the system by abusing free trials (or other, less legal methods).
But it’s not just on TV where fans can watch the cup final; BBC iPlayer will also be showing the match live, as well as ITVX, UTV, STV and STV Player.
Technically, the FA Cup isn’t “free” to watch, as the TV Licensing fee is used to fund BBC services - and is required to watch ITV.
Speaking ahead of the match, Crystal Palace goalkeeper Dean Henderson said: “Obviously the club’s never won a trophy. It’s obvious that the club’s never played in Europe, so straight away there’s a next level.
“It’s one game away for us. It’s disappointing, actually, because I genuinely believe that we should have been (in the European places) this season through the league. We started so bad that it was so hard to catch up and then the season sort of filtered out in that respect.
“The players all realise that we don’t speak about it a lot, but you go down in history and you’ll be classed as the best Crystal Palace team ever, no matter what, and it will get spoken about it for years to come.”
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