In Steve Parish, Crystal Palace have a chairman and co-owner their supporters feel they can get behind. They’ve also had to deal with John Textor.
Palace have learned the hard way a lesson all football supporters should keep in mind. In the end, the owners of our football clubs are not on our side. What we as supporters owe our clubs is not blind loyalty but protective scrutiny.
Parish is willing to go on camera at any opportunity and represent Palace supporters. He is a persistent advocate and that, as long as his representation is in line with what’s right for the club, is a great thing to have in a co-owner.
In the age of social media, too many of us are willing to ride into battle on behalf of the owners of our clubs regardless of what’s right, wrong, healthy or sensible, but these hyper-rich outsiders aren’t always acting in the interest of the clubs they own or the supporters going to verbal war to defend them.
The legal details of Palace’s demotion from the Europa League to the Conference League are tedious in the extreme and their burgeoning rivalry with Nottingham Forest is unedifying, but there’s a simple moral truth at the heart of the debacle: Crystal Palace won the FA Cup on the pitch and should be playing in the Europa League.
That’s a consequence of ownership decisions and the rest of us should take heed. Our clubs deserve our scrutiny. They need protection, not cheerleading.
Palace are in uncharted waters
Nevertheless, Aston Villa‘s next Premier League opponents are in a good spot at the start of the new season. They’ve drawn their first two matches against handy opposition and navigated a Conference League qualifying tie, conceding one goal in four matches. Textor’s gone too.
They’ve sold Eberechi Eze for big money and have proved in the wake of losing Wilfried Zaha and Michael Olise that they can deal with the consequences. The possible sale of captain Marc Guéhi to Liverpool might be more difficult to wear.
It’s easy to forget that these are historically good times for the Eagles.
The FA Cup win – they defeated Villa on the way, of course – was their first major silverware. Their tie against Fredrikstad was their first pair of European fixtures and winning it guaranteed them six more.
They have fast, attacking, capable players who are exciting to watch and a hugely impressive manager who appears to be entirely uninterested in what Palace are ‘supposed’ to be.
They head for Villa Park on Sunday so well established as a Premier League club that we’ve all just completely forgotten that they haven’t always been there. They’ve been in the top flight for a longer unbroken current stint than Villa, for starters.
Oliver Glasner is the manager who was tasked with taking that stability and pushing the club to another level. He has been an enormous success and is the envy of most Premier League clubs.
To Villa, he’s become a nemesis. He has heaped defeat after defeat on Unai Emery in the space of two years and it looks for all the world like he simply has Emery’s number. All of that can change in the course of 90 minutes on Sunday but to say Palace have the psychological advantage would be an understatement.