**Crystal Palace** **were crowned winners of the 2025/26 Conference League last night.**
Three years on from that special night in Prague, some of the shine has been taken off West Ham’s Conference League trophy as Crystal Palace lifted it in Leipzig last night.
We West Ham fans will never forget that night in Prague and the celebrations that followed, and we’ve been very reminiscent in the last few weeks because of our relegation, looking back at how good we had it just over 155 weeks ago.
Obviously, Chelsea won it last year, and I was desperate for them not to, just so it would make us look better, but realistically it didn’t change anything; they had already won both the Champions League and Europa League.
But Palace is different; they have done really well over the last year or so, winning both the FA Cup and the Community Shield, the former especially being something we were all jealous of.
And we were; however, we had something over them still: we had won a European Trophy, and they hadn’t. But now that’s all changed. Crystal Palace, if they hadn’t already, now have all the bragging rights over us in terms of recent success.
Maybe they haven’t hit the League heights of a 6th place finish as we did a few years ago under Moyes. Still, they’ve won more than us in the last ten years; they’re in the Premier League, we’re now in the Championship, and that gap is only going to increase because of how well they’re run compared to how poorly we’re run.
West Ham and Palace aren’t really rivals, apart from sharing the same city, but the fact they’re better than us right now says it all about the state of West Ham. However, a clash against their South London rivals Millwall at the Den instead of a trip to Selhurst Park does sound good.