There have also been notable changes off the pitch as well as on the pitch at Crystal Palace. The most visible is the demolition of six houses in a neighbouring street as Palace continue their preparation for the redevelopment of Selhurst Park, their home of 102 years, knocking down the more modern add-ons to the Main Stand and erecting a glass hospitality building.
There has also been further infrastructure development with the purchase of land near the existing training ground, the use for which the club is still debating. Then, on the eve of the first home game of the new season, the club’s ultras, the Holmesdale Fanatics (HF), announced they would be stepping back from activity inside the stadium as an organised group.
It is nine years since the stadium improvement plans were first announced, and five since it was originally due to be completed. Preliminary works were undertaken in 2024 and enabling works continued last summer with club offices relocated from temporary buildings to the site of the former Crystals nightclub above the Whitehorse Lane Stand and action taken to drain the flooded basement in the Holmesdale Road Stand via water retention tanks costing £1million ($1.3m).
The club remained committed to the project throughout, but prioritised the £30million redevelopment of their academy and faced challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed work. Previously, the _New York Times_ reported that costs had risen above £200m. While demolition has now started, no construction has taken place, and this will now take place in defined stages.
“The material cost is the big issue,” Palace chairman Steve Parish told _The Athletic._ “There’s been such inflation, so we’re just reviewing materials that we’re using on the facade and maybe some slight design changes, just to see if we can value-engineer the cost down slightly.
“We have a new project management company that we are hopeful will start soon. It will get done. We’re absolutely committed to it. It’s essential. We started (demolition and enabling works) because we couldn’t do any of that outside of the closed season. We were a bit in front when we did it, otherwise it would have meant a year before we could have started anything.”
Money for the project has always been an issue and Parish admits the financing is not yet secured, but is adamant it will be.
“We’re looking at different ways of funding, but that will be in place,” he says. “We’re working with people on that. We’re talking to the banks. It’s more managing the construction, processing inflation and trying to reduce some costs.
“It has (dragged on). But the reason that everybody hasn’t got a shiny new stadium is that the money will always go to the team, if it’s there. We spent on the team, which is the more recent reason that it isn’t fully going on. But also the cost keeps increasing in this environment, and we keep needing to try to find smarter ways of doing it to get the right return on it.
“So there’s no one reason. There are complications. The six houses, one of them took ages for us to buy because it was a private house, then you have the Sainsbury’s land.”
Palace this year agreed a deal to acquire land next to New Beckenham railway station previously owned by HSBC bank, after it invited sealed bids having put the site up for sale. That was an opportunistic purchase and the club are yet to decide on its future use.
“Land is at such a premium around us, and we do struggle a little bit for grass; even now, with the women’s team and all the age groups that need to play on grass,” adds Parish. “There’s a few ideas circulating (in terms of what to do with the site) but we just wanted to secure that land.
“We tried to buy it in 2016 before we put the academy on the old RBS site we’re on now. The first team like being where they are, but they can still use the academy performance centre, with the privacy of their own pitches on their site.
“We won’t get it until next year. Heaven forbid Real Madrid bought it as a south London academy. There isn’t land like that anywhere, and it’s right next door to us. So I think it was smart to secure it.”