Show some ambition, Palace: don’t sell Eze and Olise.

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Today's Times

The original Crystal Palace was built to house treasures. As the setting for the Great Exhibition of 1851, Joseph Paxton’s magnificent structure displayed brooches and brocades, daguerreotypes and telescopes, folding pianos and Greek statues, an embroidered howdah on a stuffed elephant and two of the world’s finest diamonds, the Koh-i-Noor and the Daria-i-Noor. And so there is a faint symmetry to the fact that the football club who take their name from that building are, at this moment, the repository of two of the Premier League’s sparkling jewels.

Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise are not only two of the best players in English football, but also two of the most joyful to watch. They have both had brilliant seasons: Olise, incredibly, has averaged 1.14 goals plus assists per 90 minutes, which ranks third behind Erling Haaland and Cole Palmer among all players. Eze has completed more dribbles than anyone except Mohammed Kudus, Jérémy Doku and Bruno Guimarães, and scored more goals than each of those three players.

When they play separately, their individual qualities are clear: Eze’s strong, glidingly balanced, vertical dribbling; Olise’s flicked passes and whippy shots around defenders. When they play together, there is a beautiful collusion, an instinctive harmony of tempo and spirit, two street artists painting the pitch with their patterns.

Club football in 2024 is a place of fierce and stripping winds, unrelenting in their rapacity, unchanging in their direction. Already, the stealthy breeze of a long summer is stirring, and the whispers carried on the air are that Eze will be a target for Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur, while Olise is likely to be coveted by Arsenal, Manchester United, Aston Villa and perhaps others besides. Palace have let it be known that offers for Eze and Olise, both of whom signed new contracts this season, will have to start at £60million.

It feels like a film we have all seen before. Very likely, over the summer, two of the big clubs will get two of the league’s brightest talents, Eze and Olise will get moves no one could begrudge them, and Palace will get a £140million return on players who cost them less than £30million combined. In a way, everyone wins. And yet, I find myself hoping fervently that Palace hang on to both of their star playmakers for another season at least.

In recent years a kind of mercantile cleverness has become the admired paradigm for clubs of Palace’s stature. The way that the likes of Brighton & Hove Albion and Brentford, Porto and Borussia Dortmund, scour the four corners of the sport, identify young talent, give it a platform, then profit from the thirst of a bigger club and regenerate has come to epitomise what it means to be a well-run club in an era of financial stratification.

Eze, left, and Olise are the sort of players that Palace will need if they are to mount a serious challenge for the European places
Eze, left, and Olise are the sort of players that Palace will need if they are to mount a serious challenge for the European places

Thrift, resilience and sensible husbandry are of course laudable qualities. But this strategy, however ingeniously executed, contains a baked-in defeatism, a polite acceptance of one’s place in the food chain. And much as we may admire, for example, the shrewdness that allowed Brighton to extract £150million for Moisés Caicedo and Alexis Mac Allister, their departures have significantly weakened a team who finished sixth last season.

Palace now find themselves in a similar spot. Since Oliver Glasner took charge of his first match, against Burnley on February 24, they have the fourth-best points per game in the league. Since Olise returned from injury on April 6 and he and Eze have been playing in tandem under the new manager, only two teams, Manchester City and Chelsea, have scored more goals. It’s a limited sample, but so far, the evidence suggests that under Glasner, when Eze and Olise play together, Palace are one of the best teams in the league. Why shouldn’t they aspire to finish fourth next season?

The early evidence suggests that Glasner is a man who can allow Palace to aim higher
The early evidence suggests that Glasner is a man who can allow Palace to aim higher

Already, the club have shown backbone by fending off an approach from Bayern Munich for Glasner. They don’t need to sell Eze or Olise. And there should be a little ripple of realisation running through this team, that what they could achieve by staying together might be more special than the fates that await them if they are sundered.

Something similar was felt at Bayer Leverkusen towards the end of last season. The club could easily have sold Jeremie Frimpong, Edmond Tapsoba or Florian Wirtz last summer, but countenanced only one first-team departure, Moussa Diaby to Aston Villa. Now those players are writing the greatest story of their careers.

Eze and Olise are more than worthy of the interest from the Premier League’s giants. To challenge themselves in that more rarefied air would be an understandable ambition. But those moves are also laced with risk. Let’s say, for example, that City firm up their interest in Eze. The opportunity to work with Pep Guardiola would be beguiling. And yet, the past four players that City have signed from Premier League clubs are Mateo Kovacic, Matheus Nunes, Kalvin Phillips and Jack Grealish.

Phillips’s ill-fated move to City serves as a warning for players linked with moves to the big sides
Phillips’s ill-fated move to City serves as a warning for players linked with moves to the big sides.

Kovacic has found his niche, but Phillips’s move was a disaster, Nunes has barely played this season and though Grealish has been successful, he has become a different, more peripheral, less spellbinding player than he was at Villa. Olise, meanwhile, would be competing for Bukayo Saka’s spot at Arsenal, and stepping into the one shadowed by the spectre of Jadon Sancho at United.

The Premier League also simply feels like a more interesting place with Eze and Olise at Palace. The spectacle is richer when the talent is more evenly spread, and suffers when it pools and piles up at the wealthiest end of the spectrum. This is part of what makes the NFL so popular. The teams with the best quarterbacks and those with the best receivers are not the same. The 15th or 20th-best teams contain some of the league’s marquee players. The radiance of stars is best appreciated when they are speckled spaciously across the sky, rather than clustered together in constellations of cluttered density.

There is also this: of all the present Premier League teams, Palace in particular have a sense of being rooted in their own community, something distinct which reflects something real. Eze and Olise were both born in London; so were Tyrick Mitchell and Jesurun Rak-Sakyi; Marc Guéhi moved there when he was one. Eze and Olise are of Nigerian and Nigerian-Algerian descent respectively; Mitchell and Rak-Sakyi have Jamaican and Ghanaian heritage; Guéhi’s parents moved from Côte d’Ivoire. Their club is embedded in a borough, Croydon, where in the 2021 census 22.6 per cent of residents identified as Black, Black British, Caribbean or African.

A football team does not have to echo the demographics of its location in this way — it doesn’t matter that Wolverhampton doesn’t have a large Portuguese-speaking community, or that Brentford’s Scandinavian-ness is an identity drawn by the club, not drawn from its surroundings — but it is nice, and meaningful, that one Premier League team does.

For now, while it lasts, Olise and Eze’s presence in this particular corner of south London, like the trusses that once supported Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, upholds something that is both magical and ethereal, glittering with possibility, but also firmly anchored in the ground on which it stands.

Edited by thetopgeezer (18 May 2024 7.34pm)

Could you copy and paste the article. The link you posted is not working right.

In order to keep the players they need to want to stay; the lure of a bigger club, more money and the prospect of European football will always be a pull factor. Also, their agent's greed.
My concern in letting these players go is more about the price. Brighton got £100m + for Caicedo, and yet we are talking about £60m for Olise; surely he's worth more than that in today's market?

hats off to palace, they were always gonna be louder, and hate to say it but they were impressive ALL bouncing and singing.

TBH. it is a poorly researched piece of writing which basically castigates Palace for looking to sell their players to make a profit. It totally ignores the fact that Palace have no control over Olise's future which is such a big factor on whether Palace can push on
It makes the argument that Brighton have sold big and look where they are now compared with last season - when injuries and competing in Europe have helped derail their season

The author then bizarrely states that the NFL has good players on every team, not just the top clubs, without mentioning the fact that they have a draft and a salary cap over there. The latter would be an attractive option but unlikely to work as the EPL is not a closed shop. He also failed to mention that the NFL has a play-off system and the one-off nature ensures that more teams are in with a shout of winning the Superbowl. Personally, I think this last factoe should be considered by the Premier League

So, the sentiment of the article was to be applauded but the author failed to appreciate the current facts of the world

I have The Times paper delivered every day..... except Saturday, so, without an online subscription I can't get into the article either.

But, although there is a lot of speculation swirling around about Olise and Eze, I will remain optimistic that we'll see both in Palace shirts next season. Mr Parish and Ollie will be desperate to keep them for at least another season and both players are smart enough to realise that our club is on the verge of something special.

In his presser yesterday Ollie was enthusing about how Olise and Eze enjoy playing alongside each other and how they often stay on the training pitch for half an hour after all the others have left so they can practice their trickery. Doesn't sound like they want their existing partnership to end.

If we have to get a few bob in the bank I'd sooner lose Guehi whose place can be more readily filled.

Dad and I watched games standing on the muddy slope of the Holmesdale Road end. He cheered and I rattled.

Forget about the allusion to American Football, this article expresses what most Palace fans hope and wish for.

Is it fanicful to suggest if we keep our top players we could possibly finish 4th next season?

Maybe, but for the first time in many years we have high hopes for next season under a manager who is proving to bring the best out of hius inherited players.

Man and boy Palace since my first game in 1948 sitting on my dad's shoulders