Been saying this for a while I don't trust Textor pump and dump is his game.

That's very unfair as we would be deep in the brown stuff if it wasn't for the £90m that he injected into the club that allowed us to buy the players that we are now so reliant on.

It isn't just you as there seems to be loads of fans on both Palace forums that are happy to work on guilty until proven innocent

Yup you are correct. I have been a fan for too long to accept owners at face value, they have to prove themselves.

Blitzer and Harris have done bugger all for the club apart from buying out the other shareholders they seem to have put very little into the club.

I agree Textor has put money in but is his aim to flip the club and walk away with a nice profit.

All speculation but there are plenty of chancers in the football world, just ask Charlton fans. They are currently on their 3/4 bad owner who has brought in a shyster to sell the club and the potential new owners appear even worse.

Charlton a well managed mid table PL club 10 years ago it a can all go quickly wrong.

No need to ask anyone - we had Goldberg and Jordan !

Harris and Blitzer have provided sufficient funds to get us to where we were 18 months ago. Textor has injected more money into the club, but while we know that H and B want out, his long term intentions are unclear. I don’t think he has any intention of flipping the club. The way he is setting himself up via Eagle Football / Iconic Sports suggests at least medium term investment. And there will be an expectation that the investment grows, which it clearly won’t if Palace stagnate and don’t try to improve on the playing side.

If it happens and Textor becomes the owner of our club it is a journey into the unknown. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

I'm not clear why people say this, because they make it sound like Textor somehow benevolently rode in on a white horse and donated £90 million to the listing charity that is CPFC.

He didn't "donate" any money to the club. He simply bought £90 million pounds worth of shares at their market value, and the club's board decided it would use the sum he invested to buy players. What Textor did was nothing more and nothing less than execute an investment or trade. He spent some money in order to buy a percentage shareholding in the club.

Why, thus, would anyone give credit to an investor for doing what investors do?

Again, Neillo, we're generally on the same page. The one fly in the appointment that is a little worrying is the emergence of the SPAC stories which, if that is the road Textor is going down with Eagle Football, doesn't prove that his long-term intentions are worrying but does suggest we ought to be more alert than we have been to date because there's lots of evidence that SPACS tend to be the preferred vehicles of get rich quick merchants who don't much care about their underlying investments but, rather, are after a quick profit. That makes me a little more cautious about giving Textor the benefit of the doubt than I have been up to this point.

For those who aren't versed in financial instruments and WITHOUT wanting to be condescending, it's probably worth spelling out what a SPAC is, because it's a term you might be hearing more often in the future in reference to Palace. So...

SPAC is an acronym for Special Purpose Acquisition Company. Broadly, it works like this:

Traditionally, when a private company wants to raise funds (usually to support expansion, such as buying more or better players if the company is a football club) it goes public which means becoming a listed company on the stock market, via a share sale. The money it raises by selling its shares is then invested back into the business freeing up cash to support expanded operations. In theory, this investment is attractive to investors because it increases the value of the business, thus increasing how much the shares are worth.

The company goes public through a lengthy and difficult process known as an Initial Public Offering (IPO). This involves things like exposing its books to scrutiny, etc. and generally lifting the kimono so prospective investors can fully understand what they're buying into. The IPO process costs the company money, takes time, and does not always result in success. You could be rejected for a variety of reasons before the listing even takes place. So what if you could find a way to go public, but avoid an IPO? That's where SPACs come in.

SPACs (sometimes known as "blank cheque companies" are essentially listed shell companies formed only to create a vehicle that can then subsequently merge with a private company enabling the private (target) company to go public without a traditional IPO or direct listing. As such, the private company can be taken into public ownership without any of the IPO processes noted in the preceding paragraph, and therefore it can go public quickly and cheaply compared to an IPO, getting its hands on the money it wants with extremely limited due diligence.

The issue with SPACS is thus that the knowledge available to investors at the time of investment is very, very limited (for the reasons above - there's been minimal due diligence prior to the listing, making SPACs an easy vehicle for canny or even unscrupulous investors to exploit and abuse. IPO investors know all about the company in which they have invested, whereas SPAC investors have almost no knowledge of the company they are going to invest in; they are more or less investing only in the founders’ ability (in this case, the founder is John Textor) to find a profitable acquisition (in this case, the football clubs he buys via Eagle Football group).

As Neillo has said before, and I've agreed with him, on balance I'm inclined to cautiously support Textor's interest in Palace based on what we've known about him to date. But I have to say the SPAC stories do make me a little more wary about his intentions. It would be wrong to say that "all SPACS are bad and the fact that Textor appears to be interested in going down that road guarantees doom for Palace". But it would also be foolhardy not to take note, and be aware that his approach does hold the possibility of blowing up in our faces.