Sorry everyone. Sadly you have encouraged me to comment on the product our business provides.

When Eze is- and the rest of the team are - on fire we are treated to very exciting football. A lot of our income comes from Sky and Co and our product seems to be attractive, given the number of evening kick offs we endure.

The Everton game did focus my thoughts
- under the lights for TV
- Palace portrayed as the spoilsports (like the Liverpool match where we had many cards in the ninety minutes to their two in second half added time) with two cards for our players
- the excitement of a VAR intervention supplementing the referee against Everton a sending off, earlier we got a penalty
- a feeling in the last ten minutes that our team were working to preserve the achievement of the previous eighty minutes, aiming (to a large extent) to preserve the 80 minutes interim result to full time
- possibility of Crystal Palace being scored against in the final minutes of the game.
- demonstration of not sure how to play against ten men.
All giving lots of armchair excitement and pundit comment opportunities.

I did enjoy the Brentford game, with the team serving up what we all want to see.

The question is how to get from the perception confirmed by the Everton to more time when the opposition leave the three points at Selhurst Park.

I probably deserve all the adverse comment I am likely to receive.

This is also my hope. Potentially linked to breaking ground on the new stand.

And that after securing a new another season in the top flight, we'll get in an exciting new manager and have some cash to splash!

I would like to praise what i think is an underated person, Dougie Freedman, apart from "That Goal" his contribution to our club is massive, the team he built that got promoted, which is still in the Premier, through basically free transfers, Murray, Delaney, Jedinak, Ramage etc, with a few small outlays Bolasie, KD, Ward etc, and the disastrous mistake he made leaving for Bolton, which he regrets to this day, and his appointment of the role of DOF, at the end of 2017 has been excellent, almost all of the signings, Eze, Olise, Johnstone, Andersen, Guehi, Guaita, Cahill, Butland, Clyne, Hughes, have been good or outstanding, even Mateta and Edouard havent been disaters, i wish we had two of him one for Manager and one for DOF, for me a true Palace Legend

“That’s a joke son, I say, that’s a joke.” “Nice boy, but he’s sharp as a throw pillow.” “He’s so dumb he thinks a Mexican border pays rent” “ “Son… I say, son, some people are so narrow minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”__ Forhorn Leghorn

The club has grown and improved, but nothing tangible has, apart from the training ground.
If we went down we would lose the players on the cheap and the grounds the same , except 12 years older.
Don’t know the answer of how to change it. We’d have had 12 years of premiership money and it’s debatable if we’ve got the best ground in S.London, definitely in the top 3 though.

The Independent is reporting that John Textor is considering the sale of his 45% stake in the club and that discussions have been ongoing for a number of weeks.
The report goes on to say that a sale could be complicated by the fact that potential buyers would want total control of the club.
If this story has legs it begs the question of whether Harris and Blitzer still want out too.
Is the club in play?
Personally I feel uncomfortable about investors coming in who perhaps don’t have the best interests of the club at heart even if ostensibly they have deep pockets.
Parish has his critics , but I would prefer him to the owners of the likes of Man U, Notts Forest, Chelsea and Everton.

Sorry, long post incoming, but it's an interesting subject. As the OP says, it is in many ways the topic behind all other topics that we discuss.

Our model.

I feel Palace are a test-case for 70-odd other football clubs that dream not only of becoming a top-flight outfit, but of doing so using methods like ours:

We are not truly fan-owned in a formal sense, but our Chairman is a fan.

We have foreign investment, but the fan-Chairman is a local who is here, in the building, all the time running the place.

We haven't sold our club's soul to dubious foreign money, but are able to go toe-to-toe in any one game with those that have.

We have invested in the academy, whilst being reasonably competitive on wages for established top-flight players.

We plan to improve the ground, having done the same to the other bricks-and-mortar assets we own.

We live within our means, albeit not without operational debt.

Alternative models?

I see two ways this business model could be changed.

Firstly, we could hope for a new, mega-rich owner. Such a person could spend big on the stadium (expanding Selhurst or building a new ground are both very difficult, but perhaps possible if money were literally no object) and on the squad, but only in the very short term. Ultimately FFP dictates that the club must make back what it spends. I can’t understand why people don’t understand that. Unless a sugar daddy splurge gets you into the Champions League, you will just end up selling everyone in the end like Wolves, or unable to spend even though the owner is rich, like Everton.

Thing is, who is out there that could afford it? Personally, I would rather go down than be owned by a state with links to terrorism and human rights abuses, even though so many football fans seem not to be bothered about that. Newcastle fans in particular appear, to my mind, absolutely f***ing shameless in that respect.

Secondly, we could take more risks in terms of transfer policy. I have no time at all for nit-picking about why we didn’t sign that particular player, or a new player for that particular position. Transfers are multi-party affairs in a competitive landscape. Nobody complaining about transfer activity has the first clue what deals the club tried to do, and why they didn't come off, so any criticism is based on guesswork and can, quite often, come across as a bit entitled or childish when the club plainly spends all that it can (you only need to read the accounts).

We could gamble more on left-field signings, hope that we get enough we can sell at a profit to make ends meet whilst still having a good team, like Brighton. They bring through the odd youth player so their strategy doesn’t seem to block their academy, but it is still higher-risk. They depend on huge fees regularly to break even, and will be deep in the s*** if that dries up.

All this ‘Parish doing things on the cheap’ stuff is nonsense, but I do understand the observation that he is risk-averse in many areas, and transfers is maybe one of them. I am not sure I would want to change that though.

We spent money on players for Allardyce, and then could hardly spend at all under Roy. We’ve all got paid on the Friday, hit the town all weekend and ended up going hungry later in the week. Fine for a young person, not so much for a football club. Prudence and caution are not exciting, but are probably the best bet.

Progression.

All my life the dream, forever thwarted, was of Palace being an established top-flight side. The presumption was that just by being in the big time we would then develop as a club, year on year. In fact, we are now in almost exactly the same league position Pulis left us in after year one, and are still playing similar football.

I don’t understand the idea that we should be ‘kicking on to the next level’. The maths don’t work like that. The team is as good as its players, and the players are as good as the budget. There are the odd bargains out there (though there are far more rip-offs), but in the main and in the end, money talks.

Each year the clubs above us get more money than we do, so with each passing year the task of catching them becomes harder, not easier. That's the rub. Staying in the league for ten years puts us on a different financial planet to most professional clubs in the world, but not the clubs we actually compete with, and certainly not the clubs we would need to overtake to ‘kick on’. They get a greater advantage over us each season.

We are an established top flight club, but in a way that that just means we become underdogs more and more each year. It is not a ladder, it is a greasy ramp.

Entertainment or status?

Finally, and most importantly, is it fun? Was it worth it?

All those years of effort, hoping to be a top-flight team. Every chairman, player and manager were tasked with achieving it, and now we have. And it's often s***. Even if you overlook all the media s***, the cost, the daft kick-off times, the corporate emptiness, the diving, the real problem is the football. We are just so boring. We have, on the main, played tedious, risk-averse football throughout. For me, Roy is the symptom, not the cause.

We can’t develop as a club if we go down, but almost nobody our size stays up playing decent football. Under Pardew and Vieria we played decent stuff but only for half a season each. That's about it. That's not tactics or coaching, that's just form, and it often dips as fast or faster than it rises.

Nobody, of all the managers we have had, has managed to sustain decent football, and it’s not just us. Who else is there our size that sustains decent football without going down? I can’t see any examples to follow.

It was plainly more fun to watch in the Championship, and I sort of understand it when some fans hope to go down, but then what? If you are able to isolate each match as a stand-alone contest to be enjoyed, then fine, but most of us are mindful of the points tally and the league table. Would we be in the Championship hoping to have enjoyable games but not win enough to go up?!

It is like some existential crisis or something. Most teams our size don't survive this long in the top flight, so they don’t get to this stage of glass-ceiling, deep-rooted stodge. Usually a club has momentum one way or the other, but by succeeding in staying up we now have none whatsoever, cannot realistically generate any of the positive type, but surely do not want to embrace the negative type.

We are what happens to average clubs in the big league. I’m not sure if I’d like it to stop, but I’m not sure I would wish it on anyone else, either.

Edited by TheBigToePunt (10 Jan 2024 9.29pm)