Crystal Palace have been loving life since Oliver Glasner was appointed as their new manager in February 2024.
There’s a strong argument that Glasner is the best manager Palace have ever had. Unlike the other contenders, the Austrian has the silverware to back up his credentials.
Winning the FA Cup, Palace’s first-ever major trophy, was no fluke. The Eagles have become one of the most dynamic, most incisive, most exciting teams English football has to offer.
Oliver Glasner’s Crystal Palace can jump to the next level… but some tough, smart choices will be necessary
Crystal Palace boss Oliver Glasner (Image credit: Getty Images)Palace can outplay anyone in the Premier League on their day. They have fire and spice at their liquid best but there they are, as ever, in the middle of the league table.
Long-time Eagles supporters might admit to a degree of satisfaction about that fact. This is a club for which top-flight football has been anything but guaranteed. Yet their consistency from one season to the next reveals an upper limit as much as a pinnacle.
Jean-Philippe Mateta has been a prolific striker for Crystal Palace (Image credit: Getty Images)Palace in 2025 are one of the game’s great curiosities. They are visibly and demonstrably a quite excellent football team who’ve achieved a lot in a short period, but they’ve spent the last two summers looking up at teams they’ll think are no better than them.
Winning the FA Cup takes the edge off that, sure, but being an impressive team and a mid-table meme isn’t going to be funny forever.
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The time for Palace to blast through their crystal ceiling is upon them. Their manager, their best players, their supporters – nobody at Selhurst Park will be satisfied with what they have when it’s so obvious they have the potential to be more.
Palace are already good and, mostly, reliable. The next major test will be of their ability to be ruthless and single-minded enough to regularly qualify for European football through their Premier League place.
One of the big questions facing the club’s recruitment team is hiding in the very fact that Palace sit right in the middle of the Premier League as we reach the first quarter split of the season.
Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish is no stranger to big decisions Nine Premier League matches is a small sample size but it’s striking that Palace have the league’s highest non-penalty expected goals (npxG) value and its worst performance against that measure both belong to a Palace team in the middle of the division.
Excluding penalties, Palace’s xG for the season so far is 16.1 – half a goal higher than Manchester City and miles higher than everybody else. No team has left more non-penalties goals on the table than Palace, whose actual tally is 6.1 goals worse than expected.
There are various possible reasons for that disparity. Creating high-quality chances at scale is a perfectly valid way to score goals, for one. But subpar finishing is another and that’s where the matter of Palace’s next centre-forward comes into focus.
Jean-Philippe Mateta is a very good Premier League striker. He’s proven that now since the beginning of Glasner’s tenure and he has scored five league goals already this season.
What complicates the picture is that three of those goals came in last weekend’s baffling 3-3 draw against Bournemouth and the fact that Mateta, two seasons after he was one of the division’s most efficient finishers, is currently turning the team’s highest npxG per 90 minutes and highest chance quality into a conversion rate barely better than one in 10.
According to Opta data, that makes him the least efficient of any Palace player to have scored a Premier League goal this season and, crucially, at the highest volume and best quality of chances.
That might be part of the plan. Mateta could be best served over the course of a season by giving him a mountain of chances – in the end, it’s only the goals that matter.
But if Palace want to take that next big step, even a beloved striker will find himself under the microscope when there’s a statistical suggestion that a telling gain could be on offer.
In FourFourTwo’s opinion, Palace will have the wherewithal to make tough choices. Letting Wilfried Zaha go was sensible. Selling Michael Olise and Eberechi Eze was the inevitable consequence of excellent recruitment and player development as a mid-table club.
Retaining captain Marc Guehi instead of taking their last real chance to make a fortune off him demonstrated that, but it seems likely there were some emotional factors involved in that decision.
It remains to be seen whether they’re able to set sentiment aside and start to upgrade their players instead of backfilling the stars they can sign and sell. Do that, and the sky’s the limit.
Palace take on Brentford in Premier League action on Saturday. They’re level on points in mid-table and it’s the Bees, not Palace who are making the most of their play this season.
