The Telegraph: For Crystal Palace, it's worse when no one wants their players

On January 18 local time, The Telegraph pointed out that Crystal Palace has always been a "selling club" within the Premier League ecosystem—a reality where top players and successful managers are inevitably poached by bigger platforms. 

While Marc Guéhi’s transfer may appear financially underwhelming, its sporting and historical value has already been fully realized. Oliver Glasner, fully aware of this dynamic, chose instead to emotionally criticize the club’s management in public, ignoring the tightening financial regulations and the existential pressures facing the club. For Crystal Palace, the real crisis isn’t selling players—it’s when no one wants to buy them.

Below is The Telegraph’s analysis:

Crystal Palace is a quintessential “selling club.” Marc Guéhi’s transfer is merely a reflection of the times, but the manager’s overly blunt public comments risk disrupting a delicate internal balance.

When Glasner took over Crystal Palace midway through the 2024 season, he never intended to stay long-term. Ambitious managers like him are fundamentally no different from the players they coach at clubs of this stature.

The better a player performs, the more likely they are to be lured away by elite clubs—and the same applies to managers. At clubs like Crystal Palace, Brighton, Bournemouth, and Brentford, success often leads to a move to a bigger stage. For these clubs, the challenge is perpetual: repeatedly appointing good managers and signing promising players.

On Friday, Marc Guéhi—one of the Premier League’s finest defenders and a mainstay for England—left Crystal Palace for £20 million, with the deal including future sell-on clauses. Given that Guéhi is only 25 years old, the total potential value of the deal could theoretically approach £100 million, making the initial fee clearly suboptimal. Yet, he captained Crystal Palace during their historic 2024–25 FA Cup-winning season—the greatest in the club’s history. This achievement carries immense value, and every decision must be weighed within its broader context.

Regardless of the transfer fee, Crystal Palace’s original acquisition of Guéhi was an outright success. Had Chelsea recognized his potential as clearly as Crystal Palace did, he might well be wearing the captain’s armband at Stamford Bridge today, locked into an eight-year contract as a cornerstone of their squad. Four and a half years ago, Crystal Palace paid £18 million for Guéhi—a sum that may well stand as the club’s most successful signing ever, both competitively and financially. At the time, it was also their third-highest transfer expenditure in history.

Clubs like Crystal Palace need to maintain a certain number of players who are “obviously unretainable.” Put bluntly, these players are simply too talented to stay long—they prove it with their performances, drive the club forward, and ultimately generate significant transfer revenue. Squad turnover is cyclical for all clubs, and non-elite teams can never retain their best players indefinitely.

Glasner certainly understands this. Like all top managers, he will do everything possible to retain key players. Last summer, he publicly pressured chairman Steve Parish and the club’s owners over Guéhi’s future, leveraging the team’s recent success to force the club to abandon a proposed sale to Liverpool. But after Saturday night’s loss to Sunderland, Glasner reignited tensions—this time placing the club in an even more difficult position.

Just minutes after Guéhi’s departure was confirmed on Friday, Glasner publicly announced he would leave the club when his contract expires this summer. No serious observer expected him to stay long-term—just as no one expected Guéhi to renew. But a manager stating this so explicitly in public risks undermining the unspoken “tacit understanding” that normally exists within the club.

After the Sunderland match, Glasner escalated his rhetoric further, claiming he and the players had been “abandoned”—their hearts “ripped out twice,” first by selling Eberechi Eze in the summer and then by offloading Guéhi just one day before the match. Such emotional outbursts ignore the harsh realities clubs like Crystal Palace must navigate. A manager’s duty is to manage those realities—not inflame them.

For clubs like Crystal Palace, the environment is becoming tougher by the year. The Premier League is about to implement a new financial framework—the Squad Cost Ratio (SCR)—which caps club spending at 85% of revenue. Crystal Palace is already approaching UEFA’s 70% spending threshold. These factors heavily influenced the club’s decision to accept Manchester City’s £20 million offer.

The SCR will force clubs like Crystal Palace to sell their best players to wealthier rivals earlier than before. Under the previous Profit and Sustainability Regulations (PSR), transfer profits could be amortized over a three-year cycle; the SCR offers no such “buffer.” A large one-time sale might keep a club well below the 85% limit in one season, but those savings cannot be carried forward to the next.

More departures are coming. Adam Wharton’s contract will have only two years remaining this summer—he was a shrewd signing from the Championship two years ago. Jean-Philippe Mateta will enter the final year of his deal; he blossomed into a Premier League-caliber striker through the club’s patient development, making it impossible to easily walk away from that £15 million investment.

Losing one or both would trigger familiar challenges. But for Crystal Palace, the greater danger would be if no one wanted to buy their players—that would be the true crisis.

Michael Olise and Eberechi Eze both arrived from mid-table Championship sides and were eventually sold to Champions League-level clubs for a combined £120 million. In the past decade, Manchester United paid over £70 million combined for Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Wilfried Zaha. There will always be new talent to discover and develop. The club has already identified Guéhi’s successor: 19-year-old Conor Coady, who joined from Toulouse last summer.

In any case, what alternative is there?

Crystal Palace is not a “money-printing machine.” Its next financial report may show revenue surpassing £200 million for the first time—but roughly 75% of that comes from Premier League distributions. There is room to grow through matchday income and commercial ventures, but compared to Europe’s elite clubs, it remains pocket change. The Premier League itself is Crystal Palace’s most vital revenue stream, making survival in the top flight absolutely essential.

In this historic 2025 season, Glasner gave Crystal Palace unprecedented confidence. He briefly allowed the club to transcend its structural limitations—but that inevitably came at a cost: successful players and managers will always leave. That pattern has never changed. Yet they could have departed without creating the kind of public blame and division seen on Saturday night.