It was October 2020, England was still in the grip of Covid restrictions and a raft of lower league clubs were staring at the bleak prospect of going to the wall.
That was when Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish chose to write an article in The Sunday Times enthusiastically espousing his Darwinistic view of the sport and roundly rejecting the idea that elite clubs like his owed the wider game greater help.
‘Not one company in any other industry, to my knowledge, is being asked to bail out its competitors,’ Parish wrote. ‘The supermarkets aren’t instructed to help the corner shops. Deliveroo aren’t bailing out your local cafe. Premier League clubs, while they may have some wealthy shareholders, are not awash with cash.’
As the Premier League continues to stall on a new deal with the EFL, a lot of lower-league clubs have never forgotten that brutal intervention. Parish put the boot in when many sides in the EFL were at their lowest ebb. His haughty language was startling. It was his ‘let-them-eat-cake’ moment when he revealed his true colours.
His words also revealed a surprising ignorance of the way that other ‘industries’ within the world of sport organise their affairs and the way that responsibility to smaller teams, and thus to the wider health of the whole, is built into their model.
The NFL, the most successful sporting league in the world, has a revenue-sharing model that puts the Premier League to shame and redistributes income from television deals and merchandise sales far more equitably than English football.
Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish (right), pictured with manager Oliver Glasner, put the boot in when many sides in the EFL were at their lowest ebb
Palace have had a glorious recent past. They won the FA Cup (pictured), then the Community Shield, and by early October were third in the League. Since then, they have gone into a tailspin
It is why clubs in relatively small towns – the Green Bay Packers are the most obvious example – can still thrive and compete with giants in huge cities, like the Dallas Cowboys, the Los Angeles Rams and the Chicago Bears.
So even if I have some sympathy for Crystal Palace fans – who create one of the best atmospheres in the league at Selhurst Park – as they watch their season implode spectacularly, I have zero sympathy for Parish. Be careful what you wish for. Forget your roots at your peril.
Palace have had a glorious recent past. They won the FA Cup, their first major trophy, last May and added the bonus of the Community Shield to it at the start of this season. By early October, they were sitting third in the Premier League and had gone 19 games without defeat, the longest unbeaten run in their 121-year history.
Since then, they have gone into a tailspin. They have lost six times in their last eight league games. A corner shop called Macclesfield knocked them out of the FA Cup in the third round in one of the greatest shocks in the competition’s history.
At one press conference earlier this month, it was announced both that they were about to lose their captain Marc Guehi to Manchester City and that their manager, Oliver Glasner, had decided to leave at the end of the season.
Whether he lasts that long is now a vexed question. ‘His body language isn’t good,’ Danny Murphy, the BBC’s excellent analyst, said of Glasner after the most recent defeat. ‘I would be amazed if he lasts the season. The way he’s talking doesn’t fill me with positivity and the players feed off that and start feeling a bit despondent.’
Now, their best forward, Jean-Philippe Mateta, wants to leave the club and it appears he is about to sign for Nottingham Forest. Palace have fallen to 15th and are in a relegation fight. They play Forest at the City Ground on Sunday, desperately needing a win. They have become the season’s most cautionary tale. Instead of kicking on, they have gone into freefall.
What I find most puzzling, and ironic, about their plight is the idea that we are somehow supposed to feel sorry for Parish and Palace because their ambitions to challenge the Big Six have bumped up against the glass ceiling created by the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules.
Marc Guehi, then the Crystal Palace captain, raises last season’s FA Cup after beating Manchester City in the final
Guehi, whose contract was up in the summer, has since moved to City and now striker Jean-Philippe Mateta wants out too
By Parish’s argument, what’s in it for the top five or six to let Palace join their cosy clique? Why should they?
Is this not the most salutary tale of a man being hoist with his own petard there has ever been in our game? It is a dubious argument but let’s say for a moment that Palace’s current woes have indeed been caused by being forced to sell talent to stay within the PSR boundaries created by the top clubs to bake in their superiority.
Don’t those rules fit very neatly with Parish’s philosophy of every man for himself? Survival of the fittest and might is right and all that. Let’s adopt Parish’s own argument: why should Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United bail out Palace? Why should the league’s Waitrose and Sainsbury’s and Tesco bail out a club like Palace?
By Parish’s argument, what’s in it for the top five or six to let Palace join their cosy clique? Why should they? Better to keep Palace’s nose pressed against the glass, just as Parish wished to be the fate of Lincoln City and Cheltenham Town and Gillingham and Barnsley and the other teams he cared not a jot for.
I can see the pitfalls of PSR that others have rightly highlighted, or indeed the drawbacks of the Squad Cost Ratio rules that will replace it. The system is far from perfect. But Parish stood up and made himself the poster boy for inequality. Now he’s finding out what it’s like when the supermarkets treat you like a corner shop.
