Crystal Palace‘s tumble from the Europa League before it’s even started is a sporting catastrophe that they should have seen coming. That they didn’t is overwhelmingly on them. This, in essence, is the London club’s own fault.
Yes, there are too many shades of grey in UEFA’s rules about multi-club ownership. European football’s governing body have allowed subjectivity and interpretation to play too great role in this embarrassing shambles.
What is a ‘decisive influence’ on a football club? Discuss.
It sounds like an exam question and on this occasion it’s one that John Textor, Steve Parish and everybody at Palace involved in this sorry mess have failed.
There are loopholes in UEFA’s rules. There usually are.
Clubs like Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and Nottingham Forest knew of them and exploited them. So – as absurd as it sounds – there is no conflict of interest in UEFA’s eyes between United and Nice, City and Girona, Chelsea and Strasbourg and Forest and Olympiakos.
Crystal Palace won the FA Cup – but they will now not take their Europa League place
Crystal Palace initially qualified for the Europa League through their FA Cup win but have now dropped out of the competition – forced to settle with a Europa Conference League spot instead
Lyon, who are majority owned by Palace’s previous shareholder John Textor, will compete in the competition after their appeal to stay in Ligue 1 was upheld
Palace knew of a way out of this pickle, too. They knew of the tricks. Move shares. Sell shares. Indeed UEFA emailed everybody back in March to make sure they were aware of problems that may be coming further down the line.
But Palace didn’t do anything about it. They sat on their hands. They took a risk.
Speaking on talkSPORT this week, Textor appeared to suggested UEFA’s missive had gone to an email address that nobody at Selhurst Park looks at. You cannot make it up.
Textor still knew, though. For all his strenuous and to a degree convincing protestations of having no significant input in what happens at Palace – where his shareholding stands at 43 per cent – deep down in his bones he knew.
That is why he watched Palace captain Marc Guehi lift the FA Cup at Wembley in May with the kind of feeling a 100m runner would have on settling in to his blocks only to realise he had forgotten to tie his shoelaces.
‘I thought: “Oh s***, we are going to have a problem”,’ he told talkSPORT’s White and Jordan show.
Listening to Textor talk this week was illuminating. It would appear that board meetings at Selhurst Park are quite tense. Textor didn’t even refer to Parish – the Palace chairman – by his first name when talking about him.
‘I am sitting there on the board with four other guys,’ Textor said.
‘Parish is making decisions. He involves us but he doesn’t really listen to us.’
The likes of Textor (above) and Steve Parish sat on their hands and took a risk with UEFA’s rules
Dropping out of the Europa League marks a sad ending to their historic FA Cup triumph in May
And here we get to the layers of this. Textor – belatedly in the process of selling his stake at Palace to New Yorks Jets owner Woody Johnson – has told UEFA he has no decisive influence on decisions at Palace – unlike at his other club Lyon – and says he has provided documents that prove it.
Equally, he talks of paying off the club’s COVID debt and helping in the establishment of the Palace academy. Is that not a decisive influence on the construction of the modern Palace? It’s an argument worth having at the very least.
‘I help,’ Textor told talkSPORT.
‘I help a lot’.
Textor, meanwhile, passes off Palace’s hiring of FA Cup-winning coach Oliver Glasner shortly after he admits he almost gave him the Lyon job as a happy coincidence. Maybe it was.
But once again it’s not hard to imagine UEFA being rather interested in that as they reached a decision that even as recently as Mail Sport’s breaking of the story several weeks ago nobody at Palace really thought would ever go against them.
And these are the shades of grey that were always going to put Palace at risk of a UEFA judgement that has now come to pass and this takes us back to the complacency, back to that point earlier this year where people at Palace just thought this wasn’t going to happen to them.
None of it sits well with what we know of Parish, a chairman who has built a sustainable, successful, progressive, community-based football club. He is generally an awful lot smarter than this.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe (left) and Man United knew of the loopholes and managed to exploit them
Evangelos Marinakis did the same – anticipating that his Nottingham Forest could qualify for Champions League place ahead of the new campaign, something they narrowly missed out on
But equally it’s all there in the telling of this sad sporting story.
Watching clubs effectively laugh in UEFA’s face by dumping shares in ‘blind trusts’ to get round ownership issues is embarrassing.
For example, as Forest anticipated a Champions League place towards the end of last season, owner Evangelos Marinakis – who also owns Greek champions Olympiakos – used this well-known tactic in a bid to distance himself from business at the City Ground.
When Forest fell at the final hurdle, the trust was dissolved. All right and proper and within the rules but also so transparent as to be rather ridiculous.
UEFA’s next move should be to revisit all of this in an effort to remove much of this subjectivity. Multi-club ownership within Europe threatens sporting integrity and the governing body are absolutely right to be on top of that. It’s just that they aren’t on top of it. Their rules and regulations are full of moving goal posts and such they have allowed some of their member clubs to make fools of them.
But that being the case, if everybody else managed to do that, why on earth couldn’t Crystal Palace? They should still be asking themselves this when the Conference League kicks off next season with Glasner and his players in it.
