Journal.
More than a football club
This weekend, Crystal Palace were minutes away from knocking Premier League Wolves out of the FA Cup, and just two points off the play-off positions in the league. After going into administration yesterday, and the ten point deduction that comes with it, they’re four points away from the relegation and facing a decidedly uncertain future.
Crystal Palace aren’t my team, but they are my local team. I’ve been along a couple of times this season and really enjoyed it. Their manager Neil Warnock is a difficult, difficult man to warm to, but he deserves enormous respect for what he’s done against the odds at Palace – taking a thin squad of largely unexperienced players who’ve gone unpaid more than once this season to the edge of the playoffs against far better financed clubs.
Going into administration is deeply worrying in a number of ways. With administration comes the likelihood, but not inevitability, of a rapid sale of Palace’s younger players at a fraction of their market value. Unlike other clubs, Palace’s situation is even more precarious – they don’t own their own ground – and that makes the prospects for angel investors distinctly more difficult.
My dad has a great line about the invention of the motorway being the death of provincial football clubs in Scotland – the theory being that it just became too easy to get to the Old Firm, regardless of where you lived in the country, from Aberdeen to Dumfries. That applies to Palace too, but I think they’re suffering a slow decline by satellite dish as well. There are locals better versed in the goings on at Barcelona than their similarly red and blue striped counterparts at Selhurst. I grew up watching football in the lower divisions at Dumbarton, and successes I shared in there will always mean more to me than anything I’ve been lucky enough to witness at Arsenal. I want Palace to be around for my own little boy to experience the true misery (and very occasional euphoria) of supporting a local team, where he can be close to the action, be a part of his local community, and free of the nonsense surrounding the elite clubs until he makes that choice for himself.
Football clubs are an important part of their community – Crystal Palace are, to steal Barca’s line, ‘més que un club’ (more than a club). They are an important part of my community – running numerous schemes that get local kids playing football from an early age, keeping them fit and engaged in a really positive way. It’s this stuff, not just the first team football, that suffers when a club finds itself in trouble.
Their rising star Victor Moses is a perfect example of this – a young boy who saw his parents murdered in Nigeria and was fostered in Croydon, before being spotted by Palace, his local club gave him a way out, placing him in a great school, and providing him with the means of expressing himself (he apparently barely spoke, so traumatised was he by his experiences in Nigeria). Now Moses is being watched by leading clubs here and in Spain and seems destined for a long and successful career. Football clubs can do amazing things.
Crystal Palace as a community has a wonderful independence of spirit and sense of place that really appealed when we were thinking of moving here. An energetic and well mobilised campaign to save a local cinema really exemplified this. For me, saving this local football club is just as important.
Up the Eagles.
More on Crystal Palace:
- ‘Crystal Palace: The Ron Noades Connection’ on twohundredpercent
- ‘Support the Trust’ on Five Year Plan
- Dougie Freedman’s message to Crystal Palace supporters
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