by Chris Harris
Football fans are fickle. We all know that. But there’s a special kind of flick-of-the-switch fickleness that creeps into a club when it’s been comfortable for just a bit too long — and you can see it now all over the Crystal Palace forum.
The same posters who have spent the last year proclaiming Oliver Glasner as the second coming, the best thing to happen to Palace, are already sharpening their knives. Six games without a win and suddenly it’s, “one-trick pony”, “tactically naïve”. The entitlement is starting to look uncomfortably like something we usually reserve for Brighton fans.
What makes it even more ridiculous is that none of this has happened out of the blue. This wasn’t random bad luck or a mysterious collapse of form. This was a slow motion pile up, predicted weeks ago, engineered by decisions above the manager’s head, and accelerated by the most obvious structural weakness Palace have carried for years: a squad that is talented, yes, but thin, under-resourced and chronically under-invested.
If you’ve watched Palace for more than five minutes, you knew exactly what was coming. We entered the winter period with the biggest fixture pile-ups in the Premier League, while also carrying one of the smallest squads in the division. Injuries were always going to happen. Fatigue was always going to hit. AFCON was always going to hollow out key areas. And the chairman was always going to do what Palace chairmen always do: hope it all works out while telling you the numbers are “complicated”.
Then it didn’t all work out. Shocking.
So here we are, without a win in six, and suddenly the manager is the villain. That’s the Palace way. It’s also a fanbase problem. Being established in the Premier League for long enough does something to people. It breeds the quiet assumption that survival is automatic. That we’re entitled to a standard of football. That there should always be a plan B, a deeper bench, a miracle solution.
Glasner will show frailties, of course he will. Every manager does when the squad isn’t built to withstand adversity. But you judge a manager at the end of a season, not mid-way through a downturn everyone with eyes predicted.
2) The Conference League mistake
That’s not to say Glasner has been flawless. He hasn’t. Some of the management decisions have been questionable, particularly around rotation and the handling of peripheral players. There’s been a sense at times that fringe options are treated as emergency fillers rather than being nurtured into genuine contributors.
And the decision to field what amounted to a B-team in the Europa Conference for the KuPS fixture was, to put it politely, reckless.
Not because rotation is inherently wrong. Not because managers shouldn’t protect players. But because this particular competition isn’t just “nice to be in”. For clubs like Palace, it’s potentially the one realistic shot at European silverware in our lifetime. It is a rare alignment of circumstances, the kind that might never return. And if you throw it away with casual prioritising, you’re not just dropping points. You’re dropping history.
That’s the part I find most disconcerting. If anything should sharpen Palace’s ambition, it’s the knowledge that a European trophy isn’t something you fluke into every decade. I’ve always said I wasn’t even particularly desperate for Europa League, because the Conference represented something cleaner and more winnable, a genuine chance at a European cup. That’s not being small-time, that’s being realistic. We don’t need to be embarrassed about it. We should be leaning into it.
So yes, I’m on Team Glasner. I’m not interested in joining the keyboard warriors. Because the wider story here isn’t that Glasner is failing. It’s that Palace as an institution still hasn’t grown up and grown with him at a possible high point in our existence.
3) The real problem: ambition and investment
We’ve sold two of the best top 100 players in the world in the last couple of years. We’ve done what Palace always does: punch above our weight, then cash in on the jewels, then pretend the replacements will be “found”, and then act surprised when the squad looks short of quality and depth.
Steve Parish has overseen the same basic pattern again and again, restraint dressed up as prudence, ambition delayed until it disappears.
Glasner has repeatedly pointed out, calmly and consistently, that the squad needs investment. Not madness, not panic, not throwing money around, just proper, purposeful reinforcement. The sort that turns a talented starting eleven into a functioning Premier League squad. But Palace have always been slightly addicted to the idea that we can outsmart the league without properly funding the jump.
Then, when the predictable slump comes, we look down at the manager like he’s not what we cracked him up to be.
Look at where we are right now: a few points off a European place, still in the conversation, still in a position where the final third of the season could change the entire narrative. It’s hardly catastrophe. In fact, my instinct is that we’ll rally. We’ll find rhythm again, scrape out results, and end the season sixth or seventh. That’s how football works. It swings. It’s exactly why panic mid-swing is such a waste of breath.
The intriguing part is that Glasner may be leaving at the end of the season anyway. If that happens, it won’t be because fans got angry on a forum, it’ll be because he’s seen what many managers see at Palace: the ceiling isn’t set by the quality of the coaching, it’s set by the limits of the club’s ambition. He may decide he can do better elsewhere. If he does, he’ll go with our thanks. Because he’s already delivered, an FA Cup and a Community Shield .
But here’s where it gets uncomfortable for me, because I grew up with Steve Coppell.
To me, at this moment, Glasner is better than Steve Coppell. He’s modern, he’s tactically sharp, he’s raised our level, he’s given us identity. He’s also won trophies. But the question of “greatest Palace manager ever” is not simple.
Coppell took Palace to heights that, at the time, felt like lunacy. A third place finish, our best ever, and then we were a whisker away from winning the FA Cup. Won the ZDS Cup. He did it as a very young man at a club punching wildly above its weight. That Palace wasn’t “established Premier League”. That Palace was defying gravity. And I was there. I remember how improbable it all felt, and that counts for something.
So yes, Glasner can take the crown, but he needs one more glory moment, a swansong.
And that leap might be sitting right there in the Europa Conference League. Because winning a European Cup, even the Conference, would be out of the stratosphere for Palace fans; normally fed a diet of attrition. It puts Palace in a different category. It means something forever.
That’s the choice in front of us.
Because if Glasner wins that trophy, he doesn’t just become the best manager of the current era. He becomes the greatest manager Palace have ever had. Full stop.
And if we’re going to be fickle, for once, let’s be fickle in our customary belief that we should always hope for the best but expect the worst, and while we are in the current purple patch, albeit on a bad run, possibly our greatest period ever, we should maybe lay off Glasner and wait and see how the season pans out. Football is not NOW NOW NOW, it is cyclical. Be patient.
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