WHERE EAGLES DARE
At the risk of denouncing the family name, football has become a bit of an emotional vampire. At its worst, modern football is a cesspit of bile, hype, nonsense, hot air and yellow tickers. But every time we think enough’s enough and it’s time to change our name to Tiddlywinks Biennially, something happens to remind us why we wanted to be called Football Daily in the first place. Of late, the thing keeping us away from the deed poll office is a team dressed in a red and blue Macron kit. In the English football zodiac, 2025 is the Year of the Eagle. Crystal Palace won the FA Cup, the first major trophy in their history, followed that with the Community Shield and are now, after beating Liverpool thrillingly on Saturday, the only unbeaten team left in the Premier League. On Thursday they will make history when they play Dynamo Kyiv in their first match of Tin Pot’s league stage.
With pre-emptive apologies to fans of Brighton for what is about to happen to their mouthful of tea, Palace are currently top of our patented and entirely worthless Model Club Table™. It’s nothing to do with algorithms, in either sense: we scribbled our table on the back of a vape box, and Palace’s abundant charm lies even more in the breadth of human experience – both direct, even for the neutral, and vicarious – than their ability to buy low and sell stratospheric. That’s not to say they haven’t been extremely canny in the transfer market. The team that ran Liverpool ragged in the first half at Selhurst Park cost £135.5m to assemble. That’s less than Mancheste … no, we’re not going there, this is a rare, celebratory edition of Football Daily.
Adam Wharton alone would fetch close to £135.5m were he to be sold to … well, any club in the world, because he’s good enough to fit seamlessly into every single one of them. Wharton’s un-English virtues are one of the things Football Daily loves most about Palace. We won’t list them all, or we’d be here till the day after tomorrow’s edition, but here are a few more.
The iconoclastic dignity with which Marc Guéhi behaved either side of his failed move to Liverpool, and the maturity and playfulness with which he treated balloon-popping, headline-seeking questions from people twice his age; their ability to carry on overachieving despite selling Michael Olise and Eberechi Eze in the last 18 months; Eze’s outrageous portfolio of unique goals, across 2025 or his whole Palace career; pretty much everything Jean-Philippe Mateta does, whether it’s with a football or a microphone; the delicate precision and almost vicious ruthlessness of Palace’s counterattacks; Oliver Glasner reclaiming the touchline dance from Alan P … [you said positive vibes only – Football Daily Ed] as a thing of awkward, nerdy, unchoreographed celebration; Daniel Muñoz becoming the Premier League’s first human bullet train; their hardcore support, who are almost entirely free of entitlement and selfie sticks; and the fact that, in the hour or so after Palace’s Cup final win, nobody on the pitch or in the ITV studio mentioned the prize (sic) of European football. What prize could possibly top what Palace had just achieved?
It won’t last, it never does, and there’s a fair chance Palace will lose Glasner, Wharton and Guéhi in the next 12 months. But there’s also a fair chance that, wherever they end up, football will never be quite as life-affirming as it is now.
LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE
Join Scott Murray from 8pm BST for hot Bigger Cup updates from Galatasaray 1-2 Liverpool, while Yara El-Shaboury will be on deck at the same time to clockwatch the heck out of the rest of the evening’s action.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Chelsea is a winning machine that had in the past two or three years a moment without trophies. But Chelsea won something before my time and then we start winning, and then my team kept winning and then a transformation of new teams, new coaches, more trophies, European trophies, the biggest one and the Champions League. So Chelsea is a winning machine. I am the biggest one until someone wins four” – Humility’s José Mourinho is back at the Bridge, baby, for Benfica’s Bigger Cup tie and ready to remind everyone who is No 1 in SW6. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
Taking ‘favourite shirt sponsors: go’ (last Tuesday’s Football Daily, full email edition) as an invitation, may I offer Wang Computers who sponsored my team, Oxford United, from 1985-89? For puerility fans like myself, the sponsor of course adorned our players’ shirts for the glorious Milk Cup final of 1986 where, inspired by the defeated QPR’s sponsor, a large banner in the Wembley crowd read something like: ‘I’d rather have a Wang than a Guinness any day.’ Whether any funds reached the club via this arrangement is debatable, but it certainly enabled our then-owner to [Snip – Football Daily Lawyers]” – Richard Prangle.
In response to Paul Clerkin wondering what the Football Weekly merch consists of (yesterday’s letters), that’s a cat that will surely stay firmly in its bag forever; if readers actually knew what they stood a chance of winning, they’d be sending in a daily deluge that would put Taylor Swift’s fan mail to shame. The internet would probably collapse and civilisation, including Football Daily, with it. Restraint, restraint. Please” – Simon Gill.
If you have any, please send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Richard Prangle. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we have them, are here.
This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
