The dizzying numbers doing the rounds at Selhurst Park betrayed the reality Crystal Palace are operating on another level these days. Yohan Cabaye was pictured holding aloft the home shirt, resplendent with new sponsors, after completing a club record move from Paris Saint-Germain, last season’s Champions League quarter-finalists, for an initial £10m. Behind the scenes Scott Dann was due to put pen to paper on a long-term contract, following James McArthur’s lead earlier in the month, on wages of around £65,000 a week.
The days ahead will see renewed efforts to secure Charlie Austin from Queens Park Rangers, with Palace’s salary offer expected to trump those proposed by the England squad player’s other suitors. Their wishlist of further recruits includes Ashley Williams, James Chester, Matt Phillips and Loïc Rémy. “We’re working on three more,” said the co-chairman Steve Parish. “We are committed to bolstering the squad and having a really good year. These are very exciting times. Hopefully we can sustain this and really build on it.” All this at a club who, five years ago, survived relegation to League One on the last day of the season while languishing in administration for the second time since 1998.
The owners who bought them out of financial ruin have overseen remarkable progress, with each season an improvement on the last. The major additions in the summer of 2010 were David Wright and Andy Dorman on free transfers from Ipswich and St Mirren respectively. Fast forward to the present and the ambition reflects what must be done to maintain an upward curve: Premier League placings of 11th and 10th in their first two years back in the elite were eye-catching, but staying in the top half in a brutal division requires an upgrade in personnel.
The policy is to add three or four first-team players in this window, figures who will immediately command places in the lineup. They have never been in a position to do that. Yet Premier League clubs, even those who can feel satisfied at a job well done by finishing mid-table, can aspire to pretty much anything these days.
Palace’s joint second-highest ever finish in May earned them £77,335,008 – made up of facility fees, merit money, central commercial sponsorships and equal shares of domestic and overseas broadcasting monies – in Premier League prize money alone. That was £21,664,546 less than the champions, Chelsea, who had finished 39 points away. (As an aside, that tally of 39 points was more than any of the bottom five teams accumulated.) Those revenues, centrally distributed, will soar further once the new £5.14bn media deal kicks in but, even now, a club that can establish themselves in the English top flight would expect to become one of the top 40 in Europe in terms of financial clout almost overnight.
Cabaye was secured despite Roma and Atlético Madrid, sides who will compete in the Champions League next term, having expressed interest in his services. The relative weakness of the euro in comparison with sterling clearly helps, but the Italians could offer only half the wage Palace agreed to pay the France international, with those broadcasting revenues setting the English league apart.
“We’ve got the biggest and most successful sporting league of any kind anywhere in the world, by miles,” said Parish earlier this year. “Our overseas deals are virtually bigger than any other football league and the NFL and the NBA put together. It’s a real treasure.” It is certainly generating wealth.
Examples are prevalent. Marseille could not hope to compete with Swansea City to retain André Ayew, nor Saint-Etienne to keep Franck Tabanou, despite the fact both French clubs will compete in the Europa League, whereas the Welsh side, in eighth, missed out on qualification. Marseille were just as powerless to persuade Dimitri Payet to sign new terms at Stade Vélodrome when West Ham, 12th last year, offered him a basic £70,000-a-week and a five-year deal, with an option for a sixth.
“West Ham really showed me that they wanted me to come: both the joint-chairmen and the manager,” said Payet, who had supplied 51 goals over the past six Ligue 1 seasons in stints with Saint-Etienne, Lille and Marseille. David Sullivan hailed him as a “world-class player still in his prime”.
PSV Eindhoven, Dutch champions who will compete in the European Cup next term, might not have quibbled at the sale of Memphis Depay to Manchester United but Georginio Wijnaldum is now on the verge of a £14.5m move to Newcastle. That club may attract huge crowds to St James’ Park, but they preserved their Premier League status only on the final afternoon of last season when a win hoisted them to what was arguably a deceptively comfortable position of 15th. That placing, quite rightly, was deemed utterly unsatisfactory, yet it earned Mike Ashley’s club £77,835,102. Barcelona earned £41.7m in prize money for winning the Champions League.
Parish, speaking to TalkSport on Friday morning, admitted the television monies have effectively left the league “competing against ourselves” with similar concern having been expressed by top-flight chairmen. “If you have a player on the kind of money we’re starting to pay them but you want to move them on, there really is no market out there other than the other 19 clubs in the Premier League,” he said. “It’s something that will become a growing problem.”
Yet Palace, a club attempting to reinvent itself as an established member of the elite division, can think only in immediate terms at present.
Taking the next step is always the most challenging, but Cabaye’s arrival has set the standard. The team will still begin the campaign targeting 40 points, safety and consolidation, but players such as Yannick Bolasie and Wilfried Zaha have already taken to social media to salivate over the season ahead. The successful pursuit of the Frenchman has the juices flowing. The days when securing an ageing and out-of-contract Edgar Davids on a short-term deal had them out on the streets around Selhurst Park seem an age away.
