Why are Crystal Palace struggling after such a positive end to last season? | OneFootball

At the end of the 2023/24 Premier League season, few clubs were flying higher than Crystal Palace. The mood at Selhurst Park had been bolstered by the arrival of new boss Oliver Glasner, who replaced a struggling Roy Hodgson in February and led the Eagles to a run of 24 points from 13 games. His exciting style of play had brought a forgotten feel-good factor back to SE25.

The good feeling, though, has not continued into this season. Following a turbulent summer which saw key players such as Michael Olise and Joachim Andersen leave the club, Palace are mired in a relegation battle, sitting 19th with just eight points to their name after 12 matches.

What has gone wrong?

Their statistics paint a murky picture as to the cause of the dip. Comparing Palace’s first ten matches of 2024/25 with last season’s end of season run in, the Eagles are underperforming across a range of metrics. Going forward, their average expected goals (xG), an estimate of how many goals a team should score based on the quality of their chances created, has dropped from 1.55 to 1.34.

More concerningly, Palace’s average xG per shot has also fallen from 0.129 to 0.091 since last season, indicating that Glasner’s side are struggling to create quality chances. They are struggling to finish chances too, averaging at least one big chance missed per game.

Perhaps most damning is Palace’s tendency this season to underperform their xG. With nine goals scored from an expected 15, no Premier League side have underperformed xG more than the Eagles this season. The opposite was true last season, though, when Palace regularly overperformed their xG.

This may partly be down to Eberechi Eze’s injury history and Olise’s departure. The pair combined for 31 gaol involvements last season, but Glasner has struggled for solutions with Eze absent for much of this campaign and Olise now playing in Germany with Bayern Munich. With 12 matches played this season, Palace’s top scorer is Jean-Philippe Mateta with just three goals. The club is clearly missing the prolific attack of last season.

Palace brought in attacking signings in striker Eddie Nketiah from Arsenal, Ismaila Sarr from Marseille and Daicha Kamada from Lazio, but they have managed just one Premier League goal between them so far this season, scored by Sarr.

Add into the mix injuries to midfielders Adam Wharton and Cheick Doucouré, and Palace’s start to the season became much trickier.

Glasner under pressure

But Dan Cook, whose Crystal Palace fan podcast HLTCO has accumulated 184,900 X followers, feels that Palace’s struggles can be put down to bad luck more than player performance.

Cook said: “It just feels as though from a game management perspective, everything that could go wrong at the moment is.

“If you look at the start of this season, the performances we have had have not been terrible. Every other loss we’ve had has been via the odd goal.”

He also refers to the out-of-character Maxence Lacroix mistake which gifted Fulham an opening goal at Selhurst Park, and the refereeing error which saw Eze’s opening day free kick against Brentford wrongfully ruled out.

Cook continued: “There have been spells like this where you’re just waiting for it to click. The problem we have from a mentality point of view as fans this season is that nobody wants to see Oliver Glasner go. This isn’t a managerial issue.

“We as a fanbase want for this to work, but it needs to work quickly otherwise the board are going to get pretty uncomfortable in the seats because whether you like it or not Premier League money is huge for a club of our size and if we were to drop out of it, it would be incredibly difficult to get back in.”

This is not an unfamiliar situation for Crystal Palace to be in. Cook remembers the doomed tenure of Frank de Boer in 2017, which was heralded as a landmark appointment but ended after the Dutchman won just one of his five matches in charge.

Stability could be the key for Palace despite bad start

Palace fans, then, have developed a knack for patience, something Dr Andrew Wood, a sports psychologist who has advised England football teams as well as Olympic and Paralympic athletes, says is vital for a team needing stability, particularly when losses seem to be out of a team’s control.

He said: “If you are making mistakes and there’s a sort of dark cloud hanging over you, you will focus more on negative things and they’re more likely to happen in the future because players become slightly more sensitive and attuned to the threat in a game rather than approaching a game to win.

“You need to be asking how you can focus in on things that you can control and how you can approach games about trying to do our best rather than trying to avoid failure.”

In the age of elite football, the mental side of the game has become more important than ever, and Wood acknowledges that despite last season’s run of wins, the situation at Palace was more unsettled than it appeared to outside eyes after a summer of disruption.

“[Managerial transitions are] a really challenging time. There’s this fancy word called culture around clubs at the moment, a bit of a buzzword. It’s something people find really difficult to define, but the way I look at it, people are the culture.

“When you start moving that around, the culture changes and what also comes with it comes a period of transition where you have to try and work out: what is this new culture? What is the norm? Especially if the manager might be going, you add another layer as a player of wondering what my future looks like.

“All these factors happening over the summer have an effect on performance, and all Glasner can do is play the cards he was dealt. In some senses, it feels like he is still in preseason.”

While statistics show that Palace’s play has regressed this season, one column on the spreadsheet has remained consistent: home attendance. The Eagles are averaging 25,142 supporters through the Selhurst Park turnstiles every week, which Wood considers an immeasurable boost for an underperforming team.

While Wood teaches his clients to block out noise and focus only on what they can control, he admits that a supportive crowd never goes unnoticed.

“There is a theory called challenge and threat in sports, where we try to bring lots of resources to meet the demands of a situation where we feel challenged, and that’s associated with better performance.

“By the crowd being more supportive of the players and manager and generally having optimism for their future, that sort of a resource can only be a good thing.”