After a defeat earlier in the season, Parish had joined his inner circle and lamented the absence of a passing midfielder similar to those of the past like Yohan Cabaye or Luka Milivojevic. “Dougie and his team were unanimous, ‘Steve, sign Adam Wharton’,” Parish recalls. “We are very lucky to have a hard-working scouting team. They stand by their decisions.”
Doing the deals
The preliminary work on deals is done by Iain Moody, an experienced multilingual transfer negotiator. Ordinarily Parish will deal directly with the selling club to finalise the terms. The Eze deal was finalised in August 2020 by Parish from the beach in the south of France. The £17 million Palace paid for the silky attacker barely merits a mention now. The club always believed they were signing one of the best young talents around.
Even through his long injury absence at the start of the 2021-2022 season, that never faltered. Eze worked to get back from his Achilles rupture and now Palace have a player who could play in any Premier League side. There is another obvious sell to players joining Palace. “We don’t have the biggest squad,” Parish says, “so it’s not like you’ll be waiting months for your chance.”
A manager on board
“Oliver [Glasner] has to get a lot of credit,” Parish says. “You don’t get picked for England if you’re not in a winning team.” Under the Austrian, a run of 19 points from their last seven Premier League games took Palace to a club record 10th place, as one of the form teams of the season’s end. “Roy [Hodgson] had that same attitude,” Parish says. “The pressure would be on with results and we would be discussing this and that and then he would say to me of a young lad, ‘He’s going to be some footballer.’”
Parish learned from one of his predecessors as Palace chairman, Ron Noades, an important lesson: Freedman and Parish insist that the manager looks at every academy graduate option before the club commits to a signing in that position. Palace have produced many that way. Wilfried Zaha, Jonny Williams, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Tyrick Mitchell – who was capped by Southgate two years ago – all got their chance. Wan-Bissaka only joined his first senior training session because they were short of a right-back on that day. He ended up earning the club £55 million in a transfer fee that went a long way to settling their profitability and sustainability compliance.
A club that knows what it takes
“Our fans are so encouraging of young players,” Parish says. “They love watching good football and they love watching good young players.” It helps that historically Palace have launched careers as big as those figurative giants of the English game, Ian Wright and Kenny Sansom. Guehi, a South London boy who had spent his developmental years at Chelsea, and cost around £20 million, was an instant hit.
Henderson, whose £15 million price was a lot for Palace to spend on a goalkeeper, replaced a favourite in Sam Johnstone. At the time the fans wanted a new right-back but Parish and Freedman stuck to their guns.
