1 month ago
16
Community Shield winner
©IMAGO
Crystal Palace fans have certainly been enjoying 2025, with Austrian manager Oliver Glasner delivering a second trophy in the space of five months, following the club’s victory over Liverpool in the Community Shield on Sunday. Despite Arne Slot’s side taking the lead twice, the South London side pulled it back to level before full time and then dramatically went on to win on penalties. Prior to this year, Palace hadn’t won a trophy since 1994, but have now won two in this calendar year, having won the FA Cup at the end of last season, beating Manchester City.
"I showed the players a video before we went to Wembley about the happiness of the fans after winning the FA Cup, and this, we call it the emotional reward," Glasner said at full time. "Standing here in front of the fans, having these emotions, this feeling you can't buy with any money in the world, so you have to deserve it. And the players deserved it after the FA Cup and the players deserved it today. Our fans, they are already supporting us from the beginning until the end, even today. When we were down, they were always pushing the team forward. It's a great connection, and at the end, we were all rewarded, and this is what then stays forever."
There’s little doubt that Glasner has the support of the Selhurst Park faithful, with questions now arising as to whether the Austrian tactician has risen above all others to become Palace’s most successful manager in the modern era. Alongside the two trophies, Glasner has also guided Palace to tenth and then twelfth-placed finishes, with last season’s points haul of 53 being their best return in the Premier League era. And when we take a look at the more detailed stats, there’s certainly a compelling argument to be made.
As we can see in the table above, which shows the points-per-game average of every Palace manager in the Premier League going back to 2013, Glasner boasts a record of 1.51, having won 77 points from 51 games. That, impressively, is a better return than any of the six head coaches that came before him, with only Tony Pulis coming close on 1.46 points per game. However, Glasner’s league record should come as no real surprise, considering the fact that he led the club to a record points tally last season.
The Austrian’s record becomes even more impressive when we broaden the data set out to all competitions and compare Glasner to every Palace manager in the club’s history. When we filter out managerial stints that didn’t make it to 30 games, the 50-year-old coach remarkably ranks above all other managers at the Selhurst Park club. Over the course of 62 games across all competitions, Glasner has averaged 1.73 points per game. The next highest on the list is Iain Dowie, who managed a perfectly respectable 1.44 points per game across 120 games for Palace between 2003 and 2006. However, as the table above points out, Dowie nor any other manager in the top 10 can lay claim to a single trophy for the club while Glasner now has two to his name.
What Glasner and Palace will go on to achieve this season remains to be seen, but there’s little doubt that his record to date has got fans of the club signing his name and thanking their lucky stars that he swapped the Bundesliga for Selhurst in south London in early 2024. Legacies can never truly be written until a manager moves on from a club, but as things currently stand, there are very few in Palace’s club history that can rival what Glasner has done in the past 18 months.
