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en years ago today Crystal Palace fans celebrated the last-minute survival of their football club – less than a month after they had celebrated their last-day survival in the Championship. The 2009-10 season started well for Palace, who threatened to break into the play-off positions before Christmas. But the club entered administration in January 2010, suffered a 10-point deduction, lost their best player in Victor Moses and then watched as manager Neil Warnock left for QPR in March. By May, the team was facing relegation and the club was facing liquidation.
The relegation battle went to the last day of the season in a do-or-die match against Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough. The tension-ridden 2-2 draw meant Wednesday went down to League One and Palace stayed in the Championship – but the club faced another, more significant off-the-field battle in the following weeks. Administrators had set a deadline of 1 June and, if no buyer would rescue the club from its financial predicament, Palace would fold and become the first Football League club to be liquidated since Maidstone United in 1992.
Stephen Browett, a Palace fan since the late 1960s, was acutely aware of his club’s precarious position. “We all knew we were in the shit,” he says. “But we all assumed somebody would come along and rescue the club by buying it. After a while it didn’t seem like anyone was coming in to take over and then I heard through a Palace supporters’ site about this guy called Steve Parish, whose company TAG was the back of the shirt sponsor. I read about this consortium and, through a connection of my wife, I got Steve’s phone number. I rang him and said: ‘I could get involved if you wanted an extra person.’
“He was at my office half an hour later. He told me: ‘There isn’t really a consortium. It’s just an idea, but Martin Long – the head of Churchill Insurance, who were the front of the shirt sponsor – was interested in helping. But that was it. Nobody else was interested in buying the club, so it was going to go bust. The chief executive, Phil Alexander, had a list of about 50 people who had rung up and most of them were tyre-kickers and loonies.”
Just like the drama at Hillsborough earlier in the month, the negotiations went down to the wire. The four members of the consortium – Browett, Parish, Long and Jeremy Hosking – insisted they would not buy the club unless it came with the stadium. On the other side of the deal, Lloyds Bank, who were trying to get the best price for their shareholders, wanted to sell Selhurst Park for residential development.
The crucial meeting took place on 1 June at Lloyds’ offices in the City of London against the backdrop of hundreds of Palace fans mounting a noisy but predominantly peaceful protest that had started at Selhurst Park. Among those pledging his support was Maxi Jazz, the lead singer of Faithless, who told Sky Sports: “We have been here for 105 years and I’m confident that we’re not going anywhere. I’m not as worried as some and I’m not going to apportion blame at the moment. I’m just praying that my club survives.”
His prayers were answered. With fans waiting outside, the bank became increasingly desperate to complete the deal. “This was a rare example of fan power in action,” says Browett, who recalls one of Lloyds’ senior negotiators saying: “I’ve got these bloody hooligans outside my bank making a noise – I can’t have that. Plus, if we don’t agree it, every Crystal Palace supporter will close their accounts with us.”
The consortium had achieved their initial aim of saving Palace. Now they faced the task of restoring the fortunes of a club that had been in the doldrums. As if that was not daunting enough, none of them had any experience of running a football club.
“The four of us knew how to run a business, which I think is more important,” says says Browett. “Football is a different world and you have to know how to deal with agents and all the complicated football things. But fortunately, we had Phil Alexander, who had been in football administration for decades. We also had Dougie Freedman from day one who had been Paul Hart’s assistant and had stayed on. There were stories about Freedman having to give the groundsman cash out of his own pocket to buy grass seed.”
In such unpromising circumstances, there were limited expectations. “The number one ambition was to save the club,” Browett says. “And to stop the club from going out of existence and then to keep the club operating on a sensible, practical, financial model. In truth, running it responsibly on a breakeven basis was a massive ambition because nobody in the Championship can run it like that – especially without parachute payments. The Championship is the most uneven of playing fields.”
The first few seasons under the new owners did not augur particularly well. Palace finished 20th and 17th in the Championship, making relegation to League One a more likely prospect than promotion to the Premier League. The one glimmer of hope was provided by a 17-year-old academy graduate who scored on his full debut in the opening match of the 2010-11 season in a 3-2 win over Leicester. Since then Wilfried Zaha has become the talisman for the club’s remarkable progress over the last decade, as Palace have become an established Premier League club. They are in their seventh successive season in the top flight – the longest run in their history.
There have been plenty of highlights for Browett since those inauspicious early days: Darren Ambrose’s stunning goal at Old Trafford in a League Cup win in 2011; the three minutes between Jason Puncheon scoring in the 2016 FA Cup final and Juan Mata’s equaliser; the win at the Etihad in December 2018 courtesy of Andros Townsend’s wonderful volley. “But above all those it has to be Wembley 2013 and the play-offs final win against Watford. That is the richest prize in sport and it is the most stressful 120 minutes I have ever experienced, as each one of those minutes costs millions.”
Browett’s admiration for the players who took the club to the Premier League knows no bounds. “That team was assembled by Dougie Freedman and Ian Holloway for basically nothing. Kevin Phillips was a loan. Glenn Murray was a free transfer – as were Damien Delaney and Mile Jedinak. Bolasie cost peanuts from Bristol City. Wilf and Johnny Williams were from the youth team.
“I don’t think there will ever be in the future or there has been in the recent past a team that has got promoted from the Championship without spending any money doing it and not being in debt. So that’s something to be incredibly proud of, having assembled this team of rejects, misfits, free transfers and kids.” And that team was the platform for Palace’s current, unprecedented success, which seems a long way from that day a decade ago when their very existence hung by a thread.
Richard Foster’s new book Premier League Nuggets is out now and you can follow him on Twitter.
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