Crystal Palace kick off their Premier League campaign this afternoon with an away match at Brentford. There’ll be a lot of optimism around the Eagles and that’s largely due to Oliver Glasner and how the club performed under the manager at the end of last season.
Ahead of the game, he’s spoken to Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung. The first words were him apologising for returning the call late, and he gave an insight into what’s going on behind the scenes at Crystal Palace right now: “Sorry that it was a little later than agreed, but I just had a long phone call with the sports director. There’s a lot going on – wow!”
Kronen Zeitung then asked if things were so busy because he was preparing for today’s match, and Glasner said: “No, squad policy and players are even bigger issues for us at the moment.”
The manager was then directly asked about the potential of Eberechi Eze leaving Crystal Palace and Filip Kostic then arriving from Juventus, and to that he said: “There are so many rumours. We don’t want to comment on that. The squad is in very good shape. But the transfer window is still open for two weeks – and anything is possible here.”
Bayern Munich wanted to appoint Glasner earlier this summer after the Bundesliga club made an absolute mess of their succession planning.
Uli Hoeneß, the German club’s lifetime honorary big mouth, recently said Glasner wanted to accept the move, and Kronen Zeitung asked for his response: “I have no comment on that.”
Asked about his targets for the Eagles and the coming season, the Austrian made it clear that whilst being realistic he wants to push things: “Especially since Crystal Palace has never been better than tenth. We also invested a transfer surplus of €23m and not 100. I am almost more ambitious with my own target than the management. But I also do not expect us to play the whole season like we did at the end of the last one, when we won six of the last seven games. Because then we would get 100 points and be champions. The aim is for us to improve constantly.”
On his prediction for the coming campaign, he said what happens in the next two weeks will have a major impact: “I don’t quite know yet, because I can’t estimate what will happen on the transfer market.”
It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that Oliver Glasner is expecting a lot to happen at Crystal Palace before the window closes.
Prepare for transfer mayhem!
