Crystal Palace manager Oliver Glasner has admitted they knew they couldn’t replace Michael Olise this summer with just one player.
The Palace manager has been speaking to Sky Germany about the winger and the club’s efforts to sign more than one player to fill the void he’s left behind.
Olise left Crystal Palace to join Bayern Munich earlier this summer in a €53m deal, bringing an end to an impressive three years at Selhurst Park.
He was undoubtedly the star of the show for the Eagles in that time, bagging 16 goals and 25 assists in 90 games and forming a deadly partnership with Eberechi Eze.
That came to fruition last season when Glasner arrived to replace Roy Hodgson, with the Austrian quickly ensuring that he could get the best out of the trio of Eze, Olise and Jean-Philippe Mateta.
His departure is naturally a huge loss for Crystal Palace and Glasner isn’t hiding away from that fact but insists there’s a plan in place with the signings they’ve made to replace him.
“We knew we couldn’t replace this player 1-on-1, so we sat down and said, okay, we have to split it up a bit, on several shoulders,” he said.
“With Daichi Kamada, we got this technical, intelligent player, and with Ismaila Sarr, we got the straight-forward one, who has speed and depth.
“And we said, okay, with both profiles, and also a bit counter-dependent, who needs what, where are we a bit more dominant, where do we need more of the playful solutions, maybe there are opponents where we play a bit more on the counter, then we need more speed, more depth.
“And with these two profiles, we think we can replace Michael as best we can, but we knew 1-on-1 that we couldn’t.”
