Crystal Palace are stuck in a holding pattern of endless fear and mediocrity ...Middle East

Crystal Palace 1-2 Brentford (Esse 85’| Mbeumo pen 66′, Schade 80′)

SELHURST PARK — In weather so rancid even the cheerleaders had their club-branded coats on, corkscrewing winds and rain rattling the iron roof like gunfire, 50 or so Crystal Palace fans stuck around to boo their team down the tunnel.

It didn’t last long, and their heart wasn’t really in it. This a performative expression that they ought to expect more, that defeat to Brentford shouldn’t be acceptable when it’s only their third away win of the season.

Selhurst Park was pockmarked with empty seats, miserable and muted. The crowd seemed reticent to move or else let in the cold, barely rising above a dull drone which made the place seem faintly haunted.

Perhaps it was the weather, perhaps something deeper. Palace had been on one of those six-game unbeaten runs you don’t really notice until it’s gone, having lost just three in their past 17.

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Victory on Sunday could have put them 11th, above Brentford and in reach of the top half. Maybe this was a continuation of the delayed progress of last season?

But, of course, that next step never came. Could fans really expect anything different?

This is a club stuck in a holding pattern, trapped between fear of failure and fear of hubris, condemned to comfortable, shapeless mediocrity for time immemorial.

Optimism never lasts long enough to become something real, diluted every time by memories of the last time they dared to hope.

And so we end up here: confecting outrage at a correct VAR call just to feel something.

Telling Will Hughes to shoot into traffic from 25 yards, twice, just to feel something. Grasping onto an illusion the club is going somewhere, that progress might be over the horizon, just to feel something. Overreacting to the highs and lows because otherwise everything is just numb and meaningless.

There are clear benefits to how Steve Parish has run Palace over the past decade. Relegation has never been a genuine threat. One FA Cup final and another semi.

The 26th-highest revenue in the world, 11th-highest in England, according to the Deloitte Money League 2025. Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) breaches have never been a threat. This is good governance, from the Daniel Levy school.

But why do Palace actually exist? Who is this all for? What are a football club supposed to provide? Surely more than this.

There never seems any real depth to the misery or elation at Palace because there’s an acceptance that everything will always be okay – nothing more, nothing less. There can only be so much jeopardy, so much joy, when so little is being risked. There is a reason skydiving out of ground-floor windows has never caught on.

“Many parts [of the performance] was okay, but okay was not good enough,” Oliver Glasner said. Yet okay has been good enough here for a decade. Perhaps it always will be.

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Nottingham Forest, Newcastle United, Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brighton, Fulham and Brentford are all above Palace in 2024-25, despite being promoted after them. In a season which has been more open and in flux than perhaps any other in the Premier League era, the top-flight’s designated drivers are still dutifully twelfth.

Romain Esse, signed for £14.5m from Millwall last week, was the sole provider of genuine excitement, scoring with his first Premier League touch off the bench. The Esse-Eberechi Eze partnership could eventually be brilliant, but without a quality structure around them, it won’t really matter.

That structure just isn’t in place, with a lack of depth in almost every position. Record signing Eddie Nketiah still hasn’t scored in the league. The wing-backs have been run into the ground. Without Cheick Doucoure or Adam Wharton fit, central midfield lacks creativity or class.

The rest of the season will probably be okay, perhaps slightly better. Next season will almost certainly be okay. Revenue and budget should guarantee that. But how much longer can this go on until everyone involved needs to feel something more than okay?

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