Crystal Palace are hoping to win their first major trophy in this weekend’s FA Cup final against Manchester City. If they succeed, key man Eberechi Eze is sure to have played a key role.
Crystal Palace’s 2-0 win at Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday was little more than a sideshow to the main event at the end of the season for both teams.
As Spurs gear up for next week’s Europa League final against Manchester United, Palace have a trip to Wembley on the cards for this season’s FA Cup final against Manchester City.
But while Tottenham have long since written off their domestic campaign, forgetting their woeful Premier League form when taking to the field in Europe, Palace have been building momentum in the run-up to their biggest game since the FA Cup final in 2015-16. Following Sunday’s win on the other side of London, they have won eight and lost only two of their last 14 games.
Key to that form has been Eberechi Eze, Palace’s gloriously talented number 10, who has five goals in his last four games. His brace at Spurs at the weekend means he has now scored in four consecutive games across all competitions for the first time in his career, a run that stretches all the way back to his debut for Queens Park Rangers at 18 years old way back in December 2016.
Eze, now 26, is coming into his prime years, and it’s showing. He had never before even scored in three consecutive appearances until this recent run, and he is now up to four in a row. He has 12 goals and 12 assists in all competitions this season, making this by a distance his most productive season as a Premier League player, and also eclipses his best in the Championship, when he racked up 22 goal involvements in his final season at QPR in 2019-20.
This season is his fifth at Selhurst Park, and so it’s fair to say that in goal involvement terms, he has taken a while to properly hit his stride. Now, though, Eze is looking very much the player Palace thought they were signing five years ago.
In fairness, his progress was disrupted by a terrible Achilles injury sustained at the end of the 2020-21 season – his first at Palace – and which he felt the after-effects of for a long time following his return in November 2021.
Each comeback proved a false start as he tried time and again to get back to fitness. In the end, he made only 17 appearances in 2021-22, starting just 10 games in all competitions.
That injury means that every time he suffers a knock, people assume the worst. He is sometimes even given an unfair reputation as injury-prone, when in fact he played in all 38 of Palace’s Premier League games the very next season (30 starts), and since that Achilles absence, Eze has only missed 17 games due to injury in three seasons, according to Transfermarkt. In 2024-25, he has made 38 starts and two sub appearances in all competitions already, with three more games to come.
That availability has helped him develop significantly in the last couple of years. All that promise shown in the Championship is very much Premier League quality these days.
“It’s been a weird season,” Eze said of his own form after the win at Spurs. “But I have gradually got there. [I’m] gradually getting some rhythm and playing how I want to be playing, helping the team as much as I can. It’s a good time right now.”
His performances have led to links to many of the best teams in England. There’s an argument that he’d be good enough to play for any of them, too.
Although he has thrived in a Palace side who have never put much emphasis on keeping the ball during his time there (the only season in which they’ve averaged more than 45% possession was the year he barely played due to injury), Eze is clearly capable of playing for a possession-dominant team. Comfortable on the ball in tight spaces, he never shies away from receiving passes in advanced positions.
Most of Palace’s attacks go through him at some point because he’s always looking for ways to have an impact at the sharp end of the pitch. He has played a part in 22 more open-play shot-ending sequences than any other Palace player this season (148) and ranks 23rd overall in the Premier League despite playing for a bottom-half team. Removing players from teams currently in the top half of the table, and only Fulham’s Alex Iwobi and Wolves’ Matheus Cunha are above Eze.
Most of Eze’s contributions come with him either taking the shot or creating the chance rather than playing a pass earlier in the build-up. Of players to play at least 1,000 minutes in the Premier League this season, only Bukayo Saka, Cole Palmer, Kevin De Bruyne, Mohamed Salah and Bruno Fernandes are averaging a higher total of shots and chances created per 90 than Eze’s 5.6. That’s some list of players for him to be alongside.
Eze’s numbers are boosted somewhat by an ambitious streak when it comes to his shooting. Only Julio Enciso, Diogo Jota, Noni Madueke, Palmer and Erling Haaland are averaging more shots per 90 in the Premier League this season than Eze (3.6), but the Palace man ranks third for the total number of shots he has attempted from outside the box (57).
There are times his long-range shooting can be frustrating. Since his move to Palace in August 2020, only four players have taken more shots from outside the penalty area than him (165). But the sheer volume of shots he takes means he has a decent output, with only three players scoring more goals from outside the box than his 11.
And while he still attempts plenty of (or maybe too many?) shots from distance, the evidence from the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium at the weekend suggests he is also working on making runs to support attacks and get on the end of chances closer to goal. Eze is unlikely to score an easier brace than the one at Spurs, when his two goals came from shots worth 1.14 xG, and both chances appeared easier to score than miss. Those goals also came just a few weeks after he got on the end of a low Ismaïla Sarr cross to open the scoring at City from close in.
Although Palace lost that day, they raced into a two-goal lead inside 21 minutes, and Eze even scored a third from close range but was denied by a marginal offside call. In what turned out to be a dress rehearsal for this weekend’s FA Cup final, City eventually won 5-2, but there were plenty of positives for Palace to take from it, not least in how difficult City found trying to stop Palace’s star man.
Eze is a big-game player. In the last few weeks alone, he has scored in league games against three of the current top seven in City, Arsenal and Nottingham Forest, as well as against another in Aston Villa, as he opened the scoring in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley with a rasping effort from the edge of the box.
He clearly thrives with the responsibility that comes with being Palace’s main man, and it will fall to him to inspire an upset at the weekend against City. He is well aware of just how big an occasion it is for a club who have never won a major trophy before in their history, and have twice – in 1989-90 and 2015-16 – finished as FA Cup runners up.
“I think it means everything,” Eze said. “We know what it means to the fans, to the club. We’re going to give everything that we’ve got to put ourselves in the best position. I feel like today was a good step towards that.
“We’re confident. We know that we’ve just got to do what we do and be the best version of ourselves, and we’ve got the chance of beating any team.”
Palace and Eze do indeed have good reason to believe they can beat anyone, having taken points off every one of the six teams directly beneath Liverpool in the Premier League table this season, including City in a 2-2 draw at Selhurst Park in December. They are clearly a very good, very effective team that is fully capable of springing a surprise. If they manage an upset at Wembley this weekend, Eze will surely have played a part.
Beyond that game, though, Palace may well be braced for a summer of speculation about Eze’s future. He has two years left on his contract, and it would be quite reasonable if he was looking for a route into the Champions League before long.
He is showing, more consistently than ever, that that is the level at which he belongs.
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In-Form Eberechi Eze Can Inspire Crystal Palace to FA Cup Glory Opta Analyst.
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