Crystal Palace’s European dream is at risk – it’s time for football to wake up

Crystal Palace face the prospect of not being able to play in the Europa League thanks to multi-club ownership, with John Textor holding stakes in the Eagles and Lyon

Steve Parish’s face at Uefa this week probably said enough. He didn’t need to repeat a view he has pressed on people in private – and now to Uefa executives in Nyon – that Crystal Palace are technically not part of a multi-club ownership.

A very different interpretation may now cost his club a place in the Europa League, or perhaps European competition altogether.

The challenge for the club this week has arguably been more complicated than beating Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City in the FA Cup final. They have had to convince Uefa that John Textor does not have “decisive influence” on the club.

This is due to his 43 per cent stake in Palace, while he also holds 88 per cent of fellow Europa League qualifiers Lyon. That situation could fall foul of Uefa’s rules that no one may be simultaneously involved in the management, administration or sporting performance of another club in the same competition.

The rules evolved out of EU competition law, which is where the definition of “decisive influence” is so important. In reality, as Textor himself insisted in Switzerland this week, everyone knows that is just not the level of control the US investor has. His 43 per cent equity only translates into 25 per cent of the votes, where it’s basically known that co-owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer go with Parish, who has the casting ballot.

Textor himself has publicly complained about this many times.

That doesn’t necessarily hold much weight, however, next to the legal documents that show his stake.

It is quite a grim next chapter to one of the most romantic stories of the season, and yet the real tragedy is that this was one of modern football’s inevitabilities. The sport is working against itself as a game, and a cultural value, due to its insistence on business.

Crystal Palace fans will hope to follow their FA Cup-winning team in the Europa League next season (Yui Mok/PA) (PA Wire)

Palace fans themselves warned of this over a year ago, holding up a banner complaining about “multi-club ownership”, and directly criticising Textor. Parish, Blitzer and Harris might now regret leaving the situation unresolved for so long.

This is still the kind of mess football was long headed for, because it is not governed properly, and has a lack of proactive regulation. Uefa’s ongoing failure to deal with multi-club ownership is the most pressing illustration. And these situations are simply going to become increasingly more common. Current estimates suggest more than 400 clubs around the globe are involved in almost 150 multi-structures. Like state ownership, it was a problem that became embedded before football even realised it existed, let alone the need to address it.

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There is frustration even within Fifa about this specific issue, as detailed in this writer’s book States of Play, with one source claiming “everyone could see multi-clubs coming”. When some staff raised this, there was pushback.

It really goes even deeper than that. Despite the club operating as the basic unit of football, due to its social importance, Fifa has never defined exactly what one is.

John Textor holds a stake in both Crystal Palace and Lyon, with both clubs poised to play in next season’s Europa League (Getty Images)

That is one of many reasons that football has developed what is really an ownership problem, which has been discussed on these pages at length. A complex issue like multi-club ownership is a natural evolution from that.

Football has long since been taken over by capitalist and political interests, so this was always going to the next level.

The worst part is not just how the clubs are used. It is how their identities are subsumed. They are not just Strasbourg or Troyes anymore, after all, but Strasbourg and Troyes that serve bigger structures in Chelsea and City Football Group. And the model is almost always going to best serve the biggest club in those structures.

Now, we reach the next stage of this, where a club’s actual dreams might be denied.

It should be a wake-up call for football, but will it be?

A further problem is that multi-club ownership straddles so many of the game’s major faultlines. Above anything, industry sources complain about the “vagueness” of the enforcement of regulations around this.

Steve Parish (right) is fighting for Palace’s right to play in the Europa League (Getty Images)

There’s no legal framework in place. Some in football were already pointing to how “this never happens to the big clubs”. Others have referenced how Parish worked with the Union of European Clubs, a body casting itself as a voice for those clubs not represented by the European Club Association. Paris Saint-Germain’s Nasser Al-Khelaifi is, of course, the chair of the latter, who has been locked in a number of battles with Textor in France.

It is ultimately galling that Palace may miss out because they didn’t meet the March deadline to put the club in a blind trust, as Evangelos Marinakis did with Nottingham Forest to avoid a similar clash with his Olympiakos.

On the other hand, Palace’s oversight could just be cast as another consequence of the modern game. The wealthiest clubs almost always win, so why tempt fate – and potential schadenfreude – by opting for a blind trust as early as the FA Cup quarter-final? It would certainly have gone against the sense of romance and defiance.

And while multiple lawyers and football officials might point to the absurdity of such a sentiment, it is surely all the more absurd that the situation even exists.

There is still hope. Uefa might come down on Palace’s side, given the pressure, given the sense of romance.

Fans didn’t want this. Only a certain type of investor wants it.

Multi-club ownership goes against everything football should be, to the point it might somehow sour one of football’s great modern stories.

It’s almost a fitting parable for the modern game.