Yohan Cabaye has now been confirmed as the newest signing of the Crystal Palace Football Club and his arrival is no longer the stuff of seedy British tabloid rumors. Palace supporters were somewhat in a state of shock about seeing him smiling in the flesh and holding up a red and blue jersey.
But the arrival of the Paris St. Germain midfielder signals that Crystal Palace’s sensible, but financially conservative ownership group is not going to stick with the status quo of being a 10th to 14th place Premier League side. However, simply getting to the point of being a mid-table club has in itself been incredible.
Palace entered the Premier League most recently for the 2013-14 season as the odds-on pre-season favorite to finish dead last and that was fair. After all, this was a team which finished in the second lowest possible seed (fifth) to qualify for the Championship play-off and objectively was the smallest and poorest team in the league that season. In fact, while Palace had three previous seasons in the modern Premier League (1994-95, 1997-98 and 2004-05) that ended each time with the club getting relegated back to the second tier.
Under Ian Holloway, those predictions looked accurate and the Eagles were only able to win one match in their first eight, eventually leading to Holloway’s sacking after a poor 1-4 home loss to Fulham. Tony Pulis, who had previously helped establish Stoke City as an unlikely Premier League mainstay in a seven-year stint there as manager, took over the same position at Palace.
Pulis, as is his style, made the Eagles into a tough defensive team and after a poor defensive start they ended up with 12 clean sheets in 28 Premier League matches. The end result was Pulis’ Eagles finishing in the unthinkable heights of 11th place with a 12-point cushion between the team and relegation back to the Championship.
It was an unbelievable story and Pulis won the LMA Manager of the Year award. Just as suddenly as Palace’s renaissance, he left the club about 48 hours before the start of the 2014-15 season. But Pulis did leave behind one surprisingly successful transfer window. Club mainstays like midfielders Joe Ledley and James MacArthur all stayed on; central defender Scott Dann boyhood Palace fan Jason Puncheon, signed on a permanent deal after his original loan, were just two of a host of strong signings.
After an abortive few months with Neil Warnock at the helm and the Eagles sitting at 18th place in the Premier League, the club took a risk and hired former Palace midfielder and Newcastle manager Alan Pardew. Despite the highs of taking Newcastle to a fifth-place league finish and the Europa League, the team’s performance under him had declined. Pardew had become an easy target for Newcastle fans unhappy with the penny-pinching of their owner Mike Ashley, as well as the on-field struggles.
Pardew was hired at the start of the 2015 calendar year and in that short time took Palace from 18th place to a 10th place finish that was the club’s highest finish since the formation of the modern Premier League in 1992. Along the way there also wins over big names like Tottenham, Manchester City and Liverpool in legendary Steven Gerrard’s final home game with Liverpool.
So, the expectation at Palace is no longer simply being happy with survival in the Premier League. And up to this week, rumours and whispers aside, it had been a quiet close season. Cabaye shattered this silence with a club record transfer fee which has been reported to be in the region of £12-13 million. The prior record was the transfer in the summer of 2013 for striker Dwight Gayle from Peterborough and that was between £4.5-6 million.
For accuracy’s sake Cabaye’s most recent stop at Paris St. Germain in Ligue 1 (the French top division) was something of a disappointment. He scored seven goals in 19 appearances during the 2013-14 season for Newcastle before finally in January 2014 getting the transfer he’d been not so tactfully pushing for to PSG.
After joining the Paris club, Cabaye became a small fish in the proverbial big pond of his home country’s highest profile club. He’d been extremely successful in a previously seven-year stint in Ligue 1 from 2004-11 at LOSC Lille, but by the end of this season he was clearly not a first choice pick at PSG.
Although he has never been a prolific goal scorer, at PSG though he only managed one goal in 39 Ligue 1 appearances and three in 57 total appearances in all competitions. You can contrast this to 18 goals at Newcastle (in 93 appearances) and 37 at Lille (in 243 appearances) and while that’s an overly simplistic stat, it gives an idea of where his career was headed. Cabaye also started four matches for the French national team during the 2014 World Cup and only failed to appear in their fifth match due to a suspension for accumulating too many yellow cards.
Cabaye isn’t coming to Palace to score a bunch of goals, but as a technically gifted central midfielder he will strengthen the deepest group in Palace’s squad. Cabaye lined up alongside central midfielders Ledley, MacArthur and Puncheon along with club captain Mile Jedinak and blindingly fast wingers Wilfried Zaha and Yannick Bolasie is almost a dream scenario.
Simply put, Cabaye, even if he’s not a player worthy of playing in Europe’s top clubs, is not the level of player Palace fans are used to having. After the club almost got liquidated at the end of the 2009-10 season, the new ownership group, CPFC 2010, has been understandably financially conservative. But after the club’s most profitable year in history, Palace chairman Steve Parish has signalled even after Cabaye’s signing that there are at least a few more transfer deals in the works.
The dream scenario is Queens Park Rangers striker Charlie Austin, who scored 18 goals last season, good for fourth in the Premier League, despite playing for one of the worst teams in the league. Austin is hardly a flash in the pan either. He rose from playing from Poole Town in the ninth tier of English Football at the start of the 2009-10 season to Premier League heights and along the way has scored 180 goals in 301 professional appearances. While Austin would almost certainly replace Palace club legend Glenn Murray at striker, it would be a worthwhile risk. Although again that is all the stuff of rumours at this point.
This kind of talk is almost in a different universe from the club that was on the brink of being liquidated into non-existence five years ago, so excuse supporters of the Red and Blue for finally enjoying a little bit of pre-season hyperbole.
