Eagles Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Crystal Palace F.C.

In 1995, Eric Cantona kicked a Crystal Palace supporter in the chest at Selhurst Park. It was the most famous incident in the fixture's history, but it was not the most important thing that happened to Crystal Palace that decade. The most important things were the two administrations, the sale of Selhurst Park that didn't happen, the goal Dougie Freedman scored at Stockport that kept the...

Steve Coppell arrived at Crystal Palace in 1984 with no managerial experience and a set of weightlifting equipment. Over the next decade he built something that had never existed at the club before: a team with a genuine identity, a style of play, and two strikers — Ian Wright and Mark Bright — who belonged in any company in English football. This episode covers the Coppell years in full: the unli...

Episode 5: The Team of the Eighties Terry Venables, the Burnley Night, and One Week at the Top of English Football (1976–1981) In the summer of 1976, two former Tottenham teammates were appointed as rival managers on the same stretch of road. Terry Venables took the Crystal Palace job. Alan Mullery took the Brighton job. What followed was one of the most intense personal and professional rivalries...

For most of their history, Crystal Palace had been the Glaziers — a name inherited from the glass industry surrounding the Crystal Palace building. In 1973, Malcolm Allison changed that. He changed the kit, changed the name, and changed the idea of what the club could be. The Eagles were born. This episode covers the era of transformation: Bert Head's steady promotion to the First Division in...

Crystal Palace spent almost twenty years after the Second World War in the lower reaches of English football, twice in danger of losing their place in the Football League altogether. By 1958, when the Football League was reorganised into four divisions, they were placed in the newly formed Fourth Division — as low as it was possible to go and still be a professional club. This episode covers the l...

Look at a modern Crystal Palace shirt. The badge says 1861. It said 1905 for most of the club's history — and then in 2022, after five years of archival research by historian Peter Manning, the club changed it. The Football Association reviewed the same evidence and declined to agree. The question of when Crystal Palace Football Club was actually founded remains, officially, unresolved. This...

Crystal Palace emerge from the First World War into a transformed football landscape — and a transformed club. The Crystal Palace ground is commandeered by the military during the war and never returned to the club as a viable football home; the Navy uses it as a training depot, and it is effectively lost. In 1924, the club makes one of the defining decisions in its history: the move to Selhurst P...