Inside Crystal Palace's new recruitment team as transfer spending stalls for Eagles | OneFootball

The FA Cup and Community Shield winners are into a new era of recruitment, but it has been slow going

In many ways, it has so far felt like a standard and unremarkable transfer window for Crystal Palace, Oliver Glasner having stated publicly his frustration at slow movement and the lack of spending. Some things never change.

Reports around that time that the former West Ham technical director Tim Steidten and current Brentford technical director Lee Dykes were contenders to immediately replace Freedman were wide of the mark.

In reality, Palace have moved more slowly, both in recruiting players and in hiring for the recruitment team.

The view of some is that there is no need to hire an exact replacement of the man who masterminded the signings of Eberechi Eze, Adam Wharton and Michael Olise from the Championship (Olise, bought for £8million, was sold for a £42.8m profit). Freedman would be difficult to replace even if they choose to, since his proactive approach to getting around the grounds and scouting in-person is increasingly rare among modern-day sporting directors.

Parish and manager Oliver Glasner have naturally had plenty of involvement in Palace’s summer comings and goings, but recruitment is now run chiefly by the assistant sporting director Ben Stevens and consultant Iain Moody, a previous incumbent of the Palace sporting director role until he resigned in 2014 over allegations of sharing “racist, homophobic and sexist text messages” with the ex-Cardiff City manager Malky Mackay.

Moody’s expertise is in the finer details of a transfer deal, and he was working for the club even before Freedman departed. As he is multilingual, he represented the club in their dealings with intermediaries and agents for deals to sign Daniel Munoz and Matheus Franca. He also handled Dean Henderson’s move from Manchester United in August 2023.

Moody has taken on far greater responsibility since Freedman left, and he could be seen towards the end of last season taking long phone calls in the car park at Palace’s Copers Cope Road training ground, speaking with intermediaries and contacts.

Stevens, promoted to assistant sporting director last July, has also grown in stature at Palace. Having been Freedman’s number two, he is now the club’s most senior full-time staff member on the recruitment side. Stevens is regularly in contact with potential signings and is the direct line into the club for most Palace players’ agents and representatives, who catch up with him regularly.

In the week before he departed to take a lead over Al Diriyah’s strategy across all sports in Saudi Arabia, Freedman handed over a list of players worth pursuing over the summer, after it was he who formulated Palace’s initial summer plan. He has remained contactable to the recruitment team he left behind, offering periodic advice rather than cutting ties.

Palace’s only signings so far have been back-up goalkeeper Walter Benítez, for free, and the Croatia left-back Borna Sosa. The £2m they spent on Sosa makes the Eagles one of the lowest-spending clubs across Europe’s major leagues in a summer that has yet to really get going for them.

Standard Sport understands they, along with Bournemouth, were last month offered the chance to sign the Brazilian winger Gabriel Silva from Portuguese club Santa Clara, but a deal never progressed because Palace opted against taking exploratory conversations further.

Instead, Palace have had a lot of focus on their impending European campaign and whether it is the Europa League or, as transpired, the Conference League in which they will compete.

Glasner vocalised his frustration last summer, and in January, and has done so again in this transfer window about the unhurried pace of Palace’s activity in the market.

His message to the board was clear when he insisted it would be a “mistake” for transfers to wait until they have made it past the Conference League play-off rounds.

If they did, he warned, the Eagles would be moving like a “reactive” rather than a proactive club. “You can't run a business where you're always reacting.”

On the flipside is the potential outgoings, and the huge question marks over the futures of Eberechi Eze and Marc Guehi. Eze’s £68m release clause expires on Friday, as Standard Sport first revealed, but neither Arsenal nor Tottenham are wanting to part with that amount of money. Guehi, meanwhile, is out of contract next summer and while Palace might want to cash in now, with Liverpool and Newcastle among those who are interested, Guehi is aware he would be playing roulette with his chances of starting for England at next summer’s World Cup if he were to move now.

Where Glasner tends to agree with the recruitment team, there are points of difference, naturally. For example, he is the main voice most in favour of Guehi staying, because he wants the defender available to him.

Talks over Glasner’s own future began with initial conversations over a new deal in spring but have not progressed into detailed negotiations about terms yet. It is understood that Parish does not anticipate the Austrian agreeing to a long-term deal, so a short or medium-term extension is more in line with what Palace would see as potentially feasible.

In the here and now, Glasner wanted two attackers and two defenders to be signed this summer. Granted, Palace do tend to move late in the market, and often that means paying below market rate for a player, but it remains to be seen over the coming fortnight whether Glasner is fully granted his wish.