This is a post copied from BBS, which hits the nail squarely on the head regarding our situation.
One of the hardest truths to accept in modern football is that unexpected glory isn’t always a launchpad. For clubs like Palace, it’s often a stress test.
Winning the FA Cup feels like it should be the beginning of something bigger, but in today’s game that’s rarely how it plays out for clubs outside the elite. Leicester are usually held up as the dream scenario, but their story actually underlines the risk rather than the reward.
Leicester didn’t just win the league and ride off into sustained success. Their title season blew apart their cost base, inflated expectations, and set off a cycle of spending and recruitment designed to “stay at the table” rather than consolidate safely. They won an FA Cup later, played in Europe, and still ended up relegated. Their moment of greatness didn’t insulate them from reality, it accelerated the pressures that eventually caught up with them.
That’s the modern paradox. Success doesn’t suddenly make a club rich enough to behave like a superpower. It makes you expensive without making you secure. Revenues rise a bit, wages rise a lot, and every transfer miss becomes more damaging. At the same time, the players who delivered the success get picked off by bigger clubs, often leaving you trying to replace irreplaceable chemistry with pricier, riskier alternatives.
For a club like Palace, that creates a brutal crossroads. Push too hard to capitalise and you risk destabilising the entire operation. Pull back and you’re accused of lacking ambition or wasting the moment. Fan expectations rise faster than the club’s actual capacity to meet them.
That’s where Parish’s current approach makes sense, even if it’s deeply uncomfortable. Sticking to the same recruitment strategy that’s been used over the past few years, focusing on value, character, and sustainability rather than chasing the moment, is probably the best defence against falling into that trap. It’s an attempt to absorb success without letting it fundamentally change the club’s risk profile.
But it’s still fraught with danger. Because maintaining discipline after glory is hard. The pressure to “do more” is relentless, and the margin for error is thin. You can make the right decision in principle and still suffer for it in practice.
It’s the Icarus problem. You fly higher than you ever have before and for a brief moment everything feels within reach. But the sun doesn’t care how special the flight felt. Without restraint, the wings start to melt, not immediately, but gradually, until gravity does the rest.
So moments like an FA Cup win aren’t about becoming something else overnight. They’re about navigating the aftermath without losing the fundamentals that keep the club alive. For Palace, progress has always been about survival first, growth second, and glory as a rare and precious by-product.
In modern football, achieving the dream is only half the challenge. The harder part is surviving what comes after it. I think virtually everyone has said at some point that they’d take an FA Cup win if it meant relegation as a trade off. Being in the PL is incredibly important but there’s nothing permanent or invincible about it. But your name on the cup is for all eternity. Now I am not saying that we should make that trade and still think we’ll survive this season etc BUT it’s a signpost of how the goalposts shift. When we were promoted the goal of goals was ‘if we can stay in this league and maybe win a trophy then we really cannot ask for anymore than that as we will have something to show for it’. That mission has been achieved yet it feels like some sort of failure to many.
Thats a shift in expectations rather than a necessary failure of the club.
England
