Crystal Palace being denied entry to this coming season’s Europa League is a “terrible injustice” and a “bad day for football”, the club’s chairman Steve Parish has said.
A UEFA panel has recommended that Palace are denied entry to
the competition after it found that the club breached the governing body’s
rules on multi-club ownership.
The south London club are now set to compete in the
third-tier Conference League but intend to lodge an appeal with the Court of
Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Nottingham Forest, who finished seventh in the
Premier League and originally qualified for the Conference League, could now
replace them in the Europa League.
UEFA’s rules state that no individual or legal entity can
have “control or influence” over more than one club participating in a UEFA
club competition, and European football’s governing body must be satisfied that
the respective clubs are separate entities to maintain their tournaments’
integrity.
Palace’s issue stems from Eagle Football, which owns a 43
per cent share of the club and is controlled by John Textor, also owning a
majority stake in French club Lyon, who qualified for the competition.
The club’s four general partners — Textor, chairman Parish,
Josh Harris and David Blitzer — presented their case to the panel on June 3 but
had their arguments rejected by UEFA, despite Textor agreeing on June 23
to sell Eagle’s stake in Palace to New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. The sale
will have to be ratified by the Premier League, with Johnson being the subject
of the league’s owners’ and directors’ test, a process which typically takes
around two months.
The reality is that Palace have never operated like a true
multi-club group, due primarily to Parish’s reluctance to embrace that model.
While it may not have saved them a Europa League place here, it has prevented
them from being caught up quite so much in the chaos that seems to be following
Eagle in France.
This decision feels unjust given how little involvement
Textor had, but UEFA believe they have failed to prove that Textor did not hold
decisive influence. Unless they can successfully overturn the decision then it
may be a source of regret that they did not foresee this potential conflict
either when the American arrived or when they hoped to push for a European
spot.
On the back of their most successful Premier League season,
this outcome threatens to overshadow their outstanding achievement and the joy
that came with it in the most unjust manner.
One wonders if a bigger club would have been treated in this way or whether Palace offered a convenient opportunity for Uefa to flex their muscles. I am not very hopeful about the appeal being successful. (See precedents below). The law and justice are not the same.
The Financial Times comments on the broader implications: 'The verdict (appealable to the Court of Arbitration for Sport) follows previous rulings ejecting a Mexican club from the Club World Cup and an Irish one from the Europa Conference — both upheld by CAS.
These moves mark a tightening of the rules, with serious implications for multiclub ownership. Owners must now decide by February which club(s) to place in a blind trust, the short-term fix for managing conflicts. They might even start planning which team to push towards which competition — potentially compromising domestic leagues. Uefa may have protected its tournaments’ integrity, but opened a can of worms at home.
The broader question is whether this will cool interest in
multi-club investment. The impact will be felt far beyond south London.'
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