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Palace valued at £900m

Crystal Palace have hired Raine Group as they seek investment in the club at a valuation of £900million.  The investment banking firm Raine will handle the process as they did when John Textor hired them to sell Eagle Football’s 43 per cent stake in the club, concluding a deal in July last year with the New York Jets owner Woody Johnson.

Palace — owned by chairman Steve Parish, Johnson and fellow U.S. businessmen Josh Harris and David Blitzer — are looking for ways to fund the redeveopment of the club’s Selhurst Park stadium and any external investment would likely contribute towards that.

Parish, told The New York Times  last week that starting meaningful and major work on the stadium had taken longer than anticipated and that was in part due to finances not being in place yet, instead being redirected towards a playing squad which saw 11 new arrivals in the summer.  “We’re looking at different ways of funding, but that will be in place,” he said. “We’re working with people on that. We’re talking to the banks. It’s more managing the construction, processing inflation and trying to reduce some costs.

“It has (dragged on). But the reason that everybody hasn’t got a shiny new stadium is that the money will always go to the team, if it’s there. We spent on the team, which is the more recent reason that it isn’t fully going on. But also the cost keeps increasing in this environment, and we keep needing to try to find smarter ways of doing it to get the right return on it.”

In a 2024 interview with The Athletic, Textor said he believed the club could be worth up to £1billion.  “The fact it (Palace) is responsibly managed makes it really attractive, because the fear factor that you’re just going to lose a ton of money is out of it,” he said. “It has a stadium (redevelopment) approved and a new academy built. This club can go for four to six times (current) revenue. But nobody else believes that.”

Valuing sports teams is an inexact science but most experts do it by multiplying the team’s annual revenue.  The secret, of course, is what multiple you use. At one end of the spectrum you would have lower-division football teams going for one to 1.5 times their earnings and, at the other end, you have NFL franchises now worth more than 14 times their turnover.   Mid-table Premier League sides like Palace have been trading at three to four times their annual revenues.

Palace earned just under £200m in the 2024-25 season, the most recent set of publicly-available accounts. That would ordinarily give them a value of more like £700m. Their exploits in Europe will have helped them earn more than £200m last season but most experts would still struggle to value them at much more than £700m until they have significantly improved their stadium, which is why the current owners are looking for help or a way out in the first place.

 

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