In the summer of 2019, Arsenal offered Crystal Palace £40m for Wilfried Zaha. The
figure fell short of the South London club’s valuation and so they turned the offer down.
By the end of the transfer window, Arsenal had brought in Nicolas Pepe
for a fee of around £72m and Zaha has remained with Palace ever since.
But should Palace have sold Wilfried Zaha back when his stock was higher?
Across the last ten years of Crystal Palace’s transfer business,
they have not made a profit in the transfer market.
Over that period of time, there has only been one season where the club made more
money in player sales than they spent in acquiring new talent. That was in the
summer of 2019 where they sold full-back Aaron Wan-Bissaka to Manchester United for 55m euros.
Take that period as a whole and Palace have spent 275m euros more than they
have recouped - which is to say that there’s been a 27m euro discrepancy
between incomings and outgoings on average each season over that ten-year period.
Against this context, the non-sale of Wilfried Zaha seems to lessen in scale. Had Zaha been sold
for around 40m pounds, the gap between Palace’s transfers in and out would still have remained
at around a 50% outlay. Even if they had managed to accrue the £72m that Arsenal eventually paid
for Pepe, it would have barely moved the needle on their overall transfer finances.
It’s at this point that the Wilfried Zaha Conundrum comes into sharpest relief. In
the short term, it’s clearly worth the while of the Palace decision makers to raise the question:
“How much is Zaha worth to us as a club in the short term?”
In the 2019/20 season, Crystal Palace finished 14th and received
around £115m in Premier League Funds as a result of their league position.
This is only £15m more than Watford, who got relegated that season, but it’s worth noting that
in 2018, Deloitte estimated the cost of relegation to the relegated sides to run to approximately
£50m in Premier League distributions alone. That figure includes parachute payments, but does not
take into account the external revenue benefits that being a Premier League club can bring.
On face value, then, you could make the argument that 40m for Zaha is not offset by the 50m on
average that you benefit from by staying in the Premier League for another season.
And if you consider that Wilfried Zaha has been the key player for Palace in the four
seasons following the summer of 2019 up to the point at which his contract is set
to expire this summer, you could make an argument that the value of his contract
for Palace has far exceeded the £72m plus wages that Arsenal spent on Nicolas Pepe.
But of course, every short term strategy comes at the expense of the long-term strategy and
this could have potentially come back to bite Crystal Palace in the summer of 2021.
That was the window where the club had to let eight senior players go on free transfers,
including some who had picked up over well over 1000 minutes in the previous season:
players such as Andros Townsend, Patrick van Aanholt, Scott Dann and Gary Cahill.
In the end, under the direction of sporting director Dougie Freedman, Palace were able to
navigate this issue by bringing in a number of exciting young players for relatively low fees.
Marc Guehi and Michael Olise had impressed in the Championship the season before,
as had Conor Gallagher and Joachim Andersen in their loan spells in the Premier League.
Bringing in Odsonne Edouard and signing Jean-Philippe Mateta to a full contract
after his loan spell at Selhurst Park the season before, Freedman also added Will
Huges from recently relegated Watford and the squad achieved a better demographic profile.
Even still, there was a risk in approaching squad management in this manner and,
at the time, there was expectation that new manager Patrick Vieira
could struggle to keep Palace outside of the relegation zone.
In the event, Palace survived comfortably, finishing in 12th place with Wilfried Zaha
top-scoring with 14 goals. He also scored a highly useful seven times in 2022-23,
as Palace again survived comfortably (Correct as of 9-5-23) But that shouldn’t trick you into
thinking the Wilfried Zaha conundrum is solved. With the squad looking healthier,
Dougie Freedman has to decide whether to continue with the approach of extracting footballing value
from the best players at the club - as has been the case with Zaha - or avoiding that familiar
conundrum, selling players at the peak of their value, and re-investing the money.
As things stand, Marc Guehi and Michael Olise are the obvious candidates with
resale potential. Both could be sold for a healthy profit.
But there is also a risk involved with this approach. Supporters of Crystal Palace may
point back to the years of service that Zaha has given to the club as proof that not selling a
talismanic player has kept them in the Premier League. They might also reason that selling
players for high figures doesn’t guarantee that quality replacements can then be found. Or that,
without European football, a club of Palace’s size can't always attract players of such potential.
Both are well-reasoned points, but then that illustrates the difficulty of the
situation and the many challenges presented by both sides of the Wilfried Zaha conundrum,
and the many clubs - beyond just Palace - who face it.