The second season master – Why Glasner should work wonders with Crystal Palace this season

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Brentford v Palace 

Crystal Palace fans would be forgiven to approaching the new Premier League season with caution. Although the club have spent €30 million on new signings Ismaïla Sarr from Marseille and Chadi Riad from Real Betis, the biggest business of the summer has involved star winger Michael Olise departing for €53m to join Bayern Munich. And there’s every chance that fellow star player Marc Guéhi could complete a move to Newcastle before the summer transfer window draws to a close. Whether Palace have actually improved their squad ahead of the new league campaign is certainly up for debate. 

However, fans of the London club can take hope from their stellar end to last season’s league campaign, when Palace went from fifteenth in the league table up to tenth, thanks to a run of form that saw them lose just six of their last 18 league games. That, undoubtedly, was down to the arrival of new head coach Oliver Glasner, who replaced Roy Hodgson in late February. In many ways Palace fans are hoping that Glasner will continue his good work and guide Palace back into the top-half of the table this season. And when we look at his record in Austria and Germany prior to arriving in the English capital, there’s every reason to believe that Glasner will indeed improve on what he achieved in the second half of last season. 

Indeed, when we look at the graph above, which shows Glasner’s league points per game average in each of the last eight seasons, we can see that in just about every instance he is a head coach that improves on his previous performance in new circumstances. This was apparent at the very start of his coaching career, when he took on the role of head coach a tLASK in the Austrian second division. In his first season in the dugout, Glasner bagged 72 league points and finished second in the table. Then, impressively, he went one step further the following season and finished first with a more impressive points tally and won promotion to the Austrian Bundesliga. As we can see, Glasner didn’t waste any time in the top-tier and actually took the club to fourth place despite only gaining promotion that very year. Yet, as if that wasn’t impressive enough, he then once again improved on his debut season and took the club to second place in the table with a better average of 1.97 points per game. 

Following an impressive spell at LASK, Glasner was hired by Wolfsburg to improve their standing in the Bundesliga and once again he didn’t disappoint. In his first league campaign in the German top-flight, Glasner took Wolfsburg to a respectable seventh place, but then did even better in his second season at the club by improving his points per game average by 24% to 1.79. That was good enough to bag fourth place for the Wolves – which remains only the second time in the last 15 seasons that Wolfsburg have finished in the Bundesliga top four. Following a fall out with the club’s hierarchy, Glasner then moved to Eintracht Frankfurt. And while some doubted that he would be able to reach such heights as finishing fourth in the Bundesliga, the Austrian tactician once again settled into a new environment and set about improving. 

In his first season with the Eagles, Glasner achieved a perfectly respectable eleventh place but won the hearts of Frankfurt fans by winning the Europa League – only the club’s second European trophy and first major piece of silverware since 2018. However, as if that wasn’t impressive enough, Glasner then once again stepped up a gear in his second season at the club and after averaging an impressive 1.47 points per game guided Frankfurt to a solid seventh place in the league table. And while that may not sound terribly remarkable, it was once again a clear sign of what Glasner seems to do in every job; put in a solid first season and then improve on that in the second. Which will surely come as good news for Palace fans as they approach a tricky season.