Crystal Palace embark on European quest as Glasner plots path to Leipzig

Crystal Palace supporters may have waited a lifetime for this moment but, for Oliver Glasner, it’s business as usual. After winning the FA Cup and Community Shield – the first major silverware in the club’s history – the Austrian manager who arrived in south London 18 months ago promising he was “no David Copperfield” is preparing his next trick: guiding Palace to the Conference League final next May.

Having been demoted from the Europa League after Uefa deemed Palace part of a multi-club network, Glasner’s side edged past Fredrikstad in the qualifying round and the road to Leipzig starts for real against Dynamo Kyiv in Poland on Thursday evening. It is a fixture that has been greatly anticipated by 3,500 travelling fans, with an extra 900 tickets quickly snapped up for the match at Lublin Arena, which has hosted the Ukrainian side’s home matches in Europe since Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Glasner has been keen to play down the significance of Palace’s astonishing 18-match unbeaten run since losing 5-0 to Newcastle in April, stressing after the thrilling late victory over Liverpool on Saturday that “we’re still in September, so there’s nothing more to say”.

Yet with his team boasting the longest sequence without defeat in all of Europe’s top five leagues by some distance, ahead of Barcelona and Bayern Munich, it is not an achievement to be sniffed at. The captain, Marc Guéhi, gave an insight into the belief coursing through the Palace squad at the moment.

“In terms of mentality, yes for sure it’s there,” said Guéhi, who did not want to comment on his failed £35m move to Liverpool on deadline day other than to thank Palace fans for their continued support. “We’ve tasted success but we’re definitely not satisfied and we do want more. Every single person at the football club strives for more – from the manager all the way down to the players. We’ve seen what we can do. There’s no saying that if we keep our heads down, hopefully we can have many more opportunities. Many more chances to do even greater things.”

Asked what Glasner’s impact has been, he added: “If he wasn’t there on the sidelines, I think we’d all know what to do. There’s one thing that he mentions all the time: it’s not what we do, but it’s how we do it. I think the approach of anything that we do is really, really important. Going down to the pitch, with that mindset that we were talking about, that mentality, and if we approach things that way, it always helps us and keeps us in good stead.”

The problem for Glasner is that the majority of his first XI has played almost every minute of a busy campaign so far, with Guéhi and Maxence Lacroix, Daniel Muñoz and Jean-Philippe Mateta having already racked up 10 club appearances by the end of September. Against a Dynamo Kyiv team who have plenty of pedigree in European competition over the years, and won their first league title since the war broke out last season under Oleksandr Shovkovskyi, the former goalkeeper who won 92 caps for Ukraine, Glasner is expected to take no chances and select a strong lineup.

“We always play the best available team,” said Glasner. “We reward the good performance, because everybody who played, but also the players who came on in the last games, deserve to start, and that’s the best for a manager. We have many players who deserve to start, because they are in very good shape.”

This competition is also uncharted territory for Glasner, who would have fancied his chances of repeating his 2022 success with Eintracht Frankfurt in the Europa League if Uefa hadn’t had other ideas. Yet Palace are rated as the bookmakers’ favourites to follow in the footsteps of West Ham and Chelsea by becoming the third London club to win the trophy that was introduced in 2021.

Glasner acknowledged Palace could face a different challenge against sides who sit deep. “We have the skills to break this block on the other side,” he said. “You could see yesterday in the Champions League, Liverpool struck out to score in Istanbul and even Chelsea against Benfica, they’re both in close to 70% possession. But that doesn’t mean you score four or five goals. But we think we have the skills to score goals, independent of how Dynamo Kyiv will play.”

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