Crystal Palace play Rayo Vallecano in the Europa Conference League final on Wednesday night, with the winner going into the Europa League automatically. It is Oliver Glasner's final match in charge, and it comes at the end of a European run that began when Eberechi Eze was still registered as a Palace player.
Palace had to fight for the chance to get here. They edged past Fredrikstad in a play-off to secure their Conference League place, then became the first Palace side to reach a European final after three successful trips to Wembley in a season that also included a club-record 19-match unbeaten run before winter brought the collapse.
The scale of the turnaround is easiest to see in the details. Palace were dumped out of the competition by Macclesfield, a club 117 places below them in the football pyramid, and six days later Marc Guehi was sold. Glasner confirmed his intention to follow him out of the door a few months later, before Palace lost 2-1 at Sunderland just over 24 hours after Guehi's departure. That defeat was their 10th successive match without a win, and Glasner accused the club of completely abandoning his squad after the game.
There was still no neat recovery. Palace lost 1-0 at home to AEK Larnaca in October, though they still progressed out of the group phase, and last week Glasner told Sky Sports News that it did not feel at the beginning like a special journey. Nearly three months after the Macclesfield defeat, they beat Fiorentina at Selhurst Park, a result that kept the path to Leipzig alive and underlined how far they had come from the bleakest spell of the season.
That is why Wednesday night matters beyond the trophy itself. Palace are one match from a place in the Europa League, but the final is also the end of a campaign shaped by a winter breakdown, a major sale and a public rupture between manager and club. Glasner leaves with the chance to finish on the highest note possible, yet the route to Leipzig shows a team that had to survive its own season before it could even reach the last game.
