Crystal Palace Chairman Steve Parish and manager Roy Hodgson have appeared on popular YouTube channel The Overlap, hosted by Gary Neville.
The hour-long episode – which can be seen below – sees Parish give Neville a tour of Palace’s state-of-the-art Academy facilities, opened in autumn 2021 to herald a new era for the club, and the pathways of progression into the first-team set-up.
During the tour, Parish also discusses his role as Chairman and his vision for not only the development of the club’s future playing staff, but also its holistic development.
Describing the challenge of growing Palace, Parish tells Neville: “If you want to have sustainable long-term success, you’ve got to improve the infrastructure, and for me, at least you feel like you’re moving forward.
“What’s the point of just being here for 10 years and to cling on to your status in the division? That’s great and it’s a lot of joy for fans, but it doesn’t leave anything for anybody – it doesn’t make the club any better in the long-term.
“You’ve got to try and catch up [with the biggest clubs]. What’s the point if you’re not trying to catch up? We’ve got to try and find smarter ways of doing things, or different ways of doing things, and I think in this we’ve achieved that. If we can do that with the stadium, we really are starting to get somewhere."
The episode then sees Neville interview Roy Hodgson on how the manager has worked to get the best out of his group of players since returning to the club, with five wins from their last eight Premier League games.
“I’d seen their games, albeit on the television,” Hodgson noted. “I realised there was a lot of attacking talent here – players with exceptional technical skills, and good pace as well.
“I knew with these guys, we had pace, athleticism and technique, so there was no reason why, if we could get these players into the right positions, they couldn’t score goals. We had to make certain we made them focus on the moves, the type of play and the type of actions that were going to be necessary for them to get into those positions.
“[We told them] when it happens, we’re one hundred percent behind you, so don’t fear you can’t take the shot or make the dribble – we will be more angry with you if you don’t, and you play the simpler ball and start attacks again.
“It takes a lot of effort and play to get into good attacking situations – you’ve got to profit from them because if not, you start all over again and there’s no guarantee the next situation will be any better.
“If you’re going to bring any calmness and belief, and promote some sort of faith in the group itself that we’re good enough and we can do that, you’ve got to have the faith yourself.
“I was pretty convinced we were going to give the right messages, we were going to do the right training sessions – we were going to give the right support, and as a result we had to show a bit of character ourselves.”
You can watch the full episode of The Overlap above, or on YouTube here.
