Eagles Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Crystal Palace F.C.
Eagles Through The Ages is a ten-part history of Crystal Palace Football Club, covering 120 years from the club's founding in 1905 at the original Crystal Palace building. It traces the team's long stretches in the lower divisions, the Malcolm Allison rebrand from the Glaziers to the Eagles, the Venables era, and the 1990 FA Cup final. The series also covers two administrations, the supporters who saved the club, the Wilfried Zaha decade, and the 2025 FA Cup win over Manchester City. It is a story of a South London club that repeatedly survived against the odds.
Episodes
Episode Episode 10 : Into Europe The Season Crystal Palace Changed Forever (August 2025 – May 2026)
Crystal Palace began the 2025–26 season as FA Cup holders and ended it as European champions. In between: a Europa League demotion on ownership grounds, Eberechi Eze's departure to Arsenal on the morning of the club's first ever European fixture, a Community Shield won on penalties against Liverpool, and Jean-Philippe Mateta heading Crystal Palace's first ever European goal against
Episode 9 : Eagles and Seagulls The Story of English Football's Strangest Rivalry Duration (1974–2025)
Crystal Palace and Brighton are forty miles apart. There is no shared territory, no disputed geography, no natural reason for hostility. Roy Hodgson, who grew up in Croydon in the 1950s, recalls no awareness of Brighton as rivals at all. The enmity between the two clubs was not inevitable. It was created, on a specific evening in December 1976, by a referee's decision about encroachment, a sa
Episode 8 : The Decade That Made Crystal Palace Zaha, Survival, Heartbreak, and History (2013–2025)
On the 17th of May, 2025, Crystal Palace Football Club won the FA Cup. It was the first major trophy in the club's 120-year history. The goal was scored by Eberechi Eze, a player raised ten minutes' walk from Selhurst Park who had been rejected by Arsenal as a youth. The manager was an Austrian who had been in charge for fifteen months. The opponent was Manchester City, six-time Premier
Episode 7 : The Yo-Yo Years Cantona, Chaos, Two Administrations, and the Fans Who Saved a Club (1993–2013)
In 1995, Eric Cantona kicked a Crystal Palace supporter in the chest at Selhurst Park. It was the most famous incident in the fixture's history, but it was not the most important thing that happened to Crystal Palace that decade. The most important things were the two administrations, the sale of Selhurst Park that didn't happen, the goal Dougie Freedman scored at Stockport that kept the
Episode 6 Wrighty & Brighty — Steve Coppell, Ian Wright, and the Day Crystal Palace Nearly Won the FA Cup Duration: 30 minutes (1981–1991)
Steve Coppell arrived at Crystal Palace in 1984 with no managerial experience and a set of weightlifting equipment. Over the next decade he built something that had never existed at the club before: a team with a genuine identity, a style of play, and two strikers — Ian Wright and Mark Bright — who belonged in any company in English football.This episode covers the Coppell years in full: the unlik
Episode 5 : The Team of the Eighties - Terry Venables, the Birth of the Brighton Rivalry, and a Night at the Top of English Football Duration( 1976–1980)
Episode 5: The Team of the EightiesTerry Venables, the Burnley Night, and One Week at the Top of English Football (1976–1981)In the summer of 1976, two former Tottenham teammates were appointed as rival managers on the same stretch of road. Terry Venables took the Crystal Palace job. Alan Mullery took the Brighton job. What followed was one of the most intense personal and professional rivalries i
Episode 4: The Glaziers Become Eagles Bert Head, Malcolm Allison, and the Birth of an Identity (1964–1976)
For most of their history, Crystal Palace had been the Glaziers — a name inherited from the glass industry surrounding the Crystal Palace building. In 1973, Malcolm Allison changed that. He changed the kit, changed the name, and changed the idea of what the club could be. The Eagles were born.This episode covers the era of transformation: Bert Head's steady promotion to the First Division in
Episode 3 : The Wilderness Years Two Decades in the Shadows of English Football (1945–1966)
Crystal Palace spent almost twenty years after the Second World War in the lower reaches of English football, twice in danger of losing their place in the Football League altogether. By 1958, when the Football League was reorganised into four divisions, they were placed in the newly formed Fourth Division — as low as it was possible to go and still be a professional club.This episode covers the lo
Episode 2 : Survival, Selhurst and the Shadow of War - From the Trenches to the Third Division (1915–1939)
Crystal Palace emerge from the First World War into a transformed football landscape — and a transformed club. The Crystal Palace ground is commandeered by the military during the war and never returned to the club as a viable football home; the Navy uses it as a training depot, and it is effectively lost. In 1924, the club makes one of the defining decisions in its history: the move to Selhurst P
Episode 1 : The Birth of the Palace 1861, the FA, and the Oldest Question in Football (1861–1914)
Look at a modern Crystal Palace shirt. The badge says 1861. It said 1905 for most of the club's history — and then in 2022, after five years of archival research by historian Peter Manning, the club changed it. The Football Association reviewed the same evidence and declined to agree. The question of when Crystal Palace Football Club was actually founded remains, officially, unresolved.This e
