From Austria to Wembley 

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Crystal Palace made history on Saturday, when Oliver Glasner’s side beat Manchester City 1-0 to win the FA Cup and claim the club’s first ever major trophy in its 119 year history. Having reached the final on two previous occasions, in 1990 and 2016, the London club overcame the odds at Wembley Stadium to beat Pep Guardiola’s star-studded team with a solitary goal from Eberechi Eze just 16 minutes into the match. At full time 30,000 fans of the club celebrated like they’ve never done before and for many it was all down to one man: Oliver Glasner. 

While Palace will have to settle for a spot in the bottom half of the Premier League table this season, fans of the club are more or less unanimous in their praise for the Austrian tactician. Since making the move to London in February 2024, Glasner has averaged no less than 1.69 points per game in all competitions – an average that far surpasses every Palace manager since Steve Bruce’s six-month spell in charge of the club in 2001, when he averaged 2.0 points per game. Remarkably, when we filter out any head coach of the club that oversaw less than 30 games in charge, no manager in the history of Palace has a better points-per-game average than Glasner. And now the 50-year-old coach has an FA Cup trophy to add to his growing list of achievements. 

“No one expected Frankfurt to win the Europa League and no one expected Crystal Palace to win the FA Cup,” said Glasner, referencing his first cup victory as a manager in 2022. “You can see what you can get when you are patient. As football players and managers, the biggest success is not lifting the trophy. It’s giving tens of thousands of our fans a moment for their life. Giving them great times. Maybe they have some problems at home so just to make them happy… we did it for our fans.” He added: “We said before the game that we wanted to write our own history and we have written a big chapter in our history, and next year we will do that again when we play in Europe.” 

As Glasner mentioned, he did make the move to Palace having succeeded at Bundesliga side Eintracht Frankfurt. And just as he’s taken Palace to new heights in his second season at the English club, when we look through his managerial career before making the move to the Premier League, we can quickly see that a pattern is certainly emerging with the Austrian’s time at each club he manages: whether he starts off strongly or poorly, Glasner always seems to do much better in his second season at a club.

How Glasner always improves in the second 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 at LASK 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 is now certainly something that Palace fans would whole-heartedly agree with.