Does it matter being the Premier League’s pre-summer form team? Asking for Crystal Palace

You’ll have been made aware of it by now, but Crystal Palace: actually good at the end of last season.

Oliver Glasner’s side took more points than anybody except flawless Manchester City over the final seven games, with Palace’s draw away to Fulham the only yellow line in a run of green that included scalping Liverpool and Newcastle and thrashing West Ham, Manchester United, Wolves and Aston Villa.

Losing Michael Olise to Bayern Munich has been a bit of a bummer for Crystal Palace fans, many of whom we suspect would happily handcuff Eberechi Eze and Jean-Philippe Mateta to a radiator somewhere in the depths of Selhurst Park until transfer deadline day has been and gone.

But there is finally a bit of optimism after seeing their side transformed by Glasner. Palace have been the definition of a mid-table side since arriving back in the Premier League in 2013/14, never finishing above tenth and only once finishing below 14th – in 2015/16, when they finished…15th.

After a while, that must start to get boring. A few interesting runs in the FA Cup have added a bit of spice, but while there has rarely been a sense of really serious jeopardy, there hasn’t been a lot of excitement either.

Do Palace have that now? Or rather: is it reasonable to expect they might?

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Looking at the past few seasons – specifically, how teams have fared from the turn of the new year onwards – provides mixed messages about just how much form at the end of one season carries over into the beginning of the next.

West Ham were the third-best team in the Premier League in the first five months of 2021. The next season, they mounted a legitimate challenge to finish in the top four (where they sat as late as February) before a late collapse saw them drop to seventh. Conversely, Leicester were the sixth-best team and FA Cup winners in the first few months of 2021, but started the next season in very indifferent mid-table form – and Manchester United, laughably, had been the second-best team in the second half of 2020/21, but finished sixth the following season.

It was a similar story for Liverpool the following year. They didn’t lose a game in the second half of the 2021/22 campaign – W16 D3 – but never rose above fifth the following season.

However, Newcastle’s fourth-place finish of 2022/23 had been predicted: that’s where they sat in the post-New Year Premier League table in 2021/22, despite finishing just 11th overall. Brighton meanwhile finished 2021/22 with just one defeat in their final nine games, and went on to have their best-ever Premier League season the following year, placing sixth.

We were all given the heads up on Aston Villa’s ascent in 2022/23, too. They finished seventh overall that season, but only Manchester City took more points after the turn of the new year. They’ll now be playing Champions League football after finishing a strong fourth last term .

So here’s the better news for Palace. It’s a very small sample with admittedly cherry-picked examples, but if we were unadvisedly to try and find a trend from that, it would be that finishing a season strongly probably means very little if you’re an entrenched top six side, but can be sustainable for upwardly-mobile teams coming out of the mid-table pack.

Perversely, it feels almost encouraging that Glasner’s impact was less than immediate. It took a bit of time for his Palace side to hit their stride after he replaced Roy Hodgson in February, which suggests there may have been an adaptation period to his thoughtful, trigger-effect pressing – aided, of course, by getting that key trio of Olise, Eze and Mateta finally playing together after injuries had previously robbed them of that luxury.

Palace have added new attacking options this summer to help make up for losing Olise, this time permanently, but last season suggests that what they already had was capable of more than Hodgson’s brand of football allowed.

Breaking into European contention is a big ask now that the big six is turning into a big eight (if it hasn’t already) – but Palace can approach this campaign believing they have nobody to fear, making them one of the most interesting sides to keep an eye on over the first few weeks of the season. Save the talk of where their ceiling is for now, because we’ve genuinely no idea.

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