Crystal Palace certainly strapped in for one of the more eventful January transfer windows.
Steve Parish’s south London club completed a club-record deal for Jørgen Strand Larsen, losing captain and star defender Marc Guehi to Manchester City and bringing Brennan Johnson over from Tottenham at the start of the window in a £35m deal.
These are talented attackers who have years of potential Premier League football ahead of them. The Eagles will hope at least one of them will surpass expectations and become a talisman at Selhurst Park.
Oliver Glasner’s side certainly need one, with it being some time since Wilfried Zaha plied his craft at the club now, who turned down a £200k-per-week salary in 2023 and departed the club where he is recognised as one of their greatest players ever.
How Wilfried Zaha is doing since leaving
Zaha was one of the most prominent faces in the Premier League across the second half of the 2010s. He joined the Palace academy as an eight-year-old before signing for Manchester United for £10m in 2013.
That one didn’t work out, and he returned home after two years, going on to play 458 matches for the Londoners, scoring 90 goals and supplying 54 assists.
Zaha perhaps hasn’t hit the heights he envisaged when ending his spell at his boyhood club. In 2019, Arsenal saw a £40m bid rejected for the England international; Parish wanted double that amount.
When he did leave two-and-a-half years ago, the 33-year-old was ostensibly past his prime, notching ten goals during a title-winning Turkish Super Lig campaign with Galatasaray but being loaned out to Lyon after just one year.
That move yielded rotten fruit for this mercurial winger, who featured only four times in Ligue 1 before seeing his contract terminated. Then he moved to the United States, where he now plays for Charlotte FC.
Zaha has found that he has enjoyed his time involved in Major League Soccer, but he has indeed failed to clinch the career success, on the trophy front, that the likes of Eberechi Eze after him have forged at Crystal Palace.
Even so, many would argue Zaha remains the cream of the crop in south London.
Zaha was an immensely talented player for Palace, but he was also marred by a number of controversies. In this, Glasner might have unearthed the outfit’s new version.
Glasner has found Palace’s new Zaha
Eze left Crystal Palace last summer after scoring the winning goal in the FA Cup final against Manchester City. He joined Arsenal for £67m.
But it’s not Eze who became Zaha 2.0, but Jean-Philippe Mateta, whose messy January transfer window saw a move to AC Milan fall through at the eleventh hour after he failed his medical.
Mateta has grown into a dangerous goalscorer at Selhurst Park, in fact hailed by analyst Ben Mattinson as “one of the best strikers in the Premier League” after scoring 38 goals since the start of the 2023/24 season. He’s even been described as a “goal machine” by reporter Will Pickworth.
The 28-year-old shares with Zaha a failed attempt at forcing a transfer from the club. He handed in a transfer request in 2019, one month after Arsenal showed their hand and with Everton pushing to secure his signature.
That £40m asking price that Parish and co set last summer looks slightly ambitious now. Unless Mateta can return to the top of his game in the coming months, he will leave for a lesser fee come summer, one year left on his contract and the knowledge that the Eagles want to sell.
To have achieved so much, winning multiple pieces of silverware in 2025 and being shaped into a monstrous goalscorer, has established Mateta as one of the club’s modern greats, but there is a bitterness about recent events that may cloud over the Frenchman’s time at the club.
|
Jean-Philippe Mateta in the Premier League |
||
|---|---|---|
|
Season |
Apps |
Goals + Assists |
|
25/26 |
23 |
8 + 0 |
|
24/25 |
37 |
14 + 2 |
|
23/24 |
35 |
16 + 6 |
|
22/23 |
29 |
2 + 0 |
|
21/22 |
22 |
5 + 1 |
|
20/21 |
7 |
1 + 0 |
|
Data via Transfermarkt |
||
Mateta might have made incremental progress over the past several years, but he’s missed 16 big chances in the Premier League this season and was hardly indispensable, especially when considering Strand Larsen has arrived.
Mateta stays put for now, and he will want to play his part and score some goals before the summer.
But, with Strand Larsen added to the ranks for a club-record fee, it looks like Mateta will end up leaving in slightly sour circumstances, as happened with Zaha.
Crystal Palace star looks finished at Selhurst Park after Strand Larsen deal
Crystal Palace had one of the more frantic January transfer windows in the Premier League.
