How the Golden State Warriors helped Crystal Palace beat Man Utd & Liverpool

Tom Weber

Updated: 17 May 2024 18:09 BST
4 min read

Oliver Glasner, Crystal Palace, basketball — © IMAGO

Crystal Palace boss Oliver Glasner has revealed how knowledge of basketball can be useful for a football coach.

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The Austrian has enjoyed an eminently successful start to his time at Selhurst Park. Since succeeding Roy Hodgson in the Crystal Palace dugout, Glasner has only tasted defeat three times, drawing three and winning six, including beating of Liverpool and demolishing Man Utd 4-0.

After leading Wolfsburg into the Champions League and surprisingly claiming the Europa League with Eintracht Frankfurt, Glasner now looks set to build a very exciting project at Palace, with the early signings promising indeed.

Even before catching fire with Palace, Glasner was a sought-after coaching commodity and it is unsurprising that Bayern Munich recently tried to poach the 49-year-old only to be confronted with a €100 million asking price.

What makes Glasner such an interesting personality is that he does not rest on his laurels. The Austrian wants to develop and become a better coach and different sports help him in achieving this.

Glasner's NBA lessons

During his time at Frankfurt, he was often spotted visiting local ice hockey and basketball games. After leaving the Eagles in 2023, Glasner used his time off to travel to the US for a week and link up with the Golden State Warriors.

As he has now revealed in an interview with Stadium Astro, it proved an invaluable experience. "When you're for a long time in football or in your business, you get a little blind," Glasner said. "You don't see what's right or left of you and this is what I try, looking to other sports, looking to other business and learn from it."

"At the end, every manager, every coach is the same - [it's about] dealing with people and sportsmen, also in the NBA, a lot of superstars, how to deal with them, how to work together as a team. In the NBA, they have 82 games in the season before the playoffs start, so maybe they have 100 games during the season, so how can you plan the season, what do you have to take care of? A lot of things."

"[It's about getting] new influences. There are some that are maybe typical for your sport, but with some, it's like, 'Oh yeah, that's a good idea, maybe we can implement them in football, in our methods' and so it was a very important and good week for me."

"It's about getting experience, getting influences and getting information and then sticking it all together and maybe with some adaptions, some adjustments those can work in football...It's a lot of individual training with the players in basketball, every day, and I think it's not that much in football, and we're thinking about where we can find a time slot to implement more individual training with the players, with their skills, in their positions."

"This is something we are talking about and we want to introduce and implement...In football, it's [happening] more and more that the number of staff members increases, also video analysts, more and more team meetings, individual meetings, more sessions individually, also the strength and fitness activities are more individual than it was maybe 15 or 20 years ago."

"I think the NBA, US sports, also the NFL they are, regarding these topics, maybe a few years [ahead] of football. So, we always look at how we could improve."