I know many of you cannot access the full text on The Times website so here it is below.

I enjoyed his quote about putting ticket prices up a quid, because it exposes his gut reaction to increasing finance despite £100m-plus income a year.

When Steve Parish met Sam Allardyce in his glass-walled Soho offices on Tuesday, the Crystal Palace chairman thought that they were going to talk transfers. Instead Allardyce said that he had something personal to discuss. Within minutes, he had resigned.
In the light of such an unexpected turn of events, it is not hard to see why Parish recently pulled out of the BBC’s Dragons’ Den after a few rehearsals, citing time pressures. Just when everything seemed under control running a Premier League club, you are now rushing around trying to replace the manager who has saved you from relegation.
Parish was as surprised as anyone but says that he has no reason to doubt the explanation of Allardyce needing a break, spending more time with family. The departing manager walked away from a significant pay rise. There were no arguments over transfers — Parish says that it was Allardyce who suggested pulling out of a deal for Jermain Defoe as the costs escalated — and he can do little more than be grateful for five successful months. “Sam has not left me in the lurch, he’s given me lots of time to find a replacement,” Parish says.

He wonders if “maybe Sam will turn up at Bolton in a year or two if they are in the top division”, but has covered himself with a £2 million compensation clause if that happens within the next two years.
So now he starts a new search, wondering if he will go for an overseas coach for the first time after what, by Premier League standards, has been an untypical run of Britons including Ian Holloway, Tony Pulis, Neil Warnock and Alan Pardew. There is ambition to move beyond a counterattacking game, to try something a little bolder, which is why Roger Schmidt, the former Bayer Leverkusen coach who held talks with Watford, features on a long list to which Garry Monk and Marco Silva will have been added after their respective departures yesterday from Leeds United and Hull City.

It is a critical decision for a club who, even as they look forward to an unprecedented fifth season in the top flight, have a pretty fragile grip on that status. “I don’t think people realise, the pressure is almost unbearable,” Parish says. “A friend of mine, a fan, said, ‘It’s the same for us fans.’ I said, ‘Believe me, it isn’t.’ I’ve been both, at Arsenal away in ’93, devastated [when Palace were relegated on the final day]. But a few days later you are getting over it. But the financial Armageddon that is relegation . . . the jobs that would be lost. The average is that, for Palace, it is ten years in the Championship for every one in the top division. That’s enormous pressure. So even to go close this year, you blame yourself, the self-flagellation.”
We are sitting in those trendy Soho offices, where Palace’s marketing team are based. Parish lives a short walk away, admitting that he almost developed a phobia of travel as he built up a design and production agency that he sold in 2011. A man who talks fast, says a lot, emotional and passionate, Parish would have made a very watchable Dragon. He has an opinion on most things and is willing to be forthright about the big topics in English football such as the agitation among the top six clubs to have a greater share of soaring overseas football rights.
Parish warns that the distribution model will be tinkered with at their collective peril. “Are we honestly saying people are only tuning in for Man United or Liverpool? It’s not factual, is it? If they are not careful they will ruin it, they will cook the golden goose. We’ve just signed a deal in China that is ten times the Spanish deal. That was the only place in the world where they had a bigger deal. Why? They like our version of football, the competitiveness, the uncertainty.
“If anyone thinks making this league more uncompetitive is going to make it more appetising, they are mad. The big clubs talk of the jeopardy that we don’t have the world’s top players. But the world’s public are voting constantly that they don’t care about that.”
So the idea of giving the top six more money? “If you want me to take myself into the backyard and shoot myself? There is a lot more right about what we are doing than wrong. Let’s not make the mistake of Italy in its heyday.”

Parish says that the big clubs need to study their own flaws, though he is quick to accept that he is not excusing himself. In the present gold rush, Palace have a turnover of £102 million even before the surge in TV money, which puts them beyond most clubs in Italy, Spain, Germany and France.
“The curse of too much money is upon all of us. I might have the 20th biggest wage bill in the world. Do I have the 20th best side? I very much doubt it. So I am part of that inefficiency.”
Parish is not short of ideas about what needs to be done to control some of the financial extremes of English football. One area that he thinks must be addressed is wages for youth players, especially given the recent demands of one 17-year-old at Palace for £10,000 a week after being invited to train with the first team.
“He has not even played in the Championship. He shouldn’t have more money just because he’s in a Premier League academy. That’s nonsense. What has he proved?”
He has an idea. “Especially in a post-Brexit world, can we have a rookie contract like they do in America? In EU law you couldn’t do it. But how about category one salary is this at a certain age, category two salary is that, you play in the first team you get this.
“We don’t want a nanny state. We live in a free market. But the reality is, it’s not good for the boys. To give a 16-year-old 40k a week? You are deluded if you don’t think that’s harmful. A young person needs to be constantly striving. Since EPPP [the elite player performance plan], the average wage was £256,000-a-year for 17-year-olds.”
He sees Brexit as an opportunity, a chance to redraw rules to suit everyone; a trade-off whereby the FA can enforce stronger regulations on home-grown players, but clubs have freer access to a global market with less complications for work permits.
“We can open ourselves to a world market with infinitely cheaper goods and services,” he says. “The opportunity for football with Brexit is enormous if we get it right. If we have more Peruvian, Venezuelan players, the league will grow in stature in more countries.”
Home-grown quotas would need renegotiating but, in any case, Parish does not believe they are the answer to England’s woes, believing that they lie with a failure to develop adaptable footballers. But British players do not travel overseas and why would they with such big wages available closer to home?

Parish agrees that Michel Platini was probably right when he said that English football can be too rich for its own good, including an “insane transfer market”. It makes for rich pickings for agents, and Parish says that he is among those who have supported more transparency in deals and for rules that restrict agents from taking a cut of the transfer fee as well as a player’s salary.
Parish was happy to pay large bonuses to the Palace squad for staying in the top flight given that relegation would have meant a minimum £55 million loss in the first season alone. Their close escape has, he says, reminded everyone not to be presumptuous. In the hope of pushing on, building long-term sustainability, Palace are planning to redevelop Selhurst Park, with at least £50 million required for a new main stand.
“You have to do it in a smart way,” he says, “especially when £1 [increase] on ticket prices is almost a cause for a march in central London.”
Since December 2015, he has been working with Josh Harris and David Blitzer, American investors who own the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers and the NHL’s New Jersey Devils. There have been rumblings of Chinese investment, which Parish denies, though says that he is open to discussions. It is a long way from the mess he bought with his consortium in 2010, a club facing liquidation, not even owning their own stadium or training ground, but the challenge does not seem to grow any easier.
“I saw myself before the Hull game and thought, ‘You look quite old,’ ” Parish says. “It’s so intense, so public. It’s a pressure like none other. I don’t understand why people do it when it’s not their club. Though I guess it might be easier if it wasn’t Palace. Maybe if you care slightly less, that takes the edge off it.”
But he does care and, with that, he is off to find his new manager, a ninth in eight years, excluding caretakers. “It would be nice to go a season without having to,” he sighs.

I second that.

On the subject of academy players, I know of a 16 year old whose is at a lower division club, has never played for the first team and has an agent.

It is strange but perhaps we'll have a welcome to the new manager as well as a goodbye and thanks to the old one all at the same time

Interesting comment about "Roger Schmidt, the former Bayer Leverkusen coach" being on the list of potential managers as he has never featured in the media ruminations

Very good read

£10k for a 17 year old,hasn't even got wnaking warts on his hands yet.

BFS' statement said it all. What are CPFC going to add - the same copy/paste job when all managers leave on decent terms?

'We thank Sam for all his hard work and wish him well for the future'.

It means nothing.