In the five years since Steve Parish and his fellow Crystal Palace fans took over the club, they transformed from Championship strugglers threatened with liquidation into a profitable Premier League club in the hunt for silverware

As co-chairman of a Premier League club and somebody who, in the space of 20 years, built up a company from scratch to be valued at around £100m when sold in 2011, Steve Parish’s views on the transition from running a business to running a football club are insightful. Parish succeeded in transforming an old-style print production company into a new media pioneer with offices in 13 countries and over 1,600 full-time staff, before moving into football – a different game entirely.

“What surprised me most is how much brilliant businessmen lose their minds when they get involved in football,” says Parish. “How they are just prepared to win at all costs, no matter what the money. One of the great myths in the Premier League is that the more money you spend the better you do.” It is a fair point, as many have proved that success outside football is no guarantee of achievement within the game but the 50-year-old appears to be bucking that trend as he enters the sixth year of co-owning Crystal Palace.

In setting out his aims and expectations for the season, there is a real sense of pride in what has been achieved over the last five years. “We would like to continue to progress,” says Parish. “We have finished higher every year since I bought the club with the guys so, if we could do that again, that would be great.” There cannot be many clubs who can point to such a remarkable renaissance over the last five years, from impoverished Championship stragglers to a healthy mid-table Premier League outfit.

Life at Lewes FC: an interview with the chairman of a non-league football club Read more

All football clubs have landmark anniversaries, which are duly celebrated in recognition of a particular achievement. For Manchester United supporters 29 May 1968 is forever etched in their memories as the day they became the first English winners of the European Cup. Arsenal fans recall 26 May 1989 with particular fondness as they sensationally snatched the First Division championship from Liverpool’s grasp with that last-gasp Michael Thomas goal at Anfield. Followers of Crystal Palace have 1 June 2010. There was no match played that day – no league or cup won – but a significant victory was secured. This was the crucial point when the Parish-led CPFC 2010 consortium rescued the South London club not only from a second crippling administration in a decade, but also from potential liquidation. The patient was not so much ailing as bordering on the terminal and there needed to be a radical change to reverse the decline of a quarter of a century.

The very notion of Palace being a profitable, thriving and established Premier League club back in those days would have been laughable. But, just five years on from that near-death experience, the Eagles are not only surviving but they are beginning to make a considerable mark on English football for the right reasons. There is a vibrancy and brio at Selhurst Park these days, which has replaced the rather moribund mood that pervaded for most of the previous decade. Much of the credit for this renaissance is down to Parish and his three co-owners, Stephen Browett, Martin Long and Jeremy Hosking, who also have put plenty of money, time and effort into securing the future of the club and that is beginning to pay dividends.

All four co-owners are lifelong fans who hold an equal 25% share of the club but they come from vastly different business backgrounds. Browett is chairman of wine merchants Farr Vintners; Long was founder of Churchill Insurance; and Hosking was co-founder of private investment fund Marathon Asset Management. None of the co-owners take any money from the club.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crystal Palace co-chairman Steve Parish. Photograph: Jason Dawson/Rex Shutterstock

The good news is that they are in sound financial health. Having taken over a club burdened with debts of £30m, Palace made a profit of £23m in the most recent financial year. Parish is acutely aware of the difference staying in the Premier League makes to a club like Palace when assessing priorities. “The league is infinitely more financially valuable than any cup. Moving up just two places [as Palace did on the final day of last season] is worth as much as winning the Cup.” Given that every Premier League position is worth an extra £1.2m, while prize money for FA Cup winners is £1.8m and only £100,000 for League Cup winners, moving up those two league places earned them more money than they would have made from winning both domestic cups.

Parish is quick to point out that he is not motivated solely by money. “We are not here to be on the merry-go-round of just trying to pick up winning-place money in the Premier League. We want to do well in one of the cups as realistically the likelihood of winning a cup is way above that of winning the league.”

But, despite boasting the highest operating profit margin of any English club in 2013-14 – at 25% it was nearly double that of nearest challenger Manchester United – Parish is wary of the bubble bursting. “It is about controlling costs and managing expenditure, especially salary levels. This is the richest league in the sporting world by miles but we have to be careful as we are competing with each other.”

Parish says high salaries are attracting more and more players from around the world to England. “The wages in the Premier League are crazy. They’re mad compared to any other league and the problem we are giving ourselves is, if we want to sell a player, there are no other leagues in the world that can afford them. This is not commensurate with their ability.”

While things on the pitch are going well, there is as much to do off it. “It’s a balancing act because you can’t do it all at once, especially after you have been under-invested for the last 25 years, as Palace has,” says Parish. Selhurst Park may be a cauldron of noise, with the atmosphere generated a distinguishing factor in the increasingly anodyne environment of top-flight football, but the stadium is not up to the standard expected of the richest league in the world. “I would like to see some headway made on the stadium,” says Parish. “We’ve spent probably in the region of £10m of capital expenditure on the stadium, on the training ground, the infrastructure, the pitch, the pitches at the training ground; all stuff that is going to stand us in good stead long term.”

The massive advantage of being in the Premier League is that clubs can siphon off a few million to improve other areas, taking huge strides in developing their infrastructure. “You have to decide where your priorities lie; in football there is an enormous amount of pressure to spend it all on the players.” Parish describes the hype that accompanies the transfer window as “a kind of false prophecy that occurs about a ‘who spent what’ league table, and fans now believe that this table is where you are going to end up and that somehow, because of this chase, if I spend more money than all of them therefore I will do better, but it’s just not a correlation.”

Parish warns that clubs “can blindly follow that plan to oblivion” and that plans must be flexible. “You have to be prepared to react, there may be a need to divert funds in January. The absolute priority is to stay in this division.”

Beyond this, he lists the rebuilding of the main stand, improving the ground and the academy as vitally important. “Our fans care about the make-up of the team, they want to see local boys playing in the team.” One of the most notable products of the academy in recent years has been Wilfried Zaha and Parish identifies the emergence and development of Zaha as the tipping point for Palace.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wilfried Zaha celebrates with manager Alan Pardew after scoring for Crystal Palace against Liverpool. Photograph: Carl Recine/Reuters

Zaha made his full debut in the first match of Parish’s reign in August 2010 and he marked his arrival with a goal. The youngster has been a sort of talisman for the improvements in the club’s position. “We felt like we had a star who we could build something around so we upped the budget slightly and then we got into this division with a relatively low wage bill, which gave us the high margin which in turn gave us the cash surplus.”

Parish admits it was a gamble that paid off in the end. “In every business where you are miles behind, if you want to do it quickly you need to pull a rabbit out of the hat. You can either throw lots of money at it or you can put together a plan with some kind of acumen and a bit of luck that you can beat the system slightly.”

The faith shown in Zaha was vindicated as he was instrumental in getting the club promoted in 2013, scoring both goals in the play-off semi-final and earning the match-winning penalty in the final. There was a twist in the plot as Zaha was sold to Manchester United in January 2013, becoming Alex Ferguson’s last ever purchase, but he was instantly loaned back to Palace for the rest of the season. His time in Manchester United was a struggle as first David Moyes and then Louis Van Gaal did not include him in their plans. Eventually he returned to his original club a bit battered and bruised by his experience at Old Trafford.

But Zaha is Palace’s outlier, the only academy player to have made the grade in the first-team in the last five years. It is fascinating to hear how one player’s development was so critical to the club’s fortunes and it also highlights one of Parish’s deep frustrations with the business of football. While he maintains that the current Palace squad are “a good bunch of lads who don’t cause too many problems” he admits that “you do get situations that are very frustrating because you don’t feel like you have got any tools to deal with them”.

“The biggest difference between running my advertising business and a football club is that I had a labour force where there was nobody who was absolutely intrinsic to my business. If somebody left, they left and you could control your wages and costs much more. In football all of the power is with the players and the agents and very little with the club. We have very little control over our assets.” And so, when asked what one thing he would do to improve football, he demands more transparency. “I would publish all the transfer fees and all the agent fees on every deal. The clubs should have more knowledge.”

Having enjoyed the ride so far, he is still very much a hands-on chairman, insisting on going to every match. “I need to be there, so I’m very circumspect about missing any game.” Having helped to restore a sense of pride to the club he loves, Parish is hoping to take them to the next level. He will have to avoid the trap so many other businesspeople have fallen into in the past and ensure the fans in charge of Palace do not lose their minds.

• This article is from The Agony and the Ecstasy

• Follow Richard Foster on Twitter