It Started With a Kick – Episode 60
With the Premier League season over, the focus of this blog will shift to It Started With a Kick podcast. As luck would have it, or maybe serendipitously, this week’s episode features Steve Browett, the former co-owner of current FA Cup holders, Crystal Palace. Steve will be well known and much loved by Palace fans as one of the intrepid four, alongside Steve Parish, Martin Long and Jeremy Hosking, called CPFC 2010 who bought the club when things were looking particularly grim. Staving off administration the consortium steadied the ship and led the club to promotion in 2013 via everyone’s favourite route, the Play-Offs. Steve stepped away from joint ownership a few years later but remains a director of the club.
It is always fascinating to gain insight from those who have been involved in the ownership of clubs and Steve is both candid and entertaining. Steve had been a season ticket holder at Selhurst for most of his adult life, but is one of the few who saw the club play at Crystal Palace Park, when they met Arsenal in a friendly in 1969/70. Steve was there when Palace beat Burnley in 1979 amongst a record crowd of over 52,000, but he was also present when Palace met Burnley during COVID times when the official attendance was 0.
He talks about how being 12th in Premier League, which is sneered at by some as boring, is in fact a massive achievement from where the club was, and should be celebrated – “We’ve come a long way.” He also lifts the lid on how the consortium put together a package to buy Palace in 2010. Perhaps the biggest revelation of all is that Martin Long, whose company Churchill Insurance sponsored the club, called his daughter Crystal Alice.
Even for non-Palace fans, it’s worth a listen, so here are links to both parts of Steve’s episode:
Part 1 – https://bit.ly/3Zf4qaO
Part 2 – https://bit.ly/4dR4vYb
The Football Mine 