Eagles Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Crystal Palace F.C.
Crystal Palace Football Club have been in existence for 120 years. For most of them, nothing much happened. Then, in May 2025, they won the FA Cup for the first time in their history.
Eagles Through the Ages tells the full story — from the club's founding in 1905 in the grounds of the original Crystal Palace building, through the wilderness years in the Fourth Division, the Malcolm Allison rebrand that turned the Glaziers into Eagles, the Venables era, the FA Cup final of 1990, two administrations, the fans who saved the club, the Wilfried Zaha decade, and the May afternoon at Wembley when Eberechi Eze scored the only goal against Manchester City and Crystal Palace finally won something.
Ten episodes. 120 years. One club from South London that refused, repeatedly and against considerable odds, to stop existing.
Episodes
10 episodes
Episode Episode 10 : Into Europe The Season Crystal Palace Changed Forever (August 2025 – May 2026)
Crystal Palace began the 2025–26 season as FA Cup holders and ended it as European champions. In between: a Europa League demotion on ownership grounds, Eberechi Eze's departure to Arsenal on the morning of the club's first ever European fixtur...
Episode 9 : Eagles and Seagulls The Story of English Football's Strangest Rivalry Duration (1974–2025)
Crystal Palace and Brighton are forty miles apart. There is no shared territory, no disputed geography, no natural reason for hostility. Roy Hodgson, who grew up in Croydon in the 1950s, recalls no awareness of Brighton as rivals at all. The en...
Episode 8 : The Decade That Made Crystal Palace Zaha, Survival, Heartbreak, and History (2013–2025)
On the 17th of May, 2025, Crystal Palace Football Club won the FA Cup. It was the first major trophy in the club's 120-year history. The goal was scored by Eberechi Eze, a player raised ten minutes' walk from Selhurst Park who had been rejected...
Episode 7 : The Yo-Yo Years Cantona, Chaos, Two Administrations, and the Fans Who Saved a Club (1993–2013)
In 1995, Eric Cantona kicked a Crystal Palace supporter in the chest at Selhurst Park. It was the most famous incident in the fixture's history, but it was not the most important thing that happened to Crystal Palace that decade. The most impor...
Episode 6 Wrighty & Brighty — Steve Coppell, Ian Wright, and the Day Crystal Palace Nearly Won the FA Cup Duration: 30 minutes (1981–1991)
Steve Coppell arrived at Crystal Palace in 1984 with no managerial experience and a set of weightlifting equipment. Over the next decade he built something that had never existed at the club before: a team with a genuine identity, a style of pl...
Episode 5 : The Team of the Eighties - Terry Venables, the Birth of the Brighton Rivalry, and a Night at the Top of English Football Duration( 1976–1980)
Episode 5: The Team of the EightiesTerry Venables, the Burnley Night, and One Week at the Top of English Football (1976–1981)In the summer of 1976, two former Tottenham teammates were appointed as rival manag...
Episode 4: The Glaziers Become Eagles Bert Head, Malcolm Allison, and the Birth of an Identity (1964–1976)
For most of their history, Crystal Palace had been the Glaziers — a name inherited from the glass industry surrounding the Crystal Palace building. In 1973, Malcolm Allison changed that. He changed the kit, changed the name, and changed the ide...
Episode 3 : The Wilderness Years Two Decades in the Shadows of English Football (1945–1966)
Crystal Palace spent almost twenty years after the Second World War in the lower reaches of English football, twice in danger of losing their place in the Football League altogether. By 1958, when the Football League was reorganised into four d...
Episode 2 : Survival, Selhurst and the Shadow of War - From the Trenches to the Third Division (1915–1939)
Crystal Palace emerge from the First World War into a transformed football landscape — and a transformed club. The Crystal Palace ground is commandeered by the military during the war and never returned to the club as a viable football home; th...
Episode 1 : The Birth of the Palace 1861, the FA, and the Oldest Question in Football (1861–1914)
Look at a modern Crystal Palace shirt. The badge says 1861. It said 1905 for most of the club's history — and then in 2022, after five years of archival research by historian Peter Manning, the club changed it. The Football Association reviewed...