The genius Crystal Palace summer transfer move that could prove an absolute bargain

After a slow start, new manager Oliver Glasner has finally got Crystal Palace firing on all cylinders – but he’s also got what could be a very tricky summer transfer window to negotiate in the near future, with star players Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise the subject of increasingly intense interest. It makes sense, therefore, that reports in Italy have connected Palace with a bid for a high-class winger with personal ties to the head coach.

Juventus’ Filip Kostić has enjoyed a successful career, with the highlight being lifting the 2020/21 Europa League with Eintracht Frankfurt – a victory engineered by Glasner. The Austrian manager now seems keen on a reunion, with Calciomercato claiming that he’s now on the Turin side’s “list of expandables” despite playing 27 Serie A games this season.

A bid in the region of €10m (£8.6m) will apparently be enough to secure the 31-year-old Serbian’s services, but how much gas does Kostić still have left in the tank, and are Juve right to make him expendable?

On the one hand, it’s a pretty harsh tag for a player who has performed perfectly well in a relatively indifferent Juventus team. He’s creating plenty of chances and causing problems down the left wing just as he always has done – but although his performance levels haven’t dropped appreciably, his production has.

When he was playing in Glasner’s front three at Frankfurt, he passed the 10 assist mark for three consecutive Bundesliga seasons, and scored at least four league goals every year. Last season, his first in Turin, he scored three and set up another eight. This time out, despite starting 25 matches, he’s only managed four assists and hasn’t hit the back of the net himself once.

But he’s still providing chances at a high rate – in fact, he’s generating more shots for his team than he did last year, and even more than he did back in the 2018/19 season, when he set up 10 goals for his team-mates. Based on expected assists, the quality of delivery hasn’t declined either. This looks like either bad luck or poor finishing.

And he’s still got a pretty impressive turn of speed despite edging past the other side of 30 – although there’s a legitimate concern over his endurance at this point. Of the 25 Serie A matches he has started this season, he has made it to the end of the game just three times. It appears that Max Allegri doesn’t entirely trust his legs.

But then, a winger who has the proven ability to create high volumes of chances, who has plenty of pace and would cost less than £10m looks like something of a no-brainer. He wouldn’t be a long-term replacement for someone like Eze, perhaps, but you only need a couple of good years out of him to justify such a small outlay.

In any case, he might not be playing as a more traditional left winger any more. While he was on the left side of a front three at Frankfurt, in his two years at Juventus he’s played as the left midfielder in a 3-5-2 formation – not quite a wing-back, per se, with the emphasis very much on carrying the ball forward (something Kostić’s acceleration makes him very good at, although he doesn’t have the technique and dribbling skill to win too many one-on-ones that don’t devolve into a pure foot race).

So he could play as a wider version of Eze, or in a more Jordan Ayew-esque role, but equally he could compete for Tyrick Mitchell’s spot in the side. That would be an aggressive move – Kostić isn’t a high-quality defender and doesn’t make anything like as many tackles as most wing-backs or track back as hard – but Glasner is an aggressive manager by nature.

As it stands, this is a single-sourced rumour and there isn’t enough weight behind it for it to be considered a ‘likely’ move – but Palace will likely need some fresh legs in attack, and even some legs which aren’t so fresh might do. The club have worked hard to invest in youth in the last few years, but perhaps a dash of experience wouldn’t be such a bad thing. There’s plenty of evidence that Kostić has a lot left in his legs - and West Ham United may agree, given that they reportedly attempted to sign him on loan not so long ago. This looks like a low risk, reasonably high reward move to make.