Steve Parish puts blame on Forest for Palace misfortune with the latter set to take their place in the Europa League.
Steve Parish has announced that the FA Cup winners will challenge Uefa’s judgement to the court of arbitration for sport, and he has implied that Nottingham Forest is to responsible for Crystal Palace’s relegation from the Europa League to the Conference League.
Forest is anticipated to be promoted to the Europa League in lieu of Palace after the regulatory body of European football declared last week that Palace had violated its multiclub ownership regulations. Last month, it was made public that Forest had written to Uefa to express concerns that Palace might violate the rule that prohibits clubs owned by the same person or group from participating in the same competition if that person or group is thought to have a significant influence over more than one of those teams.
Uefa decided that even though the deal was almost final, it had come too late for Palace’s largest shareholder, John Textor, whose Eagle Football Holdings company also owns Lyon, who have also qualified for the Europa League, to sell his stake to Woody Johnson of the New York Jets. To adhere to the regulations in the event that Forest qualified for the Champions League, Evangelos Marinakis, the owner of Forest and the owner of Olympiakos, the Greek champions, put his shares into a blind trust. After Textor missed the deadline on March 1st, Uefa rejected his attempts to follow suit.
Parish, asked by Gary Lineker on The Rest is Football podcast whether Forest had played a part in Palace being demoted, said: “Yes. We were told that and I think it’s been made public. These things seem to be played out in public. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of confidentiality that comes out of certain organisations. But we’re led to believe that that’s the issue – if there wasn’t somebody that wanted to get in as a consequence, then there wouldn’t be a problem.
“People have got to look at themselves. Some people will say it’s fine, some people will say it’s not. I don’t really have control of that. I only have control of the arguments that we put forward to Uefa.”