Crystal Palace F.C.

Crystal Palace Football Club is a professional football club based in Selhurst, South London, England, who currently compete in the Premier League, the highest level of English football. Although their official founding date is 1905, the club claims to be a continuation of the original amateur Crystal Palace football club established in 1861, due to the fact that they were both owned by the same Crystal Palace Company. This would make Crystal Palace the oldest professional football club in the world.[1] Both the amateur and professional clubs were founded at the Crystal Palace Exhibition building and played inside its grounds, with the professional club playing at the FA Cup Final stadium until 1915, when they were forced to leave due to the outbreak of the First World War. In 1924, they moved to their current home at Selhurst Park. The amateur club became one of the original founder members of the Football Association in 1863 and competed in the first ever FA Cup competition in 1871–72, reaching the semi-finals, but disappeared from historical records after the 1875–76 FA Cup. Shortly after Crystal Palace returned to existence in 1905 as a professional club, they applied for election to the Football League, but were rejected and instead played in the Southern League. Palace did eventually join the Football League in 1920, and have overall spent the majority of their league history competing in the top two tiers of English football. Since 1964, they have only dropped below the second tier once, for three seasons between 1974 and 1977. The club enjoyed a successful period in the top flight in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which they achieved their highest ever league finish of third place in the old First Division, now known as the Premier League, in the 1990–91 season. Palace were unfortunate to miss out on qualification for the UEFA Cup at the end of that season due to the limited number of European places available to English clubs after the lifting of the UEFA ban caused by the Heysel Stadium disaster. The club became founder members of the Premier League in 1992. Palace have also been FA Cup finalists twice, losing to Manchester United on both occasions in 1990 and 2016. The club's kit colours were claret and blue until 1973, but then they decided to change to the red and blue vertical stripes worn today. Palace have a long-standing rivalry with Brighton & Hove Albion,[5] with whom they contest the M23 derby, and also share rivalries with fellow South London clubs Millwall and Charlton Athletic.