Crystal Palace's Wilfried Zaha celebrates scoring their first goal
Crystal Palace are offering Wilfried Zaha a record-breaking deal to keep the player at Selhurst Park, Sami Mokbel reports.
The Lowdown: Zaha at Palace
Zaha has now made over 450 appearances for the Eagles across two separate spells. The 30-year-old helped take Palace into the Premier League during his first stint with the club and returned from Manchester United on a permanent deal in 2015.
Since then, he has been the club’s main creative spark in the final third and is once again Palace’s top scorer during the current campaign.
In total, Zaha has contributed to 165 goals as a Palace player, and it looks as if Steve Parish and Dougie Freedman are pulling out all the stops to keep him at the club.
The Latest: Contract update
Mokbel took to Twitter in the last 48 hours to provide an update on Zaha’s future, with the player out of contract in the summer at this moment in time.
The Daily Mail reporter revealed that Zaha has an offer worth £9m-a-year from Al-Ittihad, however, Palace are ‘offering him the most lucrative contract in their history to stay’. He added that Zaha is still undecided about where his future lies.
The Verdict: Big decision
It’s good to see that Palace are doing all they can to keep Zaha at Selhurst Park, although he also has interest from Champions League clubs alongside an eye-catching offer from Saudi Arabia.
Keeping him would be huge, as he has shown over the last eight years that he is a top-class Premier League player, turning out in a variety of attacking roles over the years. He netted a career-best 14 Premier League goals during the 2021/22 campaign under Patrick Vieira and has scored six times in 21 league games so far this season.
Palace have lacked goals under Vieira this season and actually haven’t had a shot on target in their last three top-flight fixtures. That is a cause for concern, so losing Zaha for nothing in the summer would be a big blow and may leave the Eagles on the hunt for a number of attacking additions, one of which being out wide to replace the long-serving Zaha.
Hopefully, though, the forward decides to remain in London with Palace, and should he do just that, he would cement his place as a club legend even further, making this a situation to keep a close eye on off the pitch, with Zaha looking to help get Palace back on track and away from the bottom three on the pitch.
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