With Palace and Everton reportedly on the verge of finalising a swap deal to send Brennan Johnson to the Hill Dickinson in exchange for Dwight McNeil, it feels like the right moment to take a reflective look on the past six months and ask the question no one else seems to be: have we actually been fair to Brennan Johnson?

Just six months ago, he arrived as our club-record signing. Today, he’s being talked about as makeweight in a deal to bring in a winger Everton themselves couldn’t find room for. That’s a brutal turnaround for any player, let alone one of Johnson’s calibre.

THE FOREST WONDERKID

It’s worth reminding everyone the player we signed in January, because the narrative around Brennan Johnson makes it sound like Palace took a gamble on an unproven name. We certainly did not.

Johnson joined the Nottingham Forest academy at eight years old, and by his early-twenties he became one of the most productive academy graduates England had seen in years. A loan spell at Lincoln City in 2020-21 saw him bag 13 goals in League One, before becoming a central piece to Forest’s promotion from the Championship the following season. Johnson contributed 19 goals across all competitions, winning the EFL Championship’s Young Player of the Season; an award previously won by the likes of Jude Bellingham and Michael Olise. Pretty handy company.

He left his boyhood club for Tottenham in 2023 for a fee in excess of £45m, one of the biggest academy sales English football had seen. Having racked up 29 goals and 12 assists in 108 senior Forest appearances, however, there was little questioning that price tag. At Spurs, his best campaign, 2024-25, brought 18 goals in all competitions, including the winning goal in the Europa League final to deliver the club’s first major trophy in 17 years. Not only is Brennan Johnson a player who has proven himself across the top three tiers of English football, but also one who’s performed on the European stage when the lights were brightest.

SET UP TO FAIL

During his Palace tenure, his numbers have been ugly, and there’s no way to avoid that: 26 appearances, 0 goals, 2 assists. But while the headlines love to highlight these stats, the context surrounding his time at Palace continuously gets left out of the conversation.

He signed in the January window and made his debut just 48 hours later, away at Newcastle, with essentially zero time to settle into a new club or system mid-season. There was no pre-season, no getting to know his teammates properly, no gradual introduction, just thrown straight into the deep-end that is a Premier League away day at St James’ Park. Compare that to our most recent signing, Takehiro Tomiyasu, who was given multiple training sessions and trial games before his arrival was even confirmed, and it’s hard not to feel sorry for how abruptly the Welsh international was rushed into the spotlight.

Then there’s the positioning issue, which everyone has seemed to forget. With Daniel Muñoz missing large chunks of the season through injury, Glasner turned to Johnson as an emergency option at right wing-back; a role that has almost nothing in common with the inverted, cut-inside winger’s game that helped him thrive at Spurs the season prior. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. Johnson was criticised specifically for that positional experiment, most notably after his poor performance away at Larnaca, but the criticism he received painted the narrative that he was struggling as a player, as opposed to being out-of-position.

It’s also worth noting that Johnson wasn’t a passenger during our European run. He featured in seven of the nine matches on the way to Palace’s first-ever European trophy. While he didn’t get onto the pitch in the final itself, it’s baffling how a player who contributed to winning Crystal Palace a European trophy is so comfortably being written off as a flop.

THE FIT MAKES SENSE ON PAPER

While this may sound like a pity plea so far, if you look beyond the goal and assist column, there’s a genuine argument statistically for why Johnson’s profile could suit what Sage is trying to build.

Let’s start with the most basic metric: pace. Johnson was clocked as the second-fasted player in the entire Premier League during the 2022-23 season, hitting 36.7km/h at Forest, behind only Kyle Walker. This was four seasons ago, granted, but he’s still constantly rated among the quickest players in the league today. Sage’s system is built explicitly around relentlessly attacking the space in behind the opposition’s defensive line. A player who’s number one trait is elite top-end speed is about as direct a match to that specific demand as you can ask for; just look at Ismaila Sarr.

Then there’s the underlying data from his finishing struggles, which tells a more forgiving story than the raw numbers suggest. In 2023-24 at Spurs, he scored just 5 goals from an xG of 11.0; the second-worst performance gap of any player in the entire league that season. While it may make for ugly reading, it does mean that he was still getting into elite, high-quality scoring positions through his off-the-ball movement and pace, albeit his finishing let him down. A system engineered specifically to manufacture repeated high-quality chances in behind is exactly the environment where that kind of volume could begin to pay off, even for a player who isn’t quite clinical every single time.

Despite this, Johnson still managed himself 10 Premier League assists that season; a tally only bettered by Ollie Watkins and Cole Palmer. Alongside this, his expected goal involvement of 0.62 per 90 actually bettered Heung-Min Son’s numbers from the same season, so it’s certainly evident that there’s a quality attacking player there. His following season bolstered 18 goals in all competitions, including a European final-winning goal which we touched on previously. But those two seasons together and you get a player who has separately proven both the creative output and the finishing quality Sage’s system needs, just not simultaneously.

Positionally, it should be a good fit. Johnson is right-footed but played as an inverted right winger in the past, comfortable cutting inside rather than just running down the byline for crosses. Sage’s front three, rotating fluidly through the half spaces as the wing-backs join the attack, suits Johnson as an inverted threat far better than the makeshift wing-back he had been asked to fill multiple times under Glasner. On paper, in his correct role, this is a considerably better system fit than the one that he’s been judged on so far.

ONE MORE PROPER CHANCE

Pierre Sage has barely had the opportunity to name a proper starting XI, let alone assess all of his forward options. yet Johnson is already being shipped out before being given a proper look. If there’s ever a moment a struggling signing deserves a clean slate, it’s the arrival of a new manager with fresh eyes and no previous history with the player. Instead, we’re apparently willing to make that decision for Sage before he’s had the chance to make it himself.

With all the focus on Brennan Johnson in this article, we haven’t even looked at the irony sitting right in the middle of this proposed deal. Dwight McNeil, the player coming the other way, has endured a similarly difficult season at Everton, in and out of the team and frustrated by his lack of opportunities. If we’re prepared to accept that McNeil’s struggles were partly due to environment and manager faith, the same logic should be extended to Johnson.

And then there’s the financial reality of it. Palace paid a then-club-record £35m for Johnson in January. Six months on, we’re discussing moving him on in a swap built around a player valued around £20m. That’s a huge amount of value to write off on the back of half a season, most of which was spent adapting to a new environment and playing out of position.

None of this means Johnson is guaranteed to turn his fortunes around. Plenty of talented, well-pedigreed players simply don’t work out at certain clubs, and it’s entirely possible that this remains one of those cases. But a European final winner, a £45m academy graduate, a player Palace themselves rated highly enough to make their club-record signing just months ago, deserves more than half an uncomfortable season before being shown the door. Give him a proper run in his actual position under a new manager first. If it still doesn’t work, at least we’ll know we gave him a fair shot, rather than moving him on before we ever really tried.

Do you think Palace should keep faith with Brennan Johnson, or is it time to cash in? Join the discussion in the OurCPFC Fanzone.