‘An amazing thing’ – Crystal Palace make classy Macclesfield gesture despite FA Cup defeat

Macclesfield owner Robert Smethurst has praised Crystal Palace for letting the club keep ALL the ticket sales from their FA Cup classic.

The non-league side masterminded one of the greatest upsets in the history of the competition with a 2-1 win to dump out the holders.

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National League North side Macclesfield sit 117 places below their Premier League opponents, who are also playing in Europe this year.

However, goals from Paul Dawson and Isaac Buckley-Ricketts completed a fairytale victory for the Cheshire club, managed by Wayne Rooney’s younger brother John.

How much prize money did Macclesfield receive?

The Silkmen raked in a £121,500 bonus for reaching the FA Cup fourth round, on top of the £80k from the BBC for appearing on TV.

Macclesfield owner Smethurst has now revealed that Palace have also allowed them to keep the profits from all of Saturday’s ticket sales.

Typically, gate receipts in FA Cup ties are split between the two clubs, but Macclesfield now stand to earn around £400,000 for the tie.

During an appearance on talkSPORT’s Sunday Session, Smethurst was asked what the additional funds would mean for the club’s future.

“Huge,” he replied. “It’s an amazing thing for Macclesfield. We do spend quite a lot because we have huge gate receipts.

“Within football, unfortunately, the better you do and the higher you move up the leagues, the worse it actually gets financially as an owner.

“Success brings other challenges because obviously your fan base want you to keep on moving up the leagues, but sometimes it’s not affordable.

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“This will make the club, for the next couple of years, especially with the next draw, if we’re lucky enough to potentially get an away game, especially if it’s a Premier League club, you can be drawing nearly up to a million pounds in funds.

“This will help us look at strengthening the squad.

“But you know what? After the performance those guys gave, you sort of question, do we actually need to?

“I think it’s more about retaining some of the talent and signing up and getting a few more contracts, so they don’t leave us.”

Smethurst also responded to Oliver Glasner‘s post-match interview, in which he claimed Crystal Palace’s U21s would have performed better.

He told talkSPORT: “It’s a tough one.

“When you start looking at the money side of things, I’m not saying it takes the mockery out of it, but our budget is probably just short of a million pounds.

“If you compare to their maybe 300 million value or 500 million value of a club, players and the wages that these guys are on, our guys are part-time players. That’s the fairy tale story.

“They train two times a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most of them have jobs during the week.

“For them to go out there and perform like the way they did, it was exceptional.

“I thought what Rooney has done as a manager since he’s come in, the way that he’s making them play through the thirds, making sure that the recruitment’s been right, that’s what’s impressed me.

“His tactical changes as well. The manager [Glasner] must be crushed.

“He must be upset when he sees players that have come through academies, and everything else, put a performance like that out.

“If I was certainly Crystal Palace, that performance certainly wasn’t good enough.”

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Ultimate target as Macclesfield owner

“My dream when I bought the club and the investors that have come on this journey with me now want to try and take this football club to the league,” Smethurst added to talkSPORT.

“It’s a dream of ours. That’s a realistic figure that I can put on it, which is to try and get to league football.

“But if we want to go any further, we’re going to need bigger investment and look at bigger finances to try and do that.”