"I told the players — laugh, smile, and be yourselves," Glasner said. "They should be who they are, and then we have the best chance to show a great performance."
The message carried the weight of an ending. Wednesday night's Conference League final against Rayo Vallecano at Leipzig Stadium is Glasner's 60th game in charge of Palace and his last. He announced his departure in January, choosing to go on his own terms at the end of a season that had already exceeded almost every reasonable expectation. An FA Cup in 2025. A Community Shield. And now a first-ever European final in the club's history.
The Austrian has guided Palace through Fredrikstad, Lublin, Shelbourne in Ireland and Fiorentina. He arrived at Leipzig having beaten Shakhtar Donetsk 5-2 on aggregate in the semi-finals, with a squad that was written off publicly when results dipped sharply in December and January.
Glasner was unbothered by the noise at the time.
"There was more noise around the club than within," he said. "The most important ones are the players and we always had a very close relationship, even when the results were not how we wanted them."
His ability to maintain that relationship was tested during that winter spell. But Glasner describes a culture he built deliberately — one where disagreement is not a threat but a tool. He wants his players to challenge him. He wants the chairman to challenge him. He genuinely believes that conflict, handled well, is how development happens.
"If a player says 'yes, yes, yes, yes' to everything, or somebody is always telling me 'yes, yes, yes, yes', then we always have flowers flying around the training ground — but we never win anything," he said. "I like if players, if staff members, gives me feedback and says 'Oliver, probably think about this' and then I think about it and then I change my opinion."
It is a coaching philosophy built on earned authority rather than imposed hierarchy, and it has delivered results that few predicted when Glasner arrived in south London in February 2024.
He also spoke at length about Daichi Kamada — the Japanese midfielder who has built a reputation for performing most sharply when the stakes are highest. Glasner's experience of that dates back to Eintracht Frankfurt's Europa League triumph in 2022, when Kamada scored a penalty in the final. He referenced Kamada's decisive goal against Sporting Lisbon in the Champions League under Glasner's management, and a strong showing in last year's FA Cup final.
"It seems that the bigger the games are the better Daichi is," Glasner said. "And hopefully he proves me right tomorrow."
The tactical preparation has been thorough. Glasner described his analysts spending hours watching Rayo Vallecano across La Liga and Conference League footage, studying their defensive shape, their pressing intensity and their ability to hurt teams on the transition.
"Tactically, Vallecano are so good," he said. "Always pressing, always running in behind, always sprinting. Very experienced, many players 30 or older. A really, really well-managed team."
He is not looking at this as the last chapter of his own story so much as a potential springboard for the players he will leave behind. The wider reward of winning — Europa League football for Crystal Palace next season — matters to him because of what it would do for the group that continues without him.
"I would like to watch on TV that they start the Europa League with the desire and confidence that they could win the Europa League as well," he said. "This would make me really happy, because then I think we created a mindset all together where it is always successful."
His personal record since leaving Austria is remarkable. Two European finals with two clubs — Frankfurt's Europa League win in 2022 and now this — along with a DFB-Pokal final in Berlin and an FA Cup at Wembley. He says he does not rank them.
He will remember the head tennis, though.
"These 30 minutes when the players play head tennis is one of the best moments for me," he said. "I see kids playing football, they have so much fun, everybody wants to win, but they are laughing and joking, and I'm sitting there just watching and having a big smile."
That is the image Glasner will carry from Leipzig: not the trophy cabinet, but the sound of a group he built from the inside out — laughing, joking, and ready.