The news that hip-hop legend P Diddy wants to buy Crystal Palace Football Club has been greeted with a mixture of amazement and wariness by fans of the south London club, who have had their fair share of trouble with owners in recent years.


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Currently in administration, near the bottom of English football’s second tier, lumbered with huge debts and a crumbling ground they don’t even own, Palace’s prospects aren’t exactly sparkling. So what’s the attraction for Diddy?

Apparently, he “liked the name”.

We’ve all been there, to be fair. It took a friend of mine dozens of failed dates to realise that just because women off the internet have foxy names, doesn’t mean Dolores and co. pout like porn stars in real life and I still buy I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter even though I can believe it, quite easily in fact.

Unlike me, multi-millionaire Diddy doesn’t sound like a dope, so I expect he has plans that will make it all work. In a get-the-vote-out effort for the 2004 US election, he came up with the slogan, “Vote or Die”.

I’d like to see Diddy use that uncompromising attitude at Palace. “Win or Die” has a good ring to it and the principle could be extended to the financial problems. “Write Off Our Debts or Die” and “Players: Stop Asking for Ridiculous Wages or Die” would soon do the trick.