"People would ask, why have you done this? And I remember saying to someone, because it made me think about it. Because it matters. And in your life, something has to matter. And you know, for most of us, it's our football team."
— Steve Parish, Chairman of Crystal Palace FC, When Eagles Dare (2021)
Temporal is becoming Crystal Palace Football Club's front-of-shirt partner and exclusive tech infrastructure sponsor beginning with the 2026/27 Premier League season
In June 2010, Crystal Palace Football Club had twenty-four hours to find a buyer or be liquidated, and Lloyds Bank was slow to come to terms on a deal that would keep the club whole.
Steve Parish, leading a consortium of four supporters trying to buy the club, posted a note on the supporters' message board telling the fans what was at stake. By the next morning, 3,000 fans were outside Lloyds Bank in London, protesting. The next day, thousands more. They came back, and back again, refusing to let the club be sold off for parts, until the bank had no choice but to return to the table.
By 2013, the club was promoted to the Premier League. In May 2025, Palace won the FA Cup for the first time in the club's history, and the Community Shield followed in August. This season, in their debut European campaign, Palace has reached the UEFA Conference League final, where they'll face Rayo Vallecano in Leipzig on May 27th.
This trajectory is the product of hard work, investing in fundamentals, having resilience in the face of failure, and the passion of a fanbase that views the Club as a pillar of their community. The fans rely on the club the way the club relies on them. Durable, resilient, and reliable, generation after generation.
Why this makes sense for Temporal#
In 2019, on the other side of the world, Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev made a different kind of a long-term bet. They had spent the previous decade building successive versions of the same idea: engineers were rebuilding the same undifferentiated, fragile infra over and over again. First at Amazon, where they launched the Simple Workflow Service at AWS; then at Microsoft, where Samar built Azure Durable Functions; then at Uber, where Samar and Max reunited to co-create Cadence, the open-source workflow engine that became the backbone of more than 1,000 of Uber's most critical systems and was adopted externally by companies like HashiCorp and DoorDash.
They decided enough was enough and left Uber to found Temporal so this technology could be available to everyone.
The developer community took it from there. They built incredible things with Temporal and ran them in production at massive scale, shared what they learned with us and the rest of the community, pushed the tech into use cases the founders had not imagined.
Today, Temporal is the reliable foundation layer underneath long-running, mission-critical applications at OpenAI, JPMorgan, Vodafone, Netflix, Datadog, and Snap.
Now, with the advent of AI, agents are running for hours, sometimes days, calling LLMs and tools and hitting APIs that fail in new and creative ways every week. The old patterns were strained before the agentic wave hit, and now they're buckling.
Building your agents or agentic application with Temporal means your app can crash, your LMM can meltdown, your server can die, your cloud region can go down, but your agents will complete their task.
What this looks like beyond the shirt#
Crystal Palace is becoming a Temporal Cloud customer, because this partnership is about more than the logo on the shirt.
The club is in the middle of a stadium redevelopment, the kind of generational project that only happens once in the life of an institution. Palace is using this moment to rethink and modernize how the club runs across ecommerce, payments, fan experience, and the operational systems a Premier League club depends on every matchday.
Temporal will be the Durable Execution layer underneath as much of that work as we can be useful for.
To Palace supporters#
It is exceedingly rare to be invited so warmly into someone's "home," especially not with a partner whose legacy stretches back to 1861 and whose community has carried it through 164 years. To be invited to stand alongside Crystal Palace is an honor we're taking seriously. You know better than anyone what this shirt is worth in this community, and we're not going to claim we already understand what it means to wear it. That is something we have to earn.
What we can tell you is that we're a company built on the conviction that lasting things are built by and for the communities that sustain them, and they should be built to last. We believe you all share that conviction.
We're showing up as guests, and we plan to be really good ones, and we will see you at Selhurst Park soon.
To the developers we're meeting for the first time#
Temporal is what it is because of the engineers who build with it. The ones boldly building new things and running them in production — pushing us to be better than we were before.
Going big with this partnership is, in part, how we honor that boldness, and empower you, to spend time on the work that actually matters. Every developer who finds Temporal is a developer who gets time back to pursue innovation. The more engineers globally who use Temporal, the more time we give back to the industry. Crystal Palace is going to put us in front of millions of developers who may not have had a reason to find us yet. Every developer deserves a toolbox with Temporal in it.
If you haven't yet had a reason to look at Temporal, this is your invitation. The platform is open source. The community is in Slack and on GitHub. Replay will be back next year.
And if you're watching Premier League football and you see our logo on a Crystal Palace shirt, know that the company behind it is building for the long run.
Crystal Palace and Temporal are both defined by people too stubborn and passionate to let something fail — a storied football club, or a bleeding edge AI application. Today, those two histories meet. We're stoked to be here.
— Clair