It’s not difficult to imagine how Brighton could be looking at their fixture against Aston Villa this Sunday and wondering about what might have been. Villa may have been well beaten in their semi-final of the Europa Conference League by Olympiakos on Thursday, but they almost certainly have Champions League football to look forward to next season. There’s a renewed sense of optimism around Villa Park.
By Ian King
From 16th, to ninth, to their sixth placed finish last season. What’s felt almost miraculous about Brighton’s ongoing improvement in recent years has been that it took place against a regular defenestration of their most highly-rated players, and in one case their manager. There was a relentlessness about it, as though ‘The System’ was so deeply embedded into the club as to make them impervious to such distractions as, say, losing your manager and entire backroom staff a few weeks into a new season.
There are two ways of looking at Brighton’s performance last season, neither of which are particularly optimistic, but one of which is more so than the other. With one’s cup half-full, it could be argued that sixth place in the Premier League and Europa League football was always going to be an exhausting undertaking for a club of relatively modest resources, and that a plateau was always going to be reached.
This season’s slump even seems to have cooled interest in Roberto De Zerbi which, considering the salacious way in which he’s been drooled over by some sections of other fan bases over the last couple of years, is probably a blessed relief. There’s no danger of relegation. Finances are good and there are plans for a new stadium for the women’s team. Any slump in Premier League form remains a different magnitude of ‘crisis’ compared to the Withdean athletic track, home matches at Gillingham, or having former home, the Goldstone sold off.
But…expectations change. The Amex is now more than a decade old. A generation of supporters have already come through with no lived memories of the original North Stand, or of those seasons when it really did feel as though apathy was the only thing preventing the ground from being razed to the ground.
Brighton have had seven years of Premier League football, now. Finishing 6th in the Premier League last season doesn’t make them members of the Big Six, but they’re no longer the ingénues of the top flight, either. And there can be no masking the extent to which this season has tailed off, and how soon that tail-off started.
How bad it looks depends upon which cut-off point you start from, but none of it looks good. Brighton have failed to win any of their last six Premier League games. They have won two of the eleven played since they beat rivals Crystal Palace at the start of February, and those wins came against Forest and Sheffield United.
They’ve only won six of their last 28, too. Take off their blistering start, in which they won five of their first six matches of the season, scoring 18 goals as they went, and you could even argue that they’ve been in close to relegation form for most of this season.
Of course, as this season comes to a spluttering, faltering end, the big question is whether all of this is the end of something or the start of something else. This sort of decline needs to be arrested at some point; it doesn’t always take much for things to snowball once they start rolling.
It’s easy to talk of fairy tales and the like when things are going well, but the true test of the professionals involved only starts when things take a turn for the worse. What will poker-playing chairman Tony Bloom do to refresh things in the summer? He may have to decide whether to stick or twist on several different subjects. Will the production line of young footballers that you’ve never heard of keep spinning successfully? Brighton supporters will be wanting to know whether the algorithms are still okay.
Brighton are in rude financial health. Their survival as a football club doesn’t stand or fall on being in the Premier League. But getting to the top six is one thing, but staying there is another altogether, and when you’re at such a rarefied height there is a long way to fall. Brighton & Hove Albion’s ascent from near-death experience after near-death experience between the mid 1990s and early 21st century remains one of the most remarkable stories that English football has produced. That hasn’t…gone anywhere. That’s forever.
But the vast majority of this season for Brighton has been the sound of a glass-ceiling being hit. The supporters will have memories that will live forever, of trips to Marseille, Athens, and Rome, of beating Ajax–admittedly the worst Ajax team in decades but still… Ajax!!!–home and away. It’s more complicated than saying that this season has been a ‘bad’ one.
The Europa League ended with Brighton being put firmly in their place by Roma, and while a 4-1 league win against your bitterest rivals is always welcome, it won’t sustain a fanbase for long when the results all around it are terrible. Brighton may be casting envious glances at Sunday’s opponents Aston Villa and their surprise Champions League place. But perhaps Villa would be best advised to pay attention to Brighton too, for guidance on how not to manage their next season to come.
(Images from IMAGO)
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