Brighton & Hove Albion’s nomadic years are to be revisited on stage this month, when a new play telling the story of the supporters’ battle with the club’s owners opens at the Theatre Royal to mark Brighton’s 125th anniversary. Stand or Fall, written by the Brighton fan Mark Brailsford, follows a group of supporters from the last days at the Goldstone Ground in 1997, through the club’s exile 70 miles away in Gillingham and the years at the Withdean Stadium, to the move to the Amex Stadium. Brailsford also performs in the production alongside Paul Moriarty, Andrew Crouch and Rebecca Blanchard. It runs for four nights from 23 September, and Ian Hart, the Worthing funeral director who was co-editor of the Brighton fanzine Gull’s Eye during the crisis, is a producer.
A companion exhibition, also entitled Stand or Fall, opened at Brighton Museum in August and continues until the end of the year, detailing what Hart describes as the club’s civil war.
For Hart the story began with a phone call in July 1995. Gordon Lucking, a Crystal Palace director, rang him with a tip-off. Lucking, Hart says, had always wanted to join the Brighton board but the club did not want him there, and Palace’s chair, Ron Noades, welcomed him with open arms instead. The information came from one of Lucking’s employees who had been at a golf day, where a fellow guest let slip that Brighton had sold the Goldstone Ground and were moving to Portsmouth. “Gordon loved it, because it was another nail in Brighton’s coffin,” Hart says.
Hart initially struggled to believe that a ground which had been Brighton’s home since 1902 could be in danger. He went to confront the chief executive, David Bellotti, at his office, parking his hearse outside first, and asked him straight whether the club had sold the ground and were moving to Portsmouth. “All the colour drained from his face,” Hart writes in his book, Brighton & Hove Albion: From Every Angle, which was released last year.
The campaign that followed brought together an unlikely coalition. “We were all thrown together, all different demographics: a funeral director, a punk performance poet, a chartered accountant, plasterers and labourers,” Hart says of a group that included the punk poet John Baine, better known as Attila the Stockbroker. A few days after news of the sale emerged, a fans’ meeting at Chapman’s pub in Worthing, now the Railway, drew 40 or 50 people from all walks of life, and it grew from there. A year later, 500 people who could not get inside listened on loudspeakers outside the Concorde nightclub when matters became really serious. In February 1997, thousands of supporters from clubs across the UK and Europe converged on the Goldstone Ground for Fans United day to show their solidarity.
Protest did not stay off the pitch. In April 1996, 600 spectators ran on to the Goldstone turf after a win against Carlisle, calling for Bellotti’s resignation, and some tore up seats in the directors’ box as attempts were made to storm the boardroom. Then came the meeting with York that has passed into Brighton folklore, when fans waited until the 16th minute to invade the pitch and the game was abandoned. “It was not a riot, it was a legitimate protest,” Hart says. He accuses the FA and the Football League of behaving “a bit like Neville Chamberlain at Munich, waving a piece of paper saying everything was going to be fine. They thought they could give us a load of bullshit and we would just take it.”
The Goldstone Ground was demolished a year later, after Brighton had come within 27 minutes of relegation from the Football League and were saved by Robbie Reinelt’s equaliser against Hereford. At one stage they had been 13 points adrift at the bottom of Division Three, now League Two. They finished 91st in the Football League again the following year, playing home games at Gillingham after Portsmouth reneged on their offer to groundshare.
“We lost a generation of fans, which we’ve got back now, but for years you used to be driving past parks in Worthing seeing football teams training on a Saturday morning with kits and no Brighton shirts. It was horrible,” Hart says. He coached at Worthing United from under-six to under-16 and banned anybody not wearing a Brighton or Worthing shirt.
Dick Knight became chair in 1997 through a supporter-led consortium and steadied the ship as the club moved back to the city, albeit at the Withdean, primarily an athletics stadium with a capacity of 8,850 that was Brighton’s home from 1999 to 2011. Tony Bloom’s arrival as chair in 2009 transformed the club’s trajectory: the move to the 22,500-capacity Amex Stadium followed two years later, the ground opening with a friendly against Tottenham, and promotion to the Premier League came in 2017. Brighton reached the last 16 of the Europa League in their first European campaign in 2024 and will compete in the Conference League this season.
Hart hopes a major trophy could complete the journey. “It would be brilliant and Tony did promise us a trophy at the 1983 [FA Cup final] reunion dinner a few years ago,” he says, recalling a drink with Bloom in Tromsø before the Conference League play-off in Norway last month. “As much as he promised us a trophy I don’t want to get weighed down by expectation. The great thing about the play is that there are highs and lows, but you can’t really celebrate the highs unless you have the lows. It makes the whole story even more incredible.”