Brighton & Hove Albion are celebrating their 125th anniversary around the visit of Arsenal, a milestone that invites a club with an unusually dramatic story to look back at where it has come from — and at how close it came to not existing at all.
Formed in 1901, Brighton spent almost two decades as a Southern League club before being voted into the Football League. They had experienced only seven seasons in Division Two when they were promoted to the top flight for the first time in 1979.
For years, though, the club’s identity outside Sussex was bound up with a single radio moment. In the 1983 FA Cup final, late in extra time, Gordon Smith was clear on goal with the chance to win Brighton their first major trophy. Peter Jones, commentating for BBC radio, delivered the line “And Smith must score…” — but Manchester United goalkeeper Gary Bailey saved the shot, and United went on to win the replay.
The modern crisis arrived in 1995, when chairman Bill Archer sold the Goldstone Ground, Brighton’s home since 1902, because of escalating debts there was no obvious way of paying. Fans were not consulted, and no alternative stadium was put in place. Brighton did not leave until 1997, and their final season at the Goldstone was confirmed by the property company who owned the stadium only after the final game of the 1995-96 campaign — a match that had to be abandoned as thousands of furious supporters spilled on to the pitch to demonstrate against the ownership. Both crossbars were snapped amid the tumult.
Two seasons followed playing 70 miles away at Gillingham, while the idea of a new stadium in the Toad’s Hole Valley area of Brighton proved a non-starter. The club returned to the city in 1999 and began playing at Withdean Stadium — most famous as the home athletics track of Olympic middle-distance gold medallist Steve Ovett — where the capacity was only 6,000.
For Paul Samrah, asked for his single most memorable moment as a Brighton fan, the answer is not a match at all. It is August 2007, and the moment he heard the club had actually got planning permission and that their objectors had decided not to continue their efforts to stop the stadium. “After the years of campaigning, the days and nights I spent fighting for regime change and then for the stadium,” he explained, “we’d won our battle.”
Samrah’s description of the years before that is blunt. “After the 1983 FA Cup final, players were sold, there was no investment, the Goldstone was decaying and the crowds were dipping,” he said. “There was no communication between board and fans, directors came and went. There was no continuity, no leadership, no direction. We were just rudderless.”
A handful of figures stand out in the survival story. Former Football Association executive director David Davies got involved. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott overturned a rejected planning application for Brighton’s current stadium in Falmer. And former chairman Dick Knight stabilised a club that in 1997 came within 27 minutes of being relegated out of the Football League. Without that trio, and many more, it is quite possible Brighton would not exist.
The contrast with the present is stark. On 9 November 2023, before a Europa League tie with Ajax at the Amsterdam Arena, manager Roberto De Zerbi told his players there were 3,000 Brighton fans in the stadium that night — and more than twice that number in the city who had travelled over. A long-standing senior Brighton official, in the dressing room that day, recalled the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. “The royalty of European football,” he said of Ajax. “From where we’ve come from, to be in that environment. It was a pinch-me moment.” Brighton won 2-0, the high point of the first European campaign in the club’s history, with more than 7,000 of their supporters in Amsterdam — a number greater than the entire capacity of the Withdean when they moved in there.
The contemporary Brighton exist the way they do largely because of the vision and investment of Tony Bloom. Born in Brighton and a lifelong fan, his connection to the club runs through his grandfather Harry, a former vice-chairman, and his uncle Ray, a director. Bloom, 56, is an entrepreneur who made his money in finance and gambling, largely through the use of data. He became chairman in 2009 and masterminded the rise from League One and the move into the American Express Stadium. Last season, Brighton’s average attendance was more than 31,000.
Sporting director Mike Cave sees a club transformed. “Anyone walking into Brighton today compared to even 15 years ago would not think it was the same football club,” he told BBC Sport. “The club has been on an unbelievable journey. We’ve got staff members and many fans who have done that journey. For those of us who weren’t here 15 years ago, our responsibility is to ensure what’s to come — and I think there’s lots — is better than what’s happened in the recent or long-distance past.”
In his programme notes for the Arsenal game, Bloom reflected on the anniversary in personal terms. “Since 1901, this football club has been part of the fabric of our city and the broader county of Sussex,” he wrote. “It has connected generations of families and communities. Grandparents have brought their children and grandchildren to matches. Lifelong friendships have been forged on terraces, in stands and on away trips. Through good times and bad, Brighton & Hove Albion has provided so many of us with some of the most memorable moments of our lives.”
He also pointed directly at the supporters who carried the club through its darkest period, recalling the loss of the Goldstone, the long journeys to Gillingham and the challenges of the Withdean era. “What got this football club through was the determination of its fans. The bucket collections. The protests. The refusal to accept the Albion should disappear,” he wrote. “This anniversary belongs as much to those supporters as anyone. Quite simply, without them, we would not be here today.”
On the pitch, the modern version is prospering. Brighton beat Manchester United at Old Trafford for the fifth time in six visits, sat fifth four games into their 10th consecutive Premier League campaign, and began their second European campaign in the Norwegian city of Tromso last month, knowing the Conference League offers the chance of that elusive first trophy. Their recruitment model, buying players in and selling them on for vast profits, is envied.
For a club that played in front of a 6,000-capacity crowd at an athletics track and once came within 27 minutes of dropping out of the Football League altogether, the picture is unrecognisable. In their 125-year history, Brighton have never had it so good.