Future is Bright for Seagulls fans and all supporters who dream of mission implausible
BACK in 2005, I covered a protest march along the Brighton seafront with 4,000 angry Seagulls fans.
For the previous two years, they’d had to watch their team from a converted athletics track, with little roofing, because they couldn’t get approval for a new stadium.
And they were letting the Labour government know at its annual conference that if they really believed their spin about the People’s Game, they should end the four-year public inquiry and let them build their new home, or, in the words written on one placard, “we’re history”.
A sentiment summed up by DJ Norman Cook, who told me: “Unless we get a new ground, this football team won’t survive.”
The fans were desperate back then. After the Goldstone Ground was sold in 1997, Brighton had been forced to play 70 miles away in Gillingham for two years before moving to Withdean athletics track.
With the cost of the public enquiry and gates down to 6,500, the club was approaching £10million in debt.
How apt they were sponsored by Skint Records.
Events on the pitch weren’t much better and they ended the season rock bottom of the Championship and were relegated to the third tier.
As one marching fan told me: “The next generation of kids round here will grow up supporting Man United, Arsenal or Liverpool. That’s heartbreaking.”
But what a difference 16 years makes. Approval was eventually given to the new stadium and Brighton now play before crowds of 31,800.
This week, I was back for a Labour conference and on Monday night went on a different kind of march to gauge the mood of Seagulls fans.
Around pubs that were showing their visit to Crystal Palace, where a win would have taken them top of the Premier League.
It wasn’t looking good as Palace played them off the pitch.
I left The Font pub four minutes into injury time and was halfway down Union Street when cheering broke out from a number of directions. Neil Maupay’s 95thminute equaliser had sparked wild celebrations in the pubs of Brighton.
They may have missed out on being in pole position in the top flight for the first time in their 120-year history, but sitting a point off it, in joint second, with Chelsea and the Manchester clubs felt like a big statement. The transformation from the 2005 doldrums was complete.
It came three days after Liverpool were stopped from opening a threepoint gap at the top due to a 3-3 thriller at Brentford, a place that not long ago was disparagingly referred to as a bus stop in Hounslow.
Another example of why the planned European Super League, which would have killed domestic football, was so despised, even by fans of the clubs who were promised a guaranteed seat at football’s top table. Back in April, England’s so-called Big Six spoke of “preserving the traditional domestic match calendar which remains at the heart of the club game”.
But the heart would have been ripped out of it. Brighton’s rebirth and Brentford’s rise to the pinnacle of English football, even if only for a brief time, is what the heart of the game is all about.
Had the ESL gone ahead, they would have been outside the closed shop for good, killing romanticism at the highest level.
I asked a Seagulls fan on Monday if he thought they could win the league. He laughed, then said, “Well, hang on, everyone laughed at the thought of Leicester winning it, so why not us? It’s not implausible.”
It’s not implausible. Three words that sum up the beauty of football’s glorious uncertainty.
Implausibility was what the country’s biggest clubs were trying to kill in the name of greed.
As Brighton and Brentford are showing, it would have been criminal if they had got away with it.