Brighton and Middlesbrough in £170m clash

Brighton make a point of finding out what the opposition fans like to eat. They even import the local beer.

“The more away fans there are, the better the home fans are,” says Paul Barber, the club’s chief executive. “Therefore when away fans come to Brighton we do little things; we light the concourses in their colours, we show their games on the television screens, not ours, we sell their merchandise, not ours.

“Looking after the away fans means they will respect our property and our staff and have a great day out.”

It should also all help to keep indecent chanting to a minimum but just in case those fans who have never before been to a town boasting a vibrant LGBT community are tempted to shout abuse about it, Brighton will write to all Premier League clubs to remind them that such taunts are illegal. “Brighton is a quirky city,” Barber says, but it might just have the best prepared club to have ever made their Premier League debut.

The club look, feel and smell like they belong in the top tier. The only thing wrong with their new training facility is that there is nothing wrong with it. The Premier League independent audit marked it down for not having a dirty pitch. In response, Brighton deliberately organise friendlies against Ryman League clubs so that their young players can find out what it is like to have their studs stuck in mud and to have their passes slowed down by puddles.

Chris Hughton’s team need to win today at the Riverside. A draw will not be enough because of Middlesbrough’s marginally better goal difference. It is a game billed as worth £170 million to the winner although the loser gets a second chance through the play-offs and it was at Wembley last year that Aitor Karanka’s side fell victim to the system that gives neutrals all the fun.

Barber breezily says that if Brighton cannot gain promotion this time they will brush themselves down and “go again”, but that would be like having a brand new Bugatti and keeping it in the garage for a year. The club have cherry-picked the best bits of the shiniest Premier League club training complexes and emerged with a building and pitches that are now, in turn, being used as a template for others. A delegation from Serie A concluded that the Brighton model was “the way forward”. Seville have used it as a training camp, as have Roy Hodgson’s England. The American Express Elite Football Performance Centre has a running hill, because some injuries heal quicker if the athlete jogs at a gradient; a giant, not too warm not too cold, indoor pitch; a control centre that allows the sprinklers to be turned on at the stadium when no one is there; and a climbing wall separating the academy dining room from that belonging to the first team just to underline the point about aspiration.

There is even a gate, hidden at the back of the complex, that leads to a small airfield that might just be extended to allow for a plane big enough to carry the Brighton players to and from their games in Manchester or Liverpool.

It is as if the elegant blue-tinted windows have to be extra shiny to compensate for all the bad times. Nineteen years ago the club lost their ground and came perilously close to losing league status altogether.

“That was the toughest time,” says Martin Perry, who joined the board in 1998. “We could have dropped out of the Football League and then it was the battle to rebuild the club from nothing. We were consigned to a groundshare with Gillingham. The lowest point for me was when we were busing supporters to Gillingham on 150-mile round trips and two of the buses ran into each other.”

There followed a long-winded saga to win planning permission for the new stadium funded by Tony Bloom, an internet entrepreneur, but there remained a need to woo back the supporters who had had enough of taking the day off work to attend a so-called home fixture.

“Brighton lost a whole generation of fans,” says Barber, and to make amends every child registered with the club receives, on their seventh birthday, not a card but a free replica shirt.

“For the sake of the cost of a shirt we’ve just created a lifelong fan,” Barber says. “We could spend millions on advertising and not get the same result.”

Barber feels the capacity of the Amex Stadium, 30,000, is just about perfect. “Bournemouth, they have done a fantastic job,” he says, “but almost as soon as they got up they were under pressure to expand the stadium.”

The loss of fans through the dark days, though, means that there will be no immediate need to expand Brighton’s capacity.

Every year the club throw an enormous Christmas party at the stadium with ice rinks and real reindeer. Even so, the community is biding its time before putting out the bunting. Yesterday schoolchildren were allowed to wear Brighton shirts to the classroom and local businesses encouraged staff to wear blue, but it was hard to find much physical evidence of Seagulls fever.

At King’s House, the council headquarters that overlook a row of prim beach huts, they are flying the club flag. Sam Smith, who works on regeneration projects there, is a season ticket-holder. “Not even 1 per cent of me wants a day at Wembley,” he says. “I want it all finished at Middlesbrough.”

Smith believes that promotion would boost the local economy enormously. “The Premier League has such an international following, it will make Brighton and Hove names that will be instantly recognised,” he says. “It would have massive impact on the economy of the city and really raise its profile.”

Promotion to the Premier League will provide a huge boost to the city of Brighton

BRENDON THORNE/GETTY IMAGES

Further along the promenade, Roberto Savvides, owner of the quaint Regency Restaurant, says a quiet Sunday in January was transformed when Brighton faced Arsenal in the FA Cup last year.

“Promotion would make a big difference to our city,” he said. “We had Arsenal here and the restaurants were busy so we know what the big teams do for business. We will hire more staff, especially in the winter months, if Brighton are promoted.”

Should Brighton win, there will be promotion bonuses for everyone involved, even the car- park attendants. The tone for all they do is set by Hughton, who was appointed manager in December 2014 but only after a seven-hour interview.

“We wanted to understand the man,” Barber says. “We took for granted he had a good record in management, that he was full of integrity, but we wanted to find out if he was the sort of person we could work with, our kind of guy.”

Hughton now has to navigate the complexity of safety-net soccer and says his team are “in a good place” mentally, but the former Norwich manager and his players know that the season ends this afternoon only if they win.

Three not always a magic number

More often than not, clubs that finish in the highest play-off qualification place (usually third) do not seal promotion that season...

Promoted that season in the play-offs: 11

Promoted one year later: 4

Promoted two years later: 2

Promoted three years later: 2

Promoted four years later: 2

Promoted six years later: 1

Promoted ten years later: 1

Promoted eleven years later: 1

(since play-off system was introduced in 1987)

The real value of promotion

By winning promotion to the Premier League either Middlesbrough or Brighton will enjoy a huge surge in revenue...

£170m Their increased revenue expected over the next three seasons made up of...

£95m the minimum amount awarded through central distribution of TV money and award for finishing position, plus...

£75m the guaranteed amount of money paid in parachute payments for 2017-18 and 2018-19 should they be relegated next season

£290m The prize for Middlesbrough or Brighton if they go up and survive their first season in the Premier League