Brighton fans saved their club – that’s why they accept higher ticket prices ...Middle East

Before every home Brighton & Hove Albion game, you can find supporters flashing their match tickets on the buses and trains out to Falmer. The club have ensured all fans are given free travel on public transport to the ground, where they are watching their side push for another unlikely European charge.

Without its supporters, Brighton & Hove Albion would not still exist. That bond is the result of an extraordinary three-decade journey, one which makes the bad news a little easier to weather.

This week, the club announced major changes to its season-ticket programme – on average, prices are up five per cent, concessions have been raised from over-65s to over-66s, and their discount will be reduced by 25 per cent over the next three years.

In some areas of The Amex, under-10s will now have to pay the cost of an U18 ticket. Season-ticket holders will also not be automatically allowed to renew if they miss more than five games of the league campaign.

At first glance, this is nothing new. Fulham, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and West Ham are among those who have batted away “Stop Exploiting Loyalty” protests this season. But there is an important distinction to be found in the reaction.

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“No-one’s ever happy with a price increase but it’s very understandable,” says Paul Samrah, vice-chair of the Brighton & Hove Albion Supporters’ Club.

“There’s been a lot of investment at our club, we’ve had success on the pitch, there’s infrastructure improvements which have to be paid for and player purchases, so we can see where money is going. It’s been highlighted in advance. We’re seeing entertaining football. We have a very good relationship with the board, they are family members who have supported the club financially for generations.

“If you’re not seeing what you’re getting on the pitch, be it result wise, be it infrastructure, player purchases, then of course you’re bound to say, ‘well come on’. But we tick all those boxes. You can’t deny it’s got to be paid for and that’s the way the world is and inflation and cost of energy and the like, you have to be realistic in this world.”

Inevitably, that view will not be shared by all. One fan group described the move as cynically “taking more cash from our oldest and youngest supporters”.

The dynamics of all fanbases change over time – at Brighton, the average age of a season-ticket holder is increasing, largely because nearly all of them renew every year. And to fully understand why they do, you have to look back a little further.

On the final day of the 1996-97 season, the Seagulls were half an hour away from dropping out of the Football League. Robbie Reinelt’s equaliser at Hereford not only kept them up but offered renewed hope of a what might be possible if fans could work together to remove owners Bill Archer and Greg Stanley, who by then had sold off the old Goldstone Ground with no replacement.

Archer had rocked up with £56 to buy his stake in the club but arrived uttering hollow promises of investment. It transpired that the £800,000 given to avoid a winding-up order was in fact a loan which used the stadium as collateral. The board had even amended the club’s Articles of Association to remove a clause preventing shareholders from profiting if the ground were sold.

None of this could have been uncovered without Samrah, a chartered accountant by trade, who spent days trawling Companies House to find a trail of “mismanagement and misappropriation of money” and “a club on its dying legs”.

Attendances were so low and Brighton were so close to the foot of the pyramid that nobody had picked up on the financial irregularities mounting behind the scenes. They were nevertheless so stark that the club was required to submit fresh accounts. Every interview from the owners was picked apart for discrepancies – almost like a “crime case”.

With the bulldozers ready to move in, Brighton were to play their home matches at Gillingham, or as Samrah puts it, via “a two-hour drive, four motorways and a funeral… we had nothing, the asset base had gone, the fanbase was ebbing away and the cupboard was utterly bare”.

“We were under no illusions we needed serious money, there’s no good going round with buckets at games. We needed wealthy people and luckily Dick Knight [chairman of 1997-2009] was a fan for many, many years since he was a child. He was able to say ‘I’ve got the finances, I’ve got a consortium together – now we need to get rid of the board’.

“What we needed was a knight in shining armour. Dick Knight was that knight.”

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The next campaign was BHA – “Bring Home the Albion”, to the athletics stadium at Withdean. It was only ever going to be a temporary measure, with an initial 6,000 capacity and 8,500 even after a new stand was built.

The Amex has become not just a permanent home, but an ever-present symbol of where the modern Brighton & Hove Albion came from. Like everything else they have achieved, it did not come easily and would not have materialised at all without the people sat in those stands.

In the midst of a “torturous battle” over planning permission for the new ground, they found an unlikely saviour in John Prescott, then Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister. Prescott was the one man with the power to overrule the local planning committee who had blocked the stadium being built.

On the day Brighton played Hull, where his constituency lay, fans turned up to his office with flowers. A Valentine’s Day card followed: Roses are red, violets are blue, our new ground is all down to you.

“To this day, God rest his soul, he had this giant card in his kitchen, he absolutely loved it,” Samrah says.

“That was the tone of the campaign – humorous but serious, rather than aggressive and in your face – because we knew what John Prescott was capable of!”

In the build-up to the 2004 Division Two play-off final at the Millennium Stadium, postcards were sent to Prescott’s desk with a view of the plot that would become The Amex, reading “Wish we were here”. Once the game kicked off, fans wore paper masks bearing his face and held up the banner: “John Prescott fan club [provisional]”.

Even on a visit to Japan to discuss climate change, the MP recalled how he was quickly greeted by a fan in Kyoto, asking “what are you going to do about the Brighton ground?” He became thoroughly invested, visiting the site anonymously, without media or fanfare. Ultimately, he green-lit the project.

It is easier to see where Brighton are going once you see where they have been. On Christmas Eve, it was confirmed that owner Tony Bloom will pour another £40m into upgrading the stadium, including the development of a new fanzone for 2,000 supporters which will aim to replicate the atmosphere of Wembley’s BoxPark.

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Fans will still be able to pay for their season-tickets monthly rather than up front – with Brighton one of the first clubs to introduce that policy. There has been some consternation over the decision to track season-ticket holders’ attendance but sources told The i Paper the approach is expected to be “light touch” – genuine fans are unlikely to be stopped from renewing and the real focus is on reducing opportunities for touts.

All that helps to sugarcoat the pill. Whatever the outcome of Fabian Hurzeler’s debut season in the Premier League, Brighton fans have essentially achieved everything they wanted – in Knight and Bloom they have twice secured new owners with the interests of the club at heart.

“Certainly, what we achieved out of the depths of despair, we’ve been through it, there is that bond,” Samrah says. “But I suspect now the history isn’t being told as much as it should be to new supporters. The story is getting a bit diluted now as the years go by.

“For the modern fan it’s more about ‘gosh, this small club is battling against the odds and everyone’s in it together and we’re punching above our weight, in the top 10 and we’ve played in Europe’. That’s more the story – disappointingly, because I think people should remember their history.”

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