FA Cup: How Brighton keep 'crashing through the ceiling'

It has been an impressive season so far for Brighton.

They are currently eighth in the Premier League, with games in hand on the two sides immediately above them.

If they remain where they are, it would represent the highest league finish in the club's history - bettering last season's ninth-place finish.

They go to Championship side Stoke in the FA Cup on Tuesday, knowing victory would secure a quarter-final berth for the third time in six seasons, more than in the previous 116 years combined.

It is a notable achievement for a club in only their 10th top-flight campaign, who came perilously close to going out of the Football League in 1997, spent two years after that playing home games 70 miles away in Gillingham and, until 2011, at an athletics track.

What makes it even more remarkable is Brighton's rise comes despite the loss of key staff, including manager Graham Potter and head of recruitment Paul Winstanley to Chelsea, plus technical director Dan Ashworth to Newcastle.

In addition, they have sold about £140m-worth of players, including defender Marc Cucurella to Chelsea in a £60m-plus deal in the summer.

Bringing Bloom's vision to life

Owner Tony Bloom is a pivotal figure. The 52-year-old has a lifelong association with Brighton, with his grandfather Harry the club's vice-chairman in the 1970s.

Bloom injected finance to allow Amex Stadium to be completed and, in the club's latest accounts to 30 June 2021, has provided interest-free loans amounting to £337m.

Beyond that, according to chief executive Paul Barber, he sets the tone for how the entire club operates.

"It is the chairman's vision," says Barber. "It is my job to organise the club, motivate the staff and bring that vision to life.

"Where we are now has come through a combination of planning, resilience and having a sense of where we want to get to and how we are going to get there.

"We try and plan for situations other clubs might get rocked by. The aim is to come out of the other side in at least as strong a position as we went into it and ideally better."

The approach has seen Brighton develop a reputation for being one of the top flight's most uncompromising negotiators.

When Chelsea came for Cucurella, Brighton had a valuation they refused to budge from. In the couple of days from that point to negotiations being concluded, club sources say extra millions were added to the eventual fee.

Even though Ecuador midfielder Moises Caicedo issued a statement saying he wanted to leave during last month's transfer window amid interest from Chelsea and Arsenal, Brighton let it be known they were not prepared to do business so close to the deadline.

Arsenal kept pushing but Brighton stood firm, telling Caicedo to stay away from training until the window had closed.

"The best clubs are really found out when their resilience is tested and when their plan doesn't quite go the way they expected," says Barber.

"At certain times, you have to show the ambition of your club is as important as the ambition of any other club.

"There are times when there is pressure from the agent, the player, the media, the other club, and fans of the other club try and put you in a corner.

"Sometimes the best way to deal with that is to remove some of the pressure by doing some things that people maybe think is strange at the time but made sense to us. We took the player out of the firing line, disarmed the agent and took the heat out of the situation."

Celebrating a World Cup winner's journey

Barber accepts there may be a different conversation around Caicedo's future at some point in the future. It is fair to assume the same also applies to World Cup winner Alexis Mac Allister and Kaoru Mitoma, the Japan star who has been one of the breakthrough stories of this season.

Yet Brighton have been here before. Cucurella, England defender Ben White, midfielder Yves Bissouma and, most recently, Leandro Trossard are all players who arrived at the club under the radar and were turned into accomplished Premier League performers before moving on.

Following Ashworth's exit, former Scotland and Rangers skipper David Weir is tasked with continuing Brighton's impressive recruitment.

"Very rarely do we buy Premier League-ready players," he said. "We try to buy and develop players who can become Premier League players. It is easy to say and really hard to do."

Weir accepts Brighton are not currently always regarded as a 'destination club', although the idea is to get to the point where they are.

However, the development around players like Mac Allister can only be an advantage in what is now a global recruitment market.

"People see Alexis winning the World Cup as a Brighton player but there were so many people involved in that journey, starting with his recruitment as a young player in Argentina, the loan to Boca Juniors, the challenges he had when he came into the building because he wasn't in the team initially, Graham's patience and using him in different ways and Roberto (de Zerbi) changing his position, giving him different ways of playing and different thoughts.

"For that to lead to him winning the World Cup felt like a really good story and the culmination of a lot of effort by a lot of people. Not all stories end like that but it was a special moment and something we should celebrate as a club and for him as an individual."

Crashing through the ceiling

Football is littered with stories of clubs who rise magically and fall down to earth just as quickly.

But there does seem to be a permanence about Brighton's forward momentum. Through their astute recruitment, they may also be able to start paying Bloom some of his money back.

As Barber says, there is still so much to aim for.

"It would be arrogant to think you had an answer in your back pocket for every situation," he said.

"If I am honest, there have been situations where you think 'wow, this is a new one'. We don't get everything right. We are human and have to remain humble in these good moments because it can quickly change in football.

"But for now, we want to progress as far as we can. Every time we reach what people think might be a ceiling, we crash through it.

"We have 120 years of history but have not won a major trophy, we haven't qualified for Europe, we haven't finished beyond ninth in the Premier League.

"There is still so much this club can do."

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