Is This the Best Brighton Have Ever Been?

Brighton have made the best start to a top-flight campaign in their history. Has their new manager, Fabian Hürzeler, made them even better than they were under Roberto De Zerbi?

It’s quite amazing how Brighton keep on doing it.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised anymore. Time and again they unearth gems on the pitch and consistently hire managers you hadn’t heard of but who can cut it in the Premier League.

In Fabian Hürzeler, the youngest permanent manager in Premier League history, Brighton appear to have done it again. They have found another manager who nobody else was after and who might just, like Graham Potter and Roberto De Zerbi before him, make Brighton even better than before.

Fifth in the table with 22 points from 12 games, Brighton have made the best start to a top-flight campaign in their history, three points better off than ever before at this stage of a season. They are only outside the top three on goal difference and are just a single point behind reigning champions Manchester City in second.

There is a long way to go before we start jumping to conclusions about Brighton’s Champions League credentials, but by the same stretch, Hürzeler has had to deal with some testing circumstances that make his record so far even more impressive than the raw numbers suggest.

There have been injuries to key players and a lot of them. Yankuba Minteh, who started life on the south coast so well, has sat out for the last month; João Pedro has only just returned from an ankle injury that kept him out for five games; Carlos Baleba missed a few games with a knee injury; centre-backs Lewis Dunk and Adam Webster are both currently absent while Jan Paul van Hecke missed a run of games last month; £25 million summer signing Matt O’Riley has barely played, and James Milner, Pervis Estupiñán and Ferdi Kadioglu have all spent not insignificant spells on the sidelines.

Other clubs might argue that injuries are just part of the game that every team has to deal with, while Hürzeler’s sceptics might even suggest that his high-intensity football has contributed. Learning a new way of playing and a demanding one at that could have caused some of the team’s injury problems.

In the Premier League this season, only Ipswich players have covered more ground than Brighton’s, who are averaging 111.9 km per match. Brighton players also rank fifth for sprints per game this season, with 152.2, having ranked 18th of 20 teams last season, with 123.1 sprints per game. That increase of 29.1 sprints per game – the biggest of all Premier League teams – is clearly having positive effects on the team’s results, but there’s also a chance it’s playing a part in their injury problems.

But one thing that others can’t claim to have had to deal with and is without doubt no fault of the new manager is the fixture list. Brighton have already played Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Newcastle away, as well as Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham at home.

We can use the Opta Power Rankings, a system that puts a value on the quality of thousands of teams around the world relative to one another, to work out the average difficulty of each Premier League side’s opponents so far this season.

It will come as no surprise based on the teams mentioned above that Brighton have had the hardest start of all Premier League teams to 2024-25, and yet they have only lost two games all season – at Stamford Bridge and Anfield. Wins over City, United, Spurs and Newcastle have meant the highs have been pretty consistent.

Jonathan Manuel / Data Analyst

However, Hürzeler insists his team’s start hasn’t shocked him.

“There’s no surprise or expectations,” he told Match of the Day this weekend. “There is [just] belief in the process, a belief in the potential the guys have.

“Working with them every day, you see the unbelievable work ethic, you see how they want to improve, how they support each other, how they stick together.”

They certainly had to stick together last time out at Bournemouth, when Baleba’s second yellow card left them playing the last third of the game with 10 men. They clung on to earn another important three points, as Bournemouth only managed to halve the deficit in second-half injury time.

The performance showed a resilience to this Brighton team which maybe hasn’t been a consistent feature under Hürzeler. They have conceded at least two goals in five different games this season, and have already dropped 10 points from winning positions. The most painful of those dropped points would have been the two they threw away after leading Wolves 2-0 at home with 88 minutes gone, only to end up drawing 2-2.

They also rank second in the Premier League this season for errors leading to opposition goals (five) and penalties conceded (two). Hürzeler will hope the impressive defensive performance against Bournemouth is a sign of things to come. They had only one shot after Kaoru Mitoma made it 2-0 in the 49th minute, but battled hard to earn the win.

Their main strengths under the German have been in attack. They have scored 21 goals in 12 Premier League games so far (remember they have played the most difficult set of games in the league), and they have shared out the attacking burden better than any other team. Brighton have more different goalscorers this season (11) than any other team in the Premier League.

The evergreen Danny Welbeck started 2024-25 in some of the best scoring form of his career, but João Pedro has looked like their most important player since his return from injury. In the last two games – the wins over City and Bournemouth – he became the first Brighton player to both score and assist in successive Premier League games.

Mitoma hasn’t been at his best but has still carried a real threat from the left, while Georginio Rutter has looked increasingly at home with more game time at his new club. Minteh, Simon Adingra and Evan Ferguson have also all chipped in with goals, providing further attacking options when they are available, and Matt O’Riley is slowly coming back from injury to add another capable option in midfield.

Confidence is clearly flowing throug the squad, with only Wolves (+7.0) having outperformed their expected goals to a greater degree this season than Brighton (+3.5).

Their work rate and intent without the ball has been another positive. They haven’t shied away from defending on the front foot against superior opponents, and despite playing plenty of opponents against whom other teams might choose to sit back, they still rank third in the Premier League for PPDA – the number of passes their opponents have for every defensive action Brighton make. Their 10.4 passes per defensive action leaves them behind only Tottenham (8.2) and Arsenal (9.1).

They also rank third for pressed sequences (13.4 per game), which is the number of opposition passing sequences starting in the opposition’s defensive third where they have three or fewer passes and the sequence ends in their own half.

When they do get the ball, they are quick to move it forward, averaging 14.8 metres of progress towards the opposition’s goal for each passing sequence – the third-highest rate of all Premier League teams.

This Brighton side are bold out of possession and brave and daring with it. They have taken on their new manager’s ideas quickly, and the results have been incredibly impressive.

Hürzeler is unsurprisingly refusing to get overexcited, though.

“It’s very important to stay grounded,” he said after the Bournemouth win. “We have a vision of where we want to go, but we can’t talk about expectation. It’s important to focus on the next game and the process.”

That is an understandable stance to take. Mixed results against lesser opponents this season prove that Brighton should be taking nothing for granted despite a kinder schedule coming up.

Having had such a difficult start to the season, they now have face three of the current bottom five inside their next four games, and only face one top-half team in their next six.

The catastrophe that was ending to the Wolves game and the goalless draw at home to Ipswich should act as cautionary tales for their upcoming run of games.

But that said, if ever there was a time for the fans to start dreaming, this is it. Keep going the way they are under Hürzeler, and this could well be the best Brighton team there has ever been.

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