Take a walk through the gallery space in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion and you encounter a vivid sense of the extraordinary creative energy behind the fight for the local football club’s survival, 30 years ago.
An exhibition called ‘Stand or Fall’ charts Brighton and Hove Albion’s 125-year history, and it is the early years of the three-decade metamorphosis from near extinction to one of the Premier League’s most outstanding clubs – third in the table and Champions League prospects, ahead of Sunday’s visit to Liverpool – which produces the greatest examples of innovation and imagination on display at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.
Campaign T-shirts became an art form back then and the 1997 ‘They Think it’s all Over’ classic takes pride of place, alongside back issues of the fearless satirical Gull’s Eye fanzine, heartbeat of the legions of great writing which highlighted the activities of the nefarious and detested owner, Bill Archer. And then there is wonderful photography of Stewart Weir, who chronicled it all.
That intelligence and attention to detail is the thread which binds the modern Brighton to what has gone before. Though a meticulous attention to detail by Tony Bloom’s mathematical wizards has seen the club invest so well and soar, it can be reasonably argued that the same relentless study of facts by a Brighton-supporting chartered accountant in the late 1990s still means more.
Paul Samrah was a partner at mid-tier accountancy firm Kingston Smith when the club’s mismanagement by Archer led him to investigate the club’s accounts, filed at Companies House. And to discover that Archer had quietly changed the club’s ‘articles of association’ to ensure that he – and not the local community – would be allocated any surplus cash if the club went bust.
‘It was pre-email, remember,’ Samrah tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘You would contact Companies House for information, receive a microfiche of documents and have to go to a library to print out the relevant pages and make sure you didn’t miss anything. I was acutely worried that while I’d found this change they’d put in place, maybe there was another set of documents.’
Fabian Hurzeler’s flying Brighton side are third in the Premier League – but it has been some journey by the club over the last 30 years to get there
Brighton-supporting accountant Paul Samrah (second right) was influential in exposing the mismanagement of the Seagulls’ former owner Bill Archer
But current owner Tony Bloom has been the driving force behind the club’s meteoric rise
He found out a lot more besides. Archer and his business partner, who had bought the club for £56.25 in 1993, had sold the Goldstone Ground to property developers for £7.4million without disclosing the fact and were raking in interest from the club on loans they’d made.
‘My professional reputation was on the line,’ Samrah says of these findings. ‘You’ve got to be very careful when you go around saying these things. I was thinking, “Here’s something really big. Now what do I do?”’
The answer was provided by a journalist with the intellectual curiosity to act on all this – the Brighton Argus’ chief reporter Paul Bracchi, now a Daily Mail journalist, who immediately saw the significance and persuaded his editors of it. ‘We didn’t have a team of lawyers,’ relates Bracchi. ‘As I recall, it was one external lawyer who we sometimes gave a call to, but our journalistic instincts told us that Paul had something.’
With its 100,000 circulation, the Argus’ story had an immense impact. In what would become a year’s work on the story, Bracchi turned up at Archer’s house in Lancashire and offered to buy his shareholding for the original £56.25.
Archer’s ally David Bellotti, Albion chief executive, banned the Argus and all its employees from the ground. Including Fred Oliver, an Argus seller who was over 80 years old and had been selling the newspaper at the Goldstone Ground for as long as anyone could remember.
The Gulls Eye fanzine, edited by Ian Hart, a local undertaker, came into play. It was Hart who doorstepped Bellotti at the ground after discovering that Archer had struck an agreement that Brighton would play home games in 1996-97 at the home of fierce local rivals Portsmouth.
‘I parked the hearse outside and went in and told Bellotti I had this from an impeccable source,’ Hart tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘You could see the colour draining from his face. The club tried to bring us inside the camp and eventually some of the directors sued us.’
Hart, whose book Brighton & Hove Albion: From Every Angle charts this extraordinary period, was in the High Court on the same day that Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, received libel damages from Private Eye. He, too, was ordered to pay damages for allegations published about the Brighton directors’ activities and then became a cause celebre.
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A fighting fund was set up to help pay the £6,000. But the momentum of the nascent fan campaign could not prevent the side’s slide to the jaws of relegation to non-League, knowing that defeat on a rock-hard, grassless surface at Hereford’s Edgar Street in May 1997 would end 77 years of Football League presence.
Thousands of Brighton fans will tell you that the 63rd-minute equaliser by Robbie Reinelt that day still means more to them than anything Pascal Gross might fashion at Anfield on Sunday.
‘Who knows where we would be now if we’d vanished from the Football League,’ says Hart. He, like many others, will swear until their dying day that Mark Ormerod, the Brighton goalkeeper, is among the most important figures in this 30-year resurrection story because of his save from Hereford’s Adrian Foster in the dying minutes. ‘Too many people forget him,’ Hart says.
Dick Knight certainly features extremely substantially, too. It was he who, having built a successful career in advertising, agreed to take over the club in 1997 after Archer was forced out.
Knight’s brilliant memoir, Mad Man, demonstrates how ousting Archer was just the beginning. The battle to be permitted to relocate to the Withdean athletics stadium in Brighton from Gillingham’s Priestfields, 70 miles away in north Kent, was a rehearsal for the longer campaign to develop the Amex Stadium at Falmer, on the edge of the South Downs.
By 2003, when Mark McGhee arrived as manager, almost every penny was being spent to fund the near £3million it cost simply to get through the series of planning inquiries required to get the club to Falmer.
‘We were doing talks, marching on the sea front, generally “making a scene”,’ McGhee tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘Every penny I was earning on players was going on the planning inquiries and money was going down the sinkhole, really. It was some cost. At that time, we were still scratching our heads about how we were actually going to build that stadium.’
Withdean – a 5,000-capacity ground with no cover on three of its sides – seemed bleak to outsiders. ‘But I weaponised the place,’ says McGhee. ‘We made it what we had to fight other people with. We made the best of it. We enjoyed beating Leeds and Wolves there. We were in portaloos but they were good portaloos!’
Mark Ormerod, the Brighton goalkeeper, is among the most important figures in this 30-year resurrection story, because of his save from Hereford’s Adrian Foster in the dying minutes of that 1997 match
Brighton fans celebrate their stay of execution at Edgar Street in 1997
Some of a Brighton persuasion will tell you that the most significant win down all these years was the shootout victory over Swindon Town in the second leg of the 2004 play-off semi-final, when McGhee’s side had been rescued by a last-gasp Adam Virgo equaliser in torrential rain.
It took them to a triumphant Millennium Stadium final appearance against Bristol City which was a stage to project the club’s Falmer stadium campaign to the world. ‘That was a springboard for us,’ says Samrah.
But McGhee says his greatest Brighton day of all was the win at Ipswich the following season which kept them up in the second tier. ‘In some ways, staying up with Brighton that season is the greatest achievement of my management career,’ he says.
Knight sold to Bloom in 2009 and remains a local legend. Nick Szczepanik, who helped him with his memoir, tells of walking down the street past a trench in which two workmen were labouring. ‘One of them recognised Dick and climbed out to shake his hand.’
It was by no means a linear path to the Premier League, of course. Szczepanik’s own excellent book, Brighton Up, vividly depicts the desolation of the play-off semi-final defeat by Sheffield Wednesday in 2016, and how Chris Hughton’s side finally reached the promised land.
It also relates how the devastating Shoreham air crash of August 2015, in which a jet from a local airshow exploded into a fireball and crashed, killing 11 people, bound club and community together. Among those killed were Matt Grimstone, an assistant groundsman at Brighton’s training ground and his friend Jacob Schilt, who had played in the same school team as Lewis Dunk.
Some of the details are heartbreaking. Albion staff picked up a video on the internet which seemed to show Grimstone’s car. Its number plate was matched with the one on the club’s system.
‘The club slogan at that time was #Together and what happened that day turned it into something with real meaning,’ says Szczepanik. ‘It had such resonance in the community.’
Brighton fans protest about needing a stadium of their own back in 2004
Some will tell you the most significant win down all these years was the shootout victory over Swindon Town in the second leg of the 2004 play-off semi-final when Chris Iwelumo scored
It was the following season that Brighton took the final step. Though the money now is unimaginable to all there through the foothills of the story, there is a significance to the fact that Bloom is a diehard Brighton fan, just like Knight, Samrah, Hart and all the others who have been a part of it. ‘There is still this shared journey that not all clubs have,’ says Samrah.
Thirty years ago this weekend, Brighton and Fulham supporters marched together in solidarity from Brighton Railway Station to the Goldstone Ground before kick-off in their fourth-tier game and only when the detested Bellotti had been forced to leave his seat did attention turn to what was a 0-0 draw, before around 8,000 people.
Though the club’s world has turned beyond belief, McGhee sees the golden thread between then and now. ‘There’s this appreciation of what difficulty and struggle means,’ he says.
‘We were always the underdog – it was something we tried to use in our favour – and I think they’ve tried to keep that. The mentality where, regardless of how many games they’ve won, they are still not the favourites. They try to take that out with them, just like we did.’
