Everything, everywhere, all at once: Brighton 24/25

It was Solly March’s second goal that nearly sent the table flying.

Jürgen Klopp’s 22/23 Liverpool team may not have had the right cork in it to make it his finest vintage, but it was still Liverpool, and it was still a big performance.

My mind, like yours dear reader, was racing through all the smug Liverpool half-fans that I was going to text, but only after the final whistle.

You know the type. The ones that you only hear from once a year, when they beat us. The Londoner diehards that are stuck in a weird late 80s time warp. The international guy from the office who has no connection to anything but watching the Premier League on Peacock and doesn’t really remember ‘Stevie G’.

Maybe I would even text my friend Laura, wife of an Albion fan, who loves to take glee in Brighton losses. She would definitely be getting a gloating whatsapp, or a meme of Klopp being pushed off the pier or something.

Alas, I chickened out of this particular exchange.

And then I remembered that the table nearly went flying. This was not a table that should have gotten air.

I was in a restaurant in Zagreb, dining with the establishment owner, who took great pride in the presentation and clientele.

Normally I’d never have a dodgy stream on a phone in the middle of a business meeting, but this time it was permitted and encouraged, because the proprietor of this particular establishment was none other than the 90’s AC Milan and Croatian legend Zvonimir Boban.

We had spent quite a few months making a film together on his role in the break-up of Yugoslavia, and he’d invited us over for a catch up about it, and to talk about the future and what we could do together.

As the then number two at UEFA, and the guy with a massive statue outside Zagreb’s Maksimir stadium, it was not an invitation to turn down. That, plus anyone who had grown up in the nineties would have him down as one of the greatest ever players in Serie A.

The football that we were playing at the time was peak de Zerbi, and it went on to form most of the rest of the dinner conversation. Boban had mentored de Zerbi as a player at Milan, and considered him to be an incredibly close friend.

You could see them reuniting there one day, if the club ever forgive Boban for leaving in a storm of chaos after criticising the owners – something he has good form in, as he proved with UEFA’s Aleksander Čeferin a year later.

We discussed the aura of Roberto. I, of course, could see no wrong with our new mortal, touchable deity. Zvone listened intently, as I attempted to explain the tactics (he obviously already knew, because he’s a tactical genius).

After a bit of hamfisted confidence on my part, he kindly stopped me, pulling the salt and pepper pots over to his side of the table, along with the remainder of the wine glasses.

He outlined the intricate shapes I had attempted to describe, and then placed a guy in the middle of them all. “See this guy here?”, I nodded. “One quality ball to him, one pass over the top, down the side, or just direct and fast, and you beat all of that”.

My retort of “yes, but that would have happened already” was swiped away. “It takes time to work out his patterns of play, but once a good team or a good player works it out, it will happen every time.”.

Zvone’s point wasn’t to take down his dear friend. It was being made because he hadn’t seen an alternative from de Zerbi. In his time at Sassuolo, he had genuinely revolutionised Serie A and how exciting it was, but he hadn’t adapted.

And 12 months on from that meal in Zagreb, it was happening every week, even against shit teams.

What that encounter did was get me thinking about narratives, and how we think of them. At that time, RDZ and Brighton could do no wrong.

Sure, we struggled at the end of the season, but that was just injuries and tiredness (for most). I wasn’t so sure, particularly after having stayed up for 24 hours to watch us get dicked 5-1 by Everton from a bar in Seoul.

But it didn’t really matter… Brighton were in Europe, and De Zerbi could do no wrong.

The good news vibes continued well into our Europa campaign, but any sensible analysis of our domestic season reveals another story. 41% (5/12) of our Premier League victories had come by matchday six, with only four in 2024.

The press only really started to take notice on a wider scale after our 4-0 tanking away at Roma, a game which we had performed well enough in, but fell 2-0 down from… direct balls over the top or down the side.

The point of this article is not for me to conveniently slag off de Zerbi now he’s gone. He was a mercurial force, and had great passion and charm – and is our most successful manager – but it is to highlight the convenience of narrative in football discourse.

It has always been fairly essential, but in today’s world of everybody having an online presence, needing to be in the know, witty or at the very least needing to be seen as an AI Nostrodamous, it is now really fucking essential.

We’re on the eve of a new season. The time when the experts – who make their living out of blowing hot smoke out of their arse – are starting to remember that RDZ has gone, that we sold players last summer, and now Gross (who we all agree is a major loss) is gone too.

How will we cope as a team with these continued departures? Don’t you remember the fable of Southampton, who sold it all to Liverpool and then went down about five years later? How can you get over losing someone as enigmatic as Roberto and replace him with a 31 YEAR OLD MANCHILD?

It’s that narrative again, coming out of the woodwork. But there’s an alternate narrative which is fairly little spoken of.

At the time of writing we are possibly having our best ever summer transfer window. We seem to have solved our achilles heel of last season by buying all the wide players, we’ve bought or bid for half of Eredivisie, and the age of the manager doesn’t seem to bother James Milner, who is so old that he and I might have crossed paths at secondary school.

Hurzeler is so new to all of this that it’s kind of impossible to discuss what we can really predict from him, whether he can be pragmatic or not. Potentially it could be the greatest masterstroke of them all from Bloom, Barber and the leadership team.

There is a world where it takes Premier League managers more time to second guess him than it took for them to work out Roberto’s tactics (as Zvone had done sitting in his restaurant in Zagreb). Brighton, after all, played like his Donetsk and Sassuolo teams.

Hurzeler’s so young, and so new, that there’s not much scope for anyone to study his previous.

It will certainly take the increasingly bloated world of pundits and influencers time to realise that the players who are making headlines in our first team are just the tip of the great business we have done this summer.

That version – superb recruitment designed to support an exciting new manager who’s not wedded to a single tactical approach – would be my preferred narrative going into this new era.

The cuttlefish risotto nor my large glass of Croatian red were harmed in the making of this story, and were a snip at €15.