They’re definitely a mixed and, in a lot of cases, confused bunch. There’s a core of old school fans who really had a poo time for many years and were loyal throughout. Losing their ground, playing miles away, the embarrassment that was Withdean on top of having years of rubbish football would test any fanbase. About 8 or 9,000 of them stuck it out, though, and deserve credit for that. Unfortunately, with that I think comes the dyed in the wool bitterness against a lot of clubs, and that stems from a victim complex that will take time to disappear. It’s often these people you will encounter on message boards.
But these people are now a minority. A sizeable chunk of the crowds who turn up at the AmEx now (or, bizarrely at Wembley last week) would have called themselves Liverpool/Man Utd/Arsenal fans much less than 10 years ago. There are also people who had zero interest in football 10 years ago who now have season tickets.
The slightly depressing thing from our point of view is that they’re going to maintain this. It’s fashionable to watch football here now. There’s a massive catchment area of people with money in their pockets and no real competition for miles around. Practically everyone in Sussex wants Brighton to succeed. No divided families, no businesses feeling they can’t support one club and not another. It makes a difference. They also happened to drop on lucky with a local business man with a brain, desire, money, a plan and some really good timing.
People are forgetting their old, tenuous allegiances to clubs playing in cities far away and stadia they’ve never visited and they’re buying into Brighton as a club. I don’t think this is going away any time soon. You could say they’re overdue sone good luck, but it’s still incredibly annoying being so far behind so many clubs like this.
Having grown up with a season ticket at Hillsborough through the late 80s and 90s, it seems ridiculous to be looking at the possibility of a 3rd year in the 3rd tier. Being surrounded by a growing number of Brighton fans whose football memories go back 6 or 7 years and either look at you with pity or laugh when they hear who you support is a constant punch in the nads.
The timing of our demise has been pretty terrible. It’s going to get harder and harder to catch clubs like this, particularly if we don’t scrape through the play offs this year.
Blimey I hope we get promoted.