Brighton bow only to Arsenal in terms of clear identity and ambition | OneFootball

Doesn’t generally pay to get too giddy too early in the football season. Early-campaign overexcitement is a real and deadly disease. You only have to go back a year to find Spurs feeling pretty good about themselves.

So yes, care and a bit of ‘Too early to tell for sure’ circumspection are no bad thing. But what is football if not a game for dreamers? What’s the point of it all if we spend the whole time bogged down by realism and playing down expectations? At the end of the day, save that sh*t for the real world football is supposed to offer an escape from.

And in that spirit we ask the question: what, exactly, is the limit of Brighton’s ambitions this season?

We’re really not sure there should actually be one. At the very, very least, this should be a season that goes down as the greatest in the club’s history. Because winning the Europa Conference League and with it a first major piece of silverware secures that achievement.

But it’s also the thing that makes everything feel so exciting right now. Because that’s now the baseline for this being a good Brighton season. They absolutely should follow West Ham, Chelsea and Crystal Palace in winning that trophy and giving the club and the city a moment the like of which they’ve never had before.

That’s an incredible thing to consider as the starting point of what the season might bring. Because right now Brighton sit fifth in the league having already played two of the vanishingly few teams who also look like they might actually be any good this year in Chelsea and Leeds.

Brighton lost a seven-goal humdinger to Chelsea and played out a high-quality draw with Leeds that will have left both teams feeling righteously optimistic about the year ahead.

They’ve also had a couple of games against ropey teams, and they’ve been fantastic. A moribund, shoulder-chip-addled Aston Villa were thumped 4-0. The Seagulls then went one better against a Coventry side who had lost – unluckily – by only a single goal at Manchester City the weekend before.

There was also another 4-0 win over Tromso in the Conference qualifiers that doesn’t mean much on its own, but when it forms part of a formline that gives Brighton a third victory by a 4-0 or 5-0 scoreline by mid-September it does rather catch the eye.

The Conference is the obvious place that magic could happen for a club that has no trophies and has just had to watch Crystal Palace win two in successive seasons. But it is far from the only possibility.

This is a Premier League season – and by extension domestic season in general – rich with possibility for a club that has long stood out for the smartness of its operation but never more so than right now.

The 26/27 season is, frankly, a batsh*t one at the top of English football. Over half of the current Premier League clubs have changed their manager this year. Of those clubs, more than one are now already seriously considering a further change. Four of the current top five in the Sack Race betting were appointed this year and the odd man out is Frank Lampard, who only made it back into the Premier League this year.

Among the vanishingly small group of what we could term established Premier League managers, Unai Emery and David Moyes (18 months in one job definitely counts right now) are in the top eight of that same Sack Race betting.

The only manager who’s been around their current Premier League job longer than Fabian Hurzeler and considered more secure is Mikel Arteta.

That’s the level of the advantage Brighton have over everyone else this season. They also had a Brighton Max summer. There were the usual bargain signings and big-money sales, but also serious cash splashed on the most promising younglings – most notably Luka Vuskovic – but also established talent from Our League like Pascal Struijk.

The reality of this season is that there were very few teams who came into it knowing exactly what they planned to do, and even fewer who are actually doing it.

Outside the literal champions of England, nobody fits such a description more perfectly than Brighton. For now they find themselves in what will almost certainly be a Champions League-securing position in the league table.

There is absolutely no good reason why staying there is an unreasonable stretch target for a club on the cusp of something huge.