Hurzeler ‘sacked in the morning’ if he is lucky as £300m Brighton spend sends them backwards | OneFootball

There has been a marked increase this season in the sheer number of Premier League managers whose own club’s home supporters want them to know they “don’t know what they’re doing” and will be out of work imminently, likely at the crack of dawn.

Brighton chief executive Paul Barber seemed to reference that in his programme notes ahead of what promised to be a deeply miserable experience for at least one of the fanbases involved at the Amex on Sunday.

The Seagulls and the Eagles of Crystal Palace have had their wings clipped this season. Both have been glancing nervously over their shoulders instead of looking up at and past the congested mid-table which barely masks the European qualification places.

Brighton had won one of their last 11, that coming at home to Burnley in their first game of January. Palace were on a run of nine without victory in the Premier League alone. The beaten team was always going to emerge in a heightened state of impotent fury; a draw would probably have summed things up most accurately.

But the nature of Brighton’s latest defeat, in which they conceded in the 61st minute and mustered their final shot in response in the 65th, piled pressure on the already unpopular Fabian Hurzeler.

“I think everyone can imagine how you would feel if 25,000 demand things and sing about you,” said the German as he rather unhealthily cast aside “my human feelings” to focus on his club.

The ‘growing fan impatience across large parts of the football landscape’ that Barber discussed before the game reached a level of toxicity rarely seen at Brighton, such has been their almost relentless upward motion in the last half-decade.

Three top-half finishes in the last four seasons – with 2023/24 the exception when they came 11th while juggling Europa League commitments – has raised expectations.

But so has a spend exceeding £300m during Hurzeler’s tenure, at a time the club’s rampant selling of stars to the elite for absurd profit has slowed drastically. The only players offloaded for more than £20m since the manager’s appointment in summer 2024 were Joao Pedro, and those on the fringes in Deniz Undav and Simon Adingra.

It makes captain Lewis Dunk’s history lesson – “if you look at this football club, we’ve been in worse positions as a football club” – ring particularly hollow.

Brighton almost going out of business 30 years ago and fighting relegation at the turn of the decade does not seem especially relevant to their current identity as an established Premier League force which should have been well-placed to capitalise on as open a season as this, instead of drifting so painfully and aimlessly from view.

That hard work in breaking into and embedding themselves in the fabric of the top flight to compete for trophies and European qualification is at significant risk of being wasted. Hurzeler is clearly a talented coach but the scale of this task is starting to feel beyond him.