The tidal wave of streaming landfill, football club reality series, part of the seemingly bottomless pit of sport industry content, means that cutting through is tougher than ever, especially for single-instalment films that can’t rely on surfing some sort of wave of tournament triumph nostalgia. Access isn’t enough; you really need a good story, and this account of the rise, fall and rise again of Brighton & Hove Albion – while “authorised” up the wazoo – has certainly got that.
Brighton’s top-flight exploits in the late 1970s and early 1980s may feel like ancient history – and are presented here as such – but their 1983 FA Cup final defeat by Manchester United marked the beginning of an extended spell in the wilderness, capped by the still-outrageous plan by the club’s board to sell the Goldstone Ground, Brighton’s home since 1902, to property developers without any concrete plan for a replacement. (Of the two executives cast as the bad guys, David Bellotti, former MP and the club’s CEO, is no longer with us but Bill Archer, DIY retail tycoon and then Brighton chair, is very much still around, so the film treads carefully where the latter is concerned.)
The format hits all the conventional beats, including testimony from fervent fans (both celebrity and normie), backroom staff, well-informed journalists, and nakedly hagiographic interviews with the two executives who stepped into the breach, Dick Knight and Tony Bloom. Some of the details are telling: if Brighton, then bottom of the lowest division, had lost their relegation fight in 1997, without a stadium they would have more than likely failed to be admitted to the non-league structure and therefore would have been forced to shut down – so in that final game against Hereford United the club really was fighting for its life. However, the team managed to eke out the draw they needed (sending Hereford down instead), and began the long, slow path to recovery.
It’s not explicitly stated here but there’s a case to be made that, ironically, the Goldstone disaster might have been the making of the club; the issue became a lightning rod for fan activism and dissent, generating sympathy across the game, sparking the team into life on the pitch and powering their march up the divisions. There certainly seems to be a lot of goodwill towards “the Albion”, as everyone calls them, with plenty of former players and managers happy to sit down and talk to the camera. Bloom in particular comes out of it well, his fannish enthusiasm buoying the fervent voiceover – though his steel comes out when he justifies giving the boot to popular manager Chris Hughton, whose yeoman service was rewarded with the sack in 2019, after getting the club to the Premier League’s promised land two years prior.
The film’s relentlessly celebratory tone – common to all productions of this type – in the end becomes bit of a handicap. While the club’s story is certainly an epic for the ages, the innate partisanship leads to moments of bad grace – particularly towards Gillingham, who bailed a desperate Brighton out with a two-year groundshare – and one or two of the fan comments are a bit … well … old school. I’d also have been interested in hearing a little more detail on Bloom’s spectacularly successful hiring practices; nearly all the club’s managers (with the unfortunate exception of Sami Hyypiä) turned out to be brilliant appointments. Be that as it may, there’s much to like here, a real grassroots success story that can cheer up even the grumpiest follower of the game.
• Stand or Fall: The Remarkable Rise of Brighton and Hove Albion is on digital platforms, DVD and Blu-ray from 8 September.
