Albion Analytics: Can Albion better eighth this season?

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Good starts to the season are seemingly in Albion's blood. But can they do it again this campaign?

Liam Tharme

Albion Analytics

2025-08-15T06:00+01:00

Fabian Hurzeler is heading into his second season as Albion boss. 📷 by Paul Hazlewood.

Season nine in the Premier League kicks off for Brighton this weekend at home to Fulham.

Last campaign, their first under Fabian Hurzeler — the youngest permanent head coach in the competition’s history — was one of the club’s best.

An eighth-place finish on 61pts is second only to the 2022/23 campaign (when they finished sixth on 62pts), and it meant that Brighton were the third most-improved on 2023/24. They took 13 more points and ended up three places higher (Nottingham Forest, +33, and Brentford, +17) were the only sides to improve more.

Hurzeler can take particular confidence for how well his side ended the season, with previous seasons seeing a strong start before fading away. In 2024/25, though, Brighton took 34 points (10 wins, 4 draws and 5 defeats) from their final 19 matches — within that, there was a run of four-straight wins stretching across February and March, plus 12 points won out of a possible 15 from the final five matches of the term.

In fact, the chastising 7-0 defeat away to Nottingham Forest in February turned out to be a launchpad. From the next matchday until the end of the campaign, Brighton were top scorers (31 goals) and ranked third for points (27) behind Manchester City and Aston Villa, winning eight times and drawing on three occasions in the final 14 matchdays.

Since the end of last season, Albion have recruited across the pitch. Teenage Greek striker Charalampos Kostoulas arrives from Olympiacos after scoring at a rate of one-in-two; Tom Watson, a tenacious, 19-year-old creative midfielder, made his last kick of the ball at Sunderland being a play-off final-winning goal, and brings further depth in the attacking ranks.

Further down the pitch, the no-nonsense Diego Coppola and stylish Olivier Boscagli, joining from Hellas Verona and PSV Eindhoven, bolster the centre-back options; with the arrival of the technical Belgium international Maxim De Cuyper, who can play left-back, wing-back or No 6, Hurzeler has the flexibility to switch from his preferred 4-2-3-1 to the wing-back system that he previously had success with at St. Pauli.

Diego Coppola joined Albion from Hellas Verona this summer. 📷 by James Boardman.

“We've got to be ambitious, we've got to carry on aiming high, we've got another great squad of players,” c hairman Tony Bloom said on the Official Brighton & Hove Albion podcast this summer. “I believe in them, I absolutely believe in Fabian, and in the next five years we want to push on and do even better.”

The club are going some way to fulfil the long-term target of consistently being a top-half Premier League team, having finished eighth, 11th, sixth and ninth in the past four campaigns.

This season, Brighton will leapfrog Sheffield United on the Premier League all-time charts for games played. Meanwhile it speaks volumes about stability that Hurzeler’s side spent the entirety of last term in the top half, and you have to go back to the club’s debut season in 2017/18 to find the singular time they were in the relegation zone.

Part of that owes to the club starting seasons strongly in the top flight. Brighton actually spent matchday one last season as league leaders, after a 3-0 away win over Everton, and were unbeaten after seven Premier League matches of 2024/25 — they took 19 points from the first 11 matches.

Albion began last season with a 3-0 victory over Everton. 📷 by James Boardman.

In each of the four campaigns, Brighton have been victorious on matchday one, which is the longest run in club history, and the most current consecutive opening round wins of any Premier League side.

Opta rank Brighton’s first five games of the season (Fulham, home; Everton, away; Manchester City, home; Bournemouth, away; Tottenham, home) as the ninth-hardest of all teams, which is favourable enough for another positive start. Notably, they won all five of those fixtures in 2024/25, with impressive comeback wins at home to Tottenham and Manchester City.

If there is a primary area for Hurzeler to improve, he thinks it is game management. Albion dropped 22 points from winning positions last season — which they technically compensated for by recovering 23 points from behind (the joint-most with Liverpool), however these are notoriously more difficult ways of winning matches.