A League One winner with Albion, Elliott Bennett has revealed how joining the club was ‘the best decision’ he has made in his career.
Speaking on the Football, Albion and Me podcast with Richard Newman, the now Blackburn Rovers man reflects on how conversations with former Brighton legend Terry Connor and chairman Tony Bloom convinced him to move from Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2009.
He said, “Terry Connor is probably the one person that tipped it for me to come to Brighton. I am from Telford, 20 minutes away from Wolverhampton, I am a Wolves boy who had never left home, very much a home person.
“I still had two years on my contract at Wolves, so to be told ‘we’ve accepted a bid from Brighton’, you can’t really get much further away from where I live now. It’s not that I didn’t want to join Brighton, I just thought I was going to play at Wolves and maybe go on loan at some point.
“I remember Terry pulling me into his office and saying ‘look I went to Brighton in a similar position to yourself, you’ve got to go out and forge your own career. Become a man, become a person, don’t be Elliott Bennett from the academy at Wolves. You’re Elliott Bennett the professional footballer, create your own path.’
“And from that conversation I thought ‘you have to take the shackles off and go and try something different’ and you can’t really get a much better place to live than Brighton as I later found out. It turned out to be the best decision I have made since I started playing.
“The week before I signed, I actually went to the Huddersfield away game, where Brighton got beat 7-1! I was a guest of Tony Bloom, I had a good chat with him before the game and he told me the vision.
“After I had the chat with him I made my mind up [to join] even before the game. What a bad that decision would have been to turn Brighton down off the back of one bad result! He told me where he wanted to take the club. I was blown away to be honest. I couldn’t wait to get started.”
Now 31, Bennett speaks highly of the dressing room he encountered when he joined the club. He would help Albion win promotion to the Championship and was named in the PFA League One Team of the Year.
“There were some really good characters in that dressing room – Jimmy McNulty, Gary Dicker, Alan Navarro and James Tunnicliffe, who is my best mate now,” Bennett added. “A really good dressing room to walk in to as a 19, 20-year-old that had never left Wolverhampton.”
To listen to the interview and other podcasts with Albion legends including Peter Ward, click here.