Jimmy Cooper

🚨 Roberto De Zerbi on Brighton’s remarkable start to the season: “People see Brighton second in the table, scoring more goals than anyone, and they ask, ‘How do they keep doing this? They sell their best players every summer.’ I understand the question. I worked there. I asked it myself sometimes. When Alexis Mac Allister and Moisés Caicedo left, people outside the club looked at the money and thought Brighton had won the transfer window. But as a coach, you don’t look at the money. You look at your midfield and think, ‘Okay, who is going to play on Saturday?’ I remember conversations with the people at the club. You would ask about a player and they wouldn’t just give you a name. They knew his strengths, his weaknesses, what he needed to improve, how he would fit into the team. Sometimes they had been following him long before anybody was talking about selling the player he might replace. And that is the difference. At many clubs, the manager leaves and suddenly everybody wants to start again. New ideas, new players, new recruitment department, new project. Six months later, the manager is gone and they start another project. Brighton don’t do that. Of course, Graham Potter, myself and Fabian Hurzeler are different coaches. We don’t see every situation in exactly the same way. But Brighton know what kind of football they want. They don’t appoint a manager and then ask the entire club to become something else for him. They find someone who can build on what is already there. I used to tell people that at Brighton, you are not arriving to build a house on an empty piece of land. The foundations are there. Your job is to make the house better. And when you leave, they don’t knock it down. Look at them now. They lose players, people predict a difficult season, and then another young player comes into the team and plays like he has been there for five years. You think, ‘Where did they find this one?’ And before you have learned his name, somebody is already discussing how much a bigger club will pay for him. But the beautiful thing is that Brighton supporters can enjoy these players without feeling that the whole club will disappear when one of them leaves. You can buy a very good footballer. You can even buy eleven. What is much harder to buy is a club where the scouting, the coaching, the recruitment and the football all make sense together. Brighton have built that. And I think some much bigger clubs should stop asking which Brighton player they can sign next, and start asking why Brighton keep producing teams they want to take players from.”