Goal seeking
Goal seeking
Brighton's unique path towards the top of European football
Welcome to the ninth edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
Brighton lost their men’s FA Cup semi-final to Manchester United on penalties on Sunday — but they remain a football club on a clear upward trajectory. Much has been written about the robustness of the off-field processes they’ve put in place under current owner Tony Bloom: The Athletic, The New York Times and The Telegraph have all covered the club in detail this season. Below is a brief note on the on-field outcomes that have followed — and what might come next.
Brighton's unique path towards the top of European football
In the last edition of Plot the Ball, we used a football management simulation game to try and get to grips with an aspect of attacking strategy in ice hockey.
This week, we’re using a player rating system from chess to understand relative team strength at the top of European football.
Mercifully, use of the Elo system to determine the quality of competitors is already a well established1 method in the analysis of other two-sided games.
One of the most useful public models of this nature is maintained at ClubElo.com: it takes results in competitive matches in European men’s club football, and uses them to rank teams.
The ClubElo website also allows you to look back over long periods to examine interesting trends. And — of the clubs currently rated in its ‘Top 25’, one has followed a recent path that is markedly different to the others.
As noted at the top, the effectiveness of Brighton’s current football operations department has been well documented2. But the Premier League club is only receiving so much attention because of the high level of their on-field performance.
Brighton are likely to record their highest ever3 Premier League finish in 2022-23, according to FiveThirtyEight.
This projection is particularly remarkable because they only reached the second tier of English football in 2011.
Another way to appreciate this is to look at the trajectory of the Elo rating of each of the clubs in ClubElo’s European Top 25 since that point in time. After some early missteps, Brighton’s climb towards the continent’s elite has been steadily upward; in almost every other case4, the teams at the top have remained the teams at the top.
Part of the story here — since their promotion to the top tier in 2017 — is the club’s ability to ride the wave of English football’s financial dominance over the rest of the continent in order to acquire better playing talent and improve their performance levels.
But they’re really the only Premier League club to have put the processes in place to do this continuously.
Nonetheless, the next step — becoming what we might call a ‘top, top side’ — will be a difficult one, and their current financial standing likely imposes a ceiling on their on-field performance.
However — as Michael Caley and Mike Goodman noted in an excellent recent episode of their podcast, The Double Pivot — one way in which they could immediately improve their financial position is by qualifying for next season’s Champions League5.
According to FiveThirtyEight, they currently have a 17% (or 1 in 6) chance of finishing in the top four of the Premier League this season — effectively requiring either Manchester United6 or Newcastle to forfeit their significant current advantage in the standings.
Victory over United at the weekend — and a trip back to Wembley in pursuit of major silverware — would undoubtedly have been cherished by Brighton and its fans. But if the club is to continue on its upward climb towards the pinnacle of European football, beating them to fourth place in the league would be the much more valuable prize.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to read each of the pieces I linked above by The Athletic, The New York Times and The Telegraph.
Their current record is the 9th-place finish achieved last year.
With the exception of RB Leipzig — who came onto ClubElo’s radar in 2014 with promotion into the 2. Bundesliga, and represent a very different model for progress in modern professional football.