Why Brighton were right to sack Chris Hughton

If you’ll forgive the immediate fence-sitting, every decision to sack a manager can only be judged in hindsight. It depends entirely on what comes next: identity of replacement, how the squad takes to him, how he settles in and how the club helps him to do so.

There is no such thing as a risk-free managerial change. The last person to use that phrase was Fulham owner Tony Khan in November about Claudio Ranieri. Ranieri is already out of work and Fulham are in the Championship.

People will make comparisons with Nigel Adkins at Southampton to defend Brighton, and Alan Curbishley at Charlton to attack them. But every club, and every manager, is different.

New era

What Brighton have done is attempted to take their club into a new era. They reason that Premier League clubs – even those in the bottom half – have never been more attractive to prospective managers and players. So they also reason that this a logical time to twist rather than stick. The money is there and, thanks to the immediacy of Hughton’s sacking, time is too.

If the argument that sticking was the safest option, Brighton’s recent form makes a weak case. They took 10 points from their last 17 league matches, fewer than every Premier League club bar Huddersfield, and ended the season with 36. Had this current dismal run come between August and December, Hughton would have been sacked with Brighton doomed and few would have argued against it.

There were also doubts within the club about Hughton’s football. Let’s leave the judgements of substance vs style for another time, but Brighton spent £80m last summer including the purchase of exciting young talent in Yves Bissouma, Bernardo and Alireza Jahanbakhsh. The accusation is that some of the attacking players have had their impact curbed by the safety-first approach, and the results didn’t justify the pragmatism. If the FA Cup run to the semi-final is a predictable retort, Brighton only beat one Premier League team in Bournemouth.

Hughton being sacked does not make him a failure. It doesn’t mean Brighton aren’t immensely grateful for his work. It doesn’t mean Hughton won’t succeed elsewhere. But nobody understands the minutiae of Brighton better than owner Tony Bloom, and he felt it right to make a change before the situation got worse. Given all Bloom has achieved, he at least deserves our patience and faith.