Brighton v Arsenal: History and head-to-head of Seagulls v Gunners

Seven wins in 37 games makes for pretty grim reading ahead of Brighton v Arsenal but it doesn’t really come as a surprise given that the Gunners have spent most of their history being good and the Albion, well, haven’t.

Dig a little deeper however and you will also see that the Albion actually have a surprisingly good league record against the Gunners. There have been 18 top flight meetings in the history of Brighton v Arsenal and the Seagulls have now won six of those to Arsenal’s eight.

That first Albion win came at the Goldstone in April 1982, a 2-1 success delivered thanks to goals from Andy Ritchie and Michael Robinson. Fast forward five months to September and there was another Brighton win in Hove as Gerry Ryan scored the only goal of the game.

Chris Hughton’s Brighton added another nail into Arsene Wenger’s coffin in March 2018 when goals from Lewis Dunk and Glenn Murray secured a 2-1 win at the Amex – the Albion’s first win over one of the ‘big six’ since returning to the top flight in 2017.

It is not just Wenger’s time in office that the Albion helped to shorten either. The 1-1 draw that Hughton’s side earned at the Emirates in May 2019 ensured that Arsenal could not qualify for the Champions League at the end of the 2018-19 season; had they made the top four that year, then Unai Emery may not have found himself losing his job six months later, just before the Albion went to Arsenal again in December 2019.

Freddie Ljunberg took temporary charge following Emery’s departure. His chances of getting the job on a permanent basis suffered a fatal blow however when Brighton beat Arsenal 2-1 at the Emirates, a night that has quite rightly become one of the most famous in Albion history as our first win away at a ‘big six’ club.

Mikel Arteta was safely installed in the job by the time the clubs next met at the Amex in June 2020. It was the first Albion game post-coronavirus lockdown and although Nicolas Pepe gave the Gunners the lead, it was Brighton who again came out on top after Lewis Dunk equalised and Neal Maupay scored a 95th minute winner.

The final whistle was greeted by some wonderful handbags, including Arsenal’s Sideshow Bob look-a-like Mattéo Guendouzi throttling Maupay in the after match melee.

Maupay then gave the ultimate wind up interview, saying that Arsenal needed to learn some humility. It later transpired that Guendouzi had spent the game telling the Brighton players how he earned much more money and would win many more trophies than those in blue and white.

This has not come to pass. Arteta was so appalled by the behaviour of the French midfielder that Gunedouzi never played for the Gunners again.

Those fun and games led Arsenal fans to have a real problem with Maupay, a hatred so deep that you could even argue it bordered on a rivalry between the clubs.

Maupay had been consigned to the bench with his Brighton career coming to the close when the Albion picked up their most impressive win over Arsenal to date.

The Gunners were charging into the Champions League spots in April 2022 whereas Graham Potter’s Brighton had no win in seven, a run which included six consecutive defeats and only one goal scored.

To try and get out of the rut, Potter gave a Premier League debut to Moises Caicedo and switched to a unique 3-3-3-1 formation.

Arsenal had no answer to it and goals from Leandro Trossard and Enock Mwepu gave Brighton a 2-1 win. Victory at Arsenal kick started a sequence of 10 wins, two draws and two defeats from the next 14 matches which effectively earned Potter the Chelsea job – turning him from a bloke who could have become the greatest Brighton manager in history to someone now immensely disliked by Seagulls supporters.

How times change as before 2017, the Albion could barely lay a glove on their illustrious opponents. Brighton’s first ever game in the old Division One was against the Gunners in 1979 and it was quite an eye opening experience as to what we could expect now we were mixing with the biggest names in the country.

Arsenal ran out comfortable 4-0 winners with three of their goals coming in the first half. The fourth was scored by future Albion boss Liam Brady.

Bizarrely, Brighton have played more games in their history against Arsenal at White Hart Lane – six visits in wartime football – than they have at either Highbury or the Emirates.

Highbury was requisitioned as a first aid post and air-raid patrol centre during World War II, which led the Gunners to move in with arch rivals Tottenham Hotspur.

Nobody thought to tell centre half Peter Trainor this though. On February 22nd 1941, he turned up to the second leg of our War Cup first round tie with Arsenal at Highbury, completely unaware of the situation.

Fortunately, the Albion had a spare player with them – Jack Westby – and so they were able to field a full 11 in what turned out to be a 3-1 defeat.

If that was a comical story from war time football, then there was a far more heroic one when it came to Stan Morgan. Morgan was a member of the 11th Battalion Royal Fusiliers and in February 1942, he played a part in a raid on Bruneval on the Normandy Coast.

Morgan and his fellow soldiers manned machine guns on a landing craft which retrieved a force of parachutists who successfully captured German radar technology. It had a significant effect on the war effort.

Less than a month later, Morgan was back not just playing, but also scoring for the Albion as a guest player against his former club Arsenal in a 4-2 away defeat. He would go onto return to the Gunners after the war, winning the First Division title at Highbury in 1948.