Liam Brady was much more than just a football manager to Brighton

Liam Brady was Brighton & Hove Albion manager for just 23 months and 104 games. His impact extends far beyond his relatively brief time in the Goldstone dugout though as without Brady, there might not even be an Albion to support.

On Sunday 28th April 1996, Brady stood in Hove Park, a stones throw away from the turnstiles to the North Stand. Less than 24 hours earlier, Brighton’s final home game of the season against York City had been abandoned before the 20 minute mark when supporters tore down the goalposts.

As far as anybody knew, that was going to be Brighton’s final game at their home of 95 years. Chairman Bill Archer had sold it to a development company called Chartwell with the aim of getting rich by pocketing the profits.

Archer and his fellow board members Greg Stanley and David Bellotti were trying to kill the Albion in order to line their pockets.

Brady though had other ideas. It was a cold, overcast morning which suited the mood. Brighton were heading into the fourth tier (presuming there would be a club to support in the 1996-97 season) and were now homeless.

Home games would take place at Fratton Park, Portsmouth for the foreseeable future. Worse still, nobody seemed willing or able to end the Archer nightmare. Brighton needed a saviour but there simply wasn’t one to be found.

The previous day’s protests had been a last, desperate plea for help from supporters. Getting a game abandoned was seen as the only way to shine a spotlight on the raping of a football club that was occurring on the south coast of England.

There were a handful of reporters present in Hove Park and about 50 supporters who had come to hear what the man who had resigned as Albion manager five months earlier had to say. 30 minutes later, Brady had provided a small chink of light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

Brady revealed that he had pulled together a consortium who wanted to save the club. They had money. Chartwell had said Brighton could remain at the Goldstone for another year if they put up a £40,000 deposit. And Brady was offering to pay it out of his own pocket.

“The consortium believe that with good administration and public relations, the club can attract sponsorship and work with the council to get a new stadium,” read Brady from a pre-prepared statement.

“As a gesture of goodwill, I am prepared to pay the £40,000 deposit required by Chartwell for the lease on the ground myself.”

“It is my opinion that the club will die if it moves to Portsmouth. It if does, it won’t be the fault of supporters, the council or this consortium.”

Archer rejected the offer out of hand, describing it as “totally irrelevant”. Then, with just 57 minutes to go before the noon deadline on Tuesday 30th April 1996 set by Chartwell for Brighton to secure use of the Goldstone for another season, Archer caved.

Brighton could stay at their home for the 1996-97 campaign and the ball was now rolling – albeit slowly – for new owners to sweep away the Archer regime and save the club.

Dick Knight was eventually revealed as the man working alongside Brady. When Brady was offered the role of head of youth development at his former club Arsenal in the autumn of 1996, his involvement with the consortium was over and Knight became the public face. But without Brady, none of it would have been possible.

As one of the finest players of his generation, Brady brought gravitas to the takeover bid. The national press would not have given a toss about a little known former marketing guru called Dick Knight launching a takeover bid of struggling Brighton.

Brady though was an icon at Arsenal, scoring 43 goals in 235 appearances and winning the FA Cup for his team and PFA Player of the Year for himself in the 1978-79 season at Highbury.

He won two Serie A titles in two seasons with Juventus and played for Sampdoria, Inter Milan and Ascoli. And he set a record of 72 appearances for the Republic of Ireland.

A football man of the calibre of Liam Brady wanting to buy Brighton was the equivalent of David Beckham trying to buy Southend United. The Albion were now getting the media attention they needed and there was a glimmer of hope for the future.

It wasn’t the first time that Liam Brady had been a beacon for Brighton. His initial appointment as manager in December 1993 came completely out of the blue, Archer pulling off quite the coup in convincing a genuine footballing giant to become boss of a side battling to avoid relegation out of Division Two.

Brady had left Celtic after two years in charge two months earlier. When announcing the appointment, Bellotti described Brady as being “head and shoulders” above the other applicants.

His arrival at the Goldstone on a two year contract certainly excited the Brighton faithful as the average attendance figure rose by 3,000 once he took over from Barry Lloyd.

Performances improved too. Brady lifted the Albion from 22nd in the table upon his arrival to a final finishing position of 14th.

Brighton were one of the form teams in the second half of the season with Brady winning the Manager of the Month award in February.

He did all that with no budget to speak of and very few additions, instead adding discipline and drawing much improved performances from the existing squad, most notably by turning Kurt Nogan into a goal machine.

In six short months, Brady had reinvigorated the Albion. Hopes were high for a promotion push in 1994-95 and Brighton began the season playing some beautiful football, losing only two of their opening 10 fixtures.

Included in that blistering start was arguably Brady’s greatest moment in the Albion dugout. Brighton were drawn with Premier League Leicester City in the second round of the League Cup, giving the Albion a chance to test their mettle against top flight opposition.

These were the days when the early rounds of the League Cup were played over two legs, making it doubly hard for lower league sides to progress.

Sure, you might surprise your opponents in the first game, but if you wanted to pull off an upset, then you had to do so in two matches.

Not a problem for Brady’s Brighton. Nogan gave them a 1-0 win at the Goldstone in the first leg before a stunning 2-0 victory at Leicester in the second.

That night at Filbert Street was something special. Nogan was attracting the interest of Liverpool and Everton and showed the nation why with another goal. Stuart Munday scored a 35 yard rocket which drew applause from even the home fans.

To complete a memorable evening, Jimmy Case got sent off for being deaf in the final minutes. A second yellow card came out for time wasting when Case didn’t respond to the referee telling him to hurry up, the reason for Case’s lack of compliance being that he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid.

The sky looked the limit at that point. Brighton were comfortably beating Premier League sides both home and away and Liam Brady added another Manager of the Month trophy to his collection in September, making it two awards in five months.

It was downhill from there though. Nogan’s goals dried up and he was sold to Burnley for £250,000, a significant sum of money for a club whose financial problems were beginning to bite.

Brighton finished the 1994-95 campaign in 16th position, far from what supporters had hoped for at the start but given what was about to come, a respectable finish.

Brady could feel that storm clouds were gathering. An escape route might have been on offer from North London, where Arsenal were rumoured to be interested in his services to replace the sacked George Graham.

Unfortunately for Brady, the job at Highbury went to Bruce Rioch and rather than stepping into the Gunners manager’s role, Brady found himself going into a meeting with Archer.

Bellotti had promised Brady that Archer would be using this meeting to reveal an increased budget for a better crack at promotion in the 1995-96 season.

What actually happened is that Archer told Brady that he was cutting the budget and Brady would have to sack a member of his staff to save money. Brady considered resigning as a result, but his coaches Gerry Ryan and George Petchey talked him out of it.

Instead, Brady, Ryan and Petchey all agreed to take wage cuts to fund new signings. It was another sign of Brady’s class, but not even the financial sacrifices of the coaching staff could help build a competent squad.

Brighton went into the new campaign with just 19 professionals, a mix of young players such as Kevin McGarrigle, Ross Johnson and the Fox Brothers and veterans coming to the ends of their careers like John Byrne and Steve Foster.

Then the bombshell dropped that Archer had sold the Goldstone. Suddenly, what happened on-the-pitch paled into insignificance to what was going on off it.

If Archer, Bellotti and Stanley expected their manager to be a supportive public voice of their suicidal plans, they were sorely mistaken.

Brady made it very clear he was on the side of supporters. He talked the fans off the pitch when a half time sit-in took place in the Goldstone’s centre circle against Notts County and continued to use his platform to launch verbal assaults on the board.

Results and performances were being badly impacted by the off-field circus though and by November 1995, the pressure was beginning to tell.

A flukey 2-2 draw at Canvey Island in the FA Cup saw Brady give an extraordinary interview to BBC Southern Counties Radio.

John Lees began a question by telling Liam Brady that if the part-timers Alan Harding buried an easy chance in the last minute, Brighton would have been knocked out. Brady responded with “If my granny had balls, she’d be my granddad.”

Looking back, it was a rare moment of comedy in a season devoid of much laughter. Not that anybody found it funny at the time, especially Brady who was by now reaching the end of his tether.

Brighton lost 3-0 at home to Walsall a week later and that was it. Ian Hart said at the time that even Alex Ferguson would struggle at the Albion and he wasn’t wrong.

Brady left in a blaze of glory, delivering a stinging critique of Archer, Bellotti and Stanley. He knew the sort of people they were, he knew what they wanted to do to the Albion and he wasn’t about it to let it happen.

In 2013, Brady told Nick Szczepanik in an interview for The Independent, “I just felt I had to do something to stop what was going on.”

“It was a bad time in the story of Brighton & Hove Albion, but I really enjoyed myself as manager and you could see that there was a real passion in Sussex and in the city for the Albion and they deserve a really good football club.”

“I certainly thought that the people in charge didn’t really care about the club at all, and that it needed to get some people in who would try to move them out and would have the club’s interests at heart.”

In a way, Brady’s hard work actually began the moment he quit. How many other managers have resigned, only to spend the next six months putting together a consortium to save a club, including a significant dip into their own pockets to pay a year’s rent on the stadium?

Not many. None, actually. Which is why Liam Brady was much more than just a football manager to Brighton. Cheers, Liam.