Will Buckley – the first million pound man in Brighton history

One million pounds. These days, that sort of figure is small change in Brighton & Hove Albion’s back pocket but when Will Buckley arrived at the newly-constructed Amex Stadium from Watford for such a fee in the summer of 2011, it was a record-breaking amount.

Before Buckley, Brighton have never forked out a seven figure sum for a player. £500,000 had been the Seagulls’ previous best, paid to Manchester United for striker Andy Ritchie in 1980.

To pay double that seemed utterly mind blowing to a generation of fans brought up on a footballing diet of riots and protests amid the crumbling terraces of the Goldstone Ground, home games at Gillingham and bacon baguettes in the pissing rain at Withdean.

Needless to say, there was pressure on Buckley. Not only because of the fee, but also because he was seen as a direct replacement for Elliott Bennett, who Premier League-bound Norwich City had a long-standing interest in.

Bennett had scored eight goals and assisted a further 17 as Gus Poyet He Who Must Not Be Named’s Brighton side swept to the 2010-11 League One title in such spectacular style.

The Canaries had first come sniffing in January. Tony Bloom said no, not wanting to upset the Albion’s promotion charge. Bennett subsequently handed in a transfer request which was rejected on the basis of a gentleman’s agreement being struck between chairman and player – stay until the end of the season, help us win promotion, then you can go.

Bennett duly knuckled down and played his part. By the end of the campaign, he was widely acknowledged as the best player in a division containing the likes of Adam Lallana and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, joining his Albion teammates Inigo Calderon and Gordon Greer in the PFA League One team of the year.

Eight days after Buckley’s arrival and Bennett completed his £1.5 million move to Carrow Road. Those were some pretty big boots that the new man was being asked to fill and unusually for the excitable Poyet You Know Who, there was a hint of caution in the way he spoke about his record-breaking signing.

“He is young, but he knows the division well,” Poyet The Dark Lord told Sky Sports News once the deal was announced. “He is a player I am really looking forward to working with and making him one of us.”

There were two questions now. Could Will Buckley deliver as Brighton & Hove Albion’s first ever million pound player? And how long would it take Poyet He Who Must Not Be Named to make Buckley one of us?

The answer to both of those was delivered in the space of 15 minutes on Saturday 6th August 2011. You could have pitched what unfolded as Brighton hosted Doncaster Rovers in the first ever league game at the Amex to Walt Disney and he would have laughed you out of his office for creating a fairy tale too farfetched.

Brighton were trailing Doncaster 1-0 when Buckley was introduced as a second half substitute in place of Matt Sparrow. Within eight minutes, the debutant equalised when lashing home from the edge of the box after the visitors failed to convincingly clear a free kick.

That was only the start of the drama. As the game ticked into the eighth minute of injury time, Craig Noone’s quick feet and vision slipped Buckley in one-one-one with Rovers goalkeeper Gary Woods.

20,219 supporters held their breath followed by an explosion of noise as, cool-as-you-like, Buckley lifted the ball over Woods to make it 2-1.

After forking out £97 million to pay for the Amex, Bloom nearly had to find some more cash to replace a roof now being lifted off the stadium thanks to Buckley’s heroics, the winger having already paid off his £1 million fee in only a quarter of an hour.

Two goals including a 98th minute winner in the first game at a ground Brighton supporters had been dreaming of for 14 years… had we just seen the greatest debut in Albion history? You would be hard pushed to find many better, even if Darren Freeman might have something to say about it.

So big had Buckley’s impact been that he even had Bennett’s song bestowed upon him whilst Bennett’s old number seven shirt was still warm. The concourses of the Amex rang out to the sound of “William Buckley runs down the wing for me”, Buckley proving that heavy is not always the head that wears the crown.

The world looked like being Buckley’s oyster, although sadly he rarely reached the heights of that Doncaster game again thanks largely to injuries.

Like so many other young players who rely on explosive pace, Buckley struggled with hamstring problems. A week after those Doncaster heroics, Buckley limped off after just 25 minutes of his first Championship start for the Albion as Portsmouth were beaten 1-0 at Fratton Park.

He was not considered fit enough to start another game until December and only completed his first 90 minutes in a Brighton shirt in the famous 3-0 win over Southampton on January 2nd 2012. From that point on, he would play five or six games in a row before missing three or four through injury.

When Will Buckley did make it onto the pitch for Brighton, he was class. He developed a niche for last minute winners, with four of his eight goals in the 2011-12 season coming in the final two minute of matches. Doncaster, Nottingham Forest, Peterborough United and Leicester City all fell foul of Buckley at the death.

In the first half of the 2012-13 season, a fit Buckley was one of the best players in the Championship. He scored five times and assisted another five between September and November, leading to Poyet You Know Who to claim in the press that Buckley was better than Wilfried Zaha after the Crystal Palace winger made his England debut against Sweden.

Time has not been kind to those comments from Poyet The Dark Lord – in fact, Poyet You Know Who appears to have been completely out of his mind when you compare the career paths of Buckley and Zaha post-2013.

Back then though, it did not seem so ridiculous – Buckley was genuinely playing that well. He claimed two more assists in the St Patrick’s Day Massacre against Palace in March 2013 to further strengthen Poyet He Who Must Not Be Named’s claims, although Zaha obviously had the last laugh in that play off semi final that we still pretend never happened.

Buckley’s final full season with Brighton was 2013-14, when he contributed three goals and four assists. Fitness issues again plagued him and there was also this sense that Oscar Garcia could not quite get the best out of Buckley in the same way that Poyet You Know Who did.

Given how much Poyet The Dark Lord loved Buckley, it did not come as a surprise when Sunderland bid for him in the summer of 2014, when Brighton were going through their ill-advised stage of selling the family silver and trying to replace it with cheap loan options.

Ashley Barnes, Leonardo Ulloa and Liam Bridcutt had all been allowed to leave in the previous eight months before Buckley joined Briductt at the Stadium of Light for £2.5 million, representing a tidy profit on that record-breaking £1 million forked out three years previously.

Unfortunately, injuries continued to play havoc with Buckley. After 109 appearances and 19 goals for the Albion, he managed only 116 more games over the next six years with the Black Cats, The Leeds United, Birmingham City, Sheffield Wednesday and Bolton Wanderers. He retired in 2020 at the age of 31.

Will Buckley left behind a career of what ifs, especially when it came to his time at Brighton. What if he had not been so susceptible to injury? Might he have gone onto live up to Poyet He Who Must Not Be Named’s words as being better than Zaha?

And what if he had never moved to the Sunderland? Neither Bridcutt nor Buckley benefited from reuniting with Poyet You Know Who in the north east, their career highs having taken place in blue and white.

Imagine how a fit Buckley might have shone in Chris Hughton’s Championship side of 2015-17 had he not been flogged. He would have thrived in a system built on out-and-out wingers flying down the flanks to feed Tomer Hemed, Sam Baldock and then Glenn Murray.

Despite the fact that Buckley’s career sadly never hit the heights it perhaps should have done, he still managed to write himself into Albion history. That Doncaster game, all those last minute winners, destroying Palace 3-0… Brighton’s first million was money well spent.