5 ways to improve the atmosphere at the Amex Stadium

What’s happened to the atmosphere at the Amex Stadium so far in the 2019-20 season? Ever since the stadium opened in 2011, it hasn’t exactly been a cauldron of noise, but even by the low standards set over the past nine years, home games in the current campaign have been dire.

Andy Naylor has written about it at length in The Athletic. Graham Potter has commented on it during his media duties and in his programme notes. Paul Barber also used his column prior to the 1-1 draw with Aston Villa to address the issue.

And while it’s all very well having the media and club employees question the atmosphere at the Amex Stadium, nobody in a position of power seems to want to come up with any ideas to improve it.

There have been plenty of suggestions across social media in response to Naylor, Potter and Barber’s comments about what the club and supporters could do to get behind the team more.

Using those, we’ve come up with these five ideas for improving the atmosphere at the Amex Stadium.

Introduce safe standing
The theory goes that when football supporters can stand, they create more noise. Although safe standing is yet to be legalised in the top two divisions of English football, it is becoming increasingly likely that one day it will be.

The new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is set up for safe standing once the law becomes chanced to allow it. Wolves have installed rail seating in the Sir Jack Hayward Stand at Molineux so they too can offer terracing to supporters.

Shrewsbury Town meanwhile already operate a safe standing area at their Montgomery Waters Meadow Stadium. Standing is allowed in League One and below with their section having been installed in 2017 thanks to a considerable donation from Fansbet, the online bookmakers who plough a percentage of their customers’ losses back into projects to benefit local community and football organisations.

Could a standing section improve the atmosphere at the Amex Stadium? Perhaps – although it seems unlikely that we will ever find out. The club did consult on introducing safe standing at the Amex several years ago, but they received only a lukewarm response to the idea.

At last year’s fan’s forum, this led Barber to openly dismiss the idea. People didn’t want to move to make the necessary room required for a safe standing area and the Albion’s CEO questioned whether it was worth altering a fantastic stadium to install something that only a vocal minority of supporters are in favour of. Somewhere in a corner, John Baine was writing a furious poem.

Given the lack of atmosphere so far this season, has people’s opinions on the issue of safe standing at the Amex changed? The very least that the club should do is conduct a second referendum. Four years on from the initial poll, no safe standing may not mean no safe standing any more.

Move away supporters to the East Stand
One of the more popular ideas is moving away supporters from their current home behind the South Stand goal and putting them in the lower tier of the East Stand.

There aren’t many Premier League clubs who give an entire stand behind one goal to travelling fans. When away teams are attacking the south end, they can be inspired by the mass of 3,000 fans packed in front of them who can almost suck the ball in.

With Brighton fans behind both goals, the pitch would be surrounded by Albion fans on all sides, rather than just in the horseshoe shape that currently exists while the whole south end is given to away supporters. This would mean that the noise from behind the goals would meet in a crescendo in the middle, significantly improving the Amex Stadium atmosphere.

It often gets forgotten that the club actually tried this shortly after the corners at the Amex were filled in. It failed because the club were so desperate not to lose ticketing revenue that they offered two different prices for away fans; tickets for those sitting in the East Stand portion of the away section charged more for their premium view than those in the South Stand portion.

Needless to say, a lot of away fans were put off by the price differential. Once the South Stand area sold out, the club struggled to shift tickets to travelling supporters in the East. The idea was very quickly and quietly dropped in favour of reverting back to giving the away following the entire South end.

And it’s pricing that will probably prevent this idea taking off again. Premier League rules state that away fans can only be charged £30 for a ticket. If the Albion moved the away area to the East Stand Lower, they would only be able to charge that amount for a seat which they currently sell for up to £42 to home supporters.

Losing out on £12 from up to 3,000 seats would cost the Albion £36,000 per game or £684,000 per season. When you’re raking in £105,741,728 from the Premier League as we did for finishing 17th in the 2018-19 season, that may seem like a small price worth paying if it improves the atmosphere at the Amex Stadium.

Until you remember that we support a club where taking ‘customers’ for every possible penny is more important. Sadly, this is probably an idea that would never fly with the powers that be.

Have a drum
Ah yes, the old drum chestnut. Brighton fans seem to hate the idea of a drum at the Amex more than the thought of having Harold Shipman care for an elderly relative. The big question is why?

Ask most football fans which country’s atmosphere they want to recreate and you’ll get the answer Germany. And what is the one thing that every single German club has, without fail? A drum.

A drum helps lead chanting. It gets everyone singing the same thing. It keeps people in time so that songs aren’t sung at 1,000 miles per hour and subsequently end in incoherent drivel.

People will happily bash the back wall of a stand or clap to get a song going, but when a drum is used for the exact same purpose it becomes a crime tantamount to murder.

Perhaps we’ve given Crystal Palace fans so much abuse for their drum over the years that we now couldn’t possibly go and get one of our own. Or perhaps it’s just the vitriol towards Palace that means we’re unlikely to ever see a drum as an answer.

Which is sad, as it could actually work.

Create a North Stand singing section
One of the biggest barriers to a good atmosphere at the Amex Stadium is the way the North Stand is effectively split into two singing sections.

You’ve got the NSK who have positioned themselves under the police box in the North West corner. And 50 metres away on the other side of the stand is the other singing crew who stand in front of the big screen.

Because of this disconnect, you often find two different groups of fans singing two different songs. A single, loud song very rarely takes off, either because the two areas can’t hear each other properly or because they don’t want to sing together for some odd reason.

Moving all the singers together into a couple of blocks slap bang in the middle of the North Stand could help address the issue and improve the atmosphere at the Amex Stadium.

There is of course one major problem with this idea. Those who currently sit in the central sections of the North Stand would have to move from season ticket seats that they may have had since the ground opened. And how many would be willing to do so voluntary?

Palace took this approach when the Holmesdale Fanatics threw their toys our of the pram and demanded to be placed in the middle of the Holmesdale End. Rather ironically, the atmosphere appears to have become worse at Selhurst Park in our experience since the move, although these are admittedly two very different cases.

The Albion would be bringing together singers spread thinly across an entire stand into one area. Palace meanwhile moved a load of unemployed people in black from a corner section where they did generate a good atmosphere into the middle of the stand where they seemingly don’t anymore.

Have supporters and the club work more closely together
Are Albion supporters doing enough to work together to improve the atmosphere? There was one FA Cup game at the Amex a few seasons ago when the NSK wanted to get everyone who wanted to sing to buy seats together in a central block of the North Stand to see if it could help improve the atmosphere.

A brilliant idea. Except we were told by one of their group that they didn’t want to publicise it through the club because they don’t like Barber.

WAB has got the biggest social media presence outside of the official Albion channels and yet they wouldn’t speak to us about helping. They hardly used North Stand Chat to promote the idea either, when that reaches more Albion fans than any other medium.

If the atmosphere at the Amex is to improve, then everybody with an interest in helping to do so needs to come together. The Police Box Crew need to work with those under the big screen. Fan groups need to talk about how they can work in unison to promote an improved atmosphere and ultimately, the club need to do their bit too.

There’s little point in Barber or Potter lecturing us about how to support the team if the Albion aren’t willing to help. Back in 2014, the club invited a number of supporters to attend a meeting at the Amex with then-Head of Commercial Development Paul Beirne.

We got a free curry out of it and the chance to talk with Beirne about what could be done to improve the atmosphere. It was a constructive meeting – other than the suggestion of sacking Sami Hyypia to boost morale, which was met with awkward laughter, although Hyypia was in fact gone within a week.

It was this forum that helped get the words to Sussex by the Sea on the big screens before games. It put forward the idea of improving the outside of the Amex from looking like an office block to an area where people could hang out before games, drink beer and build an atmosphere before heading through the turnstiles.

The club wanted to make these meetings a regular thing. And yet we never had another. If they listen to supporters again, perhaps we will see the Amex turn into the cauldron of noise we all want it to be.