Perhaps Fabian Hurzeler has been thinking about it himself over the past few days. At the start of the year, he was a manager many had already written off, Brighton supporters above all. Just 33, with little Premier League experience, he was in charge of a team that seemed to be sinking a little further every Sunday, bereft of ideas and without a clear sense of direction. Now Brighton are third in the table, the season’s great surprise in English football. They have won their last six games in all competitions, scoring 22 goals and conceding just two, knocked Manchester United out of the EFL Cup, made a flying start to their Conference League campaign and, most strikingly, beaten reigning champions Arsenal 3-0, ending their perfect league record. Tactical invention, an ability to adapt along the way, or both?
The circle closed this weekend, when Brighton thrashed Crystal Palace 5-0 away from home. It was Palace, beating Brighton at the AMEX Stadium last February, who had seemed to deliver the final blow to Hurzeler’s hopes of turning things around. As the BBC reported after that 1-0 defeat, “nobody in the stadium could see anything to suggest a change of fortunes was coming. And Hurzeler seemed a manager without ideas.” That, too, is part of football’s appeal. What happened in the space of a few months? The young Fabian decided to do something relatively rare for a manager in his position: question himself, properly, starting with his own footballing philosophy. No small step for a rising coach whose ideas had taken St Pauli into the Bundesliga and, soon afterwards, earned him the opportunity of a lifetime at Brighton, where he became the youngest permanent manager in Premier League history. That was in 2024. His first season in blue and white had ended with a respectable eighth-place finish, making the prospect of a fundamental rethink all the harder to contemplate.
But that is precisely what he did. Hurzeler reshaped the team, rethought its pressing game and learned when to raise the tempo. Brighton recovered, finished eighth again and he kept his job. Over the summer, the club made a series of shrewd, purposeful additions, including Vuskovic and Struijk. Now Brighton are flying, confounding expectations and restoring their manager’s reputation. The supporters who once greeted him with boos and chants calling him washed-up are now hoping he will stay rather than be tempted elsewhere. Football has a short memory, and the distance between a lost cause and a prized asset can be surprisingly small.
The bigger clubs have duly added another name to their notebooks, another possible heir to Roberto De Zerbi, as Brighton continues to produce managers of real substance. Hurzeler’s own path, though, has been anything but straightforward. He stopped playing at just 23, after too many injuries, having also turned out for Bayern Munich’s reserve side. From then on, he pursued coaching with almost obsessive determination, studying and travelling whenever he could, even attending training sessions at Premier League clubs. His main job at the time was a rather different one: he earned his living working for a company that sold paintings to Bavaria’s upper classes, until his passion for football cost him the job.
Even now, he looks back on those years with gratitude. “They weren’t all that different from certain aspects of being a manager,” Fabian once explained. “If you want to sell something to someone, you have to create a need and understand what that person wants. And so the most important thing for me today is to understand the man behind the player I coach. What does he need? What are his values? How was he brought up?” For Hurzeler, it comes down to understanding the person behind the player, and building a team from there.