Brighton's 2025: Welbeck's record, memorable results - but can you call it progress?
Highlights of Brighton's past year include an FA Cup victory over Chelsea and a battling draw at Manchester City, but have they advanced?
Brighton & Hove Albion ended 2025 with another 2-2 away draw against a team in claret and blue. The opponents this time were West Ham, following a 2-2 draw at Aston Villa in the final fixture of 2024.
Fabian Hurzeler’s side twice came from behind at the London Stadium on Tuesday night, a 32nd-minute Danny Welbeck penalty and a 61st-minute Joel Veltman volley from close range at a corner cancelling out Jarrod Bowen’s 10th-minute strike for West Ham and Lucas Paqueta’s spot kick in added time in the first half.
The contest typified Brighton’s calendar year — a mixed bag. A second Welbeck penalty, within minutes of his first success, was dinked against the crossbar. The result stretched their winless run to six matches, including three draws, two of those in December against West Ham (it was 1-1 at home). That is wasteful against a team in the relegation zone, but three defeats in the sequence came against three of the top four (Arsenal, Aston Villa and Liverpool).
Brighton are 14th with 25 points at the halfway stage of the 2025-26 campaign. That is four places lower and two points fewer than last season, when they went on to finish eighth and narrowly miss out on qualifying for Europe.
Hurzeler, reflecting on 2025 in his post-match press conference, said: “Negatives, positives, I think it’s a mix, especially at the moment. We see good phases in every game.
“There has not been an obvious winner or loser, so we can compete in every game. At the moment, we have a lack of consistency, maybe in certain moments a lack of quality and I think especially at the moment a lack of luck.
“There might be a deflected shot that goes in, an action where we have an easy goal, a tap-in. We miss these kind of things, but this season the Premier League is so competitive. It is more equal than it was last season. We are five points off fifth place, so it’s quite narrow.”
Here, The Athletic looks back on Brighton’s past year.
What was Brighton’s best moment of 2025?
Coming from behind twice to draw 2-2 at Manchester City in March. Until then, the Etihad was the only heavyweight venue where Brighton had always been beaten, by the dominant force in the Premier League for a decade. It was rubber-stamping confirmation that they are capable on their day of getting a result against anyone.
The worst moment?
Losing 7-0 at Nottingham Forest in February. A horrible afternoon in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Hurzeler’s tactics backfired, trying to play Georginio Rutter in midfield. The Frenchman’s attacking instincts left Jack Hinshelwood badly exposed.
It went from bad to worse once Lewis Dunk put through his own net early on. Chris Wood feasted on the chaos with a hat-trick across 37 minutes against the club he served on loan in League One in 2010-11.
