Dismissing complaints as clickbait is a worrying path for Brighton to take

When yours truly sat down to write their weekly column for the Brighton Independent of Friday 17th December about the problems with the Albion’s season ticket sharing scheme, little did I know that Paul Barber would take the time and effort to put together a 1709 word response.

Perhaps I should have done. Mr Barber is a good communicator who takes time to answer fan enquiries in detail, no matter the subject.

From outside toilets at the Amex to the Premier League’s failed PPV scheme, his willingness to engage is one of his strong points and stands him out from Chief Executives of other clubs around the country.

The other reason to have expected a reply (which you can read here) was that the Albion are somewhat thin-skinned as a football club. Despite claiming they want to engage with fans and are willing to listen, they do not like criticism.

They will go to the ends of the earth to justify what they have done and claim it as being a success, even when the opinion of the majority of fans on the ground suggests otherwise. They cannot admit they have got something wrong.

Mr Barber and the club are of course entitled to their opinion and to publicise it. If he wants to say that the atmosphere when Brighton lost 2-0 at Villa Park was rocking when most Albion fans felt that it was flat, then fair play.

If he also feels “if someone is an Albion fan” then they should happily pay an extra £20 to give their seat to a friend or family member on top of the many hundreds already being forked out for a season ticket, then that is fine too.

It is probably easier to say that though when you were paid over £2 million in 2020 – including a one-off loyalty bonus – than if you scrimp and save your wages together to afford to watch Brighton every week.

With the rising cost of living, mortgages to pay and families to feed, £20 (or £18 to become a MyAlbion+ member for the remaining half of the season) is actually quite a lot of money to some.

The biggest issue with Mr Barber’s response to the article was in him dismissing it as “clickbait”, however. Firstly, if it were clickbait then it would have been posted right here on WeAreBrighton.com, so that we benefited from the additional views and potential advertising revenue.

To write something which is purely clickbait and then hand it over to another publication is akin to having a winning lottery ticket in your pocket and giving it to a random bloke on the bus.

The Brighton Independent ask WAB to provide a weekly column reflecting feeling on the terraces. The season ticket sharing scheme has been big news all season as, despite what Mr Barber claims, the majority of supporters who follow WAB think it is a terrible idea.

A thread on North Stand Chat running to over 30 pages in which 90 percent of the contributors are also dismissive of it backs that up, as do the thousands of empty seats every week at the Amex.

Yes, the 10,000 empty seats at the Wolves game was an exceptional case due to people fearing becoming Covid-19 positive ahead of Christmas. But there have been visible empty seats at every game this season, starting with the 2-0 win over Watford.

What is more concerning about Mr Barber describing complaints as clickbait is that it appears a blatant attempt to stifle debate and criticism of the club.

He is so dismissive because he does not want to listen to supporters who deem a scheme he has played a major role in signing off as being a failure.

The Brighton Independent deserve a huge amount of credit for running the piece. There is a reason that Andy Naylor, The Argus and BBC Radio Sussex have not touched the subject of season ticket sharing despite it being such a hot topic – because they do not want to upset the club.

Criticism of the Albion in local media is rarer than a Brighton goal at home from open play these days. Which I suspect is why Mr Barber has taken such umbrage with it and decided to try and portray it as clickbait.

Someone at a big organisation involved in the football industry once described the Albion to me as “the Hyacinth Bucket of football”.

For those who do not know, Mrs Bucket (or was it Mrs Bouquet?) was the lead character in Keeping Up Appearances who is desperate to portray to the world that she is an upper class lady, normally with hilarious consequences.

This official viewed the Albion as being desperate to show the world that they are the perfect football club who get everything right.

If that is the prevailing attitude at the Amex, then it is little wonder that the club are not happy with a local newspaper having the nerve to highlight something that supporters feel they have got wrong. Trying to bury the story as clickbait is an attempt to sweep it under the carpet.

To have a media who only toe the line and are never willing to ask questions of the club is not healthy. The ironic thing about this of course is that without criticism from the media, there would probably not be a Brighton & Hove Albion.

Had The Argus and Naylor not been willing to look into, report and criticise Bill Archer, David Bellotti and Greg Stanley in 1995, then they might well have got away with removing the non-profit clause from the club’s articles of association.

Selling the Goldstone Ground and profiting the pockets could have gone unnoticed for many months, by which time it would have been too late for Albion fans to fight back and save their club.

Clickbait did not exist back in Bellotti’s day, but you can easily imagine him using the term. He famously told fans to “stop whinging” in his programme notes for the Notts County game early in the 1995-96 season in response to protests against the sale of the Goldstone.

When that did not work, he banned The Argus from the ground in an attempt to shut them up. That did not work either. We owe the fact that our club is still here to the local media and their willingness not to be silenced. How is that for a history lesson?

It is not clickbait to report on issues that supporters have with their club. And judging by the tweets, messages and emails we received in response to Barber’s reply, the majority of our followers back what we said in the original article.

WAB will continue to try and reflect what Albion fans think about the club, whether Mr Barber and co want to hear it or not. The Brighton Independent have said they will do the same, living up to their name as an independent, unbiased publication.

As for the season ticket sharing scheme, the proof of the pudding will ultimately come in the eating. There are two ways it will be judged – in season ticket renewals and how long the scheme lasts beyond the end of the current season.

When games are moved to Sunday lunchtimes, Saturday evenings or Monday nights at a whim, many Albion fans desire the ability to pass on their ticket without it being a luxury extra available at an additional cost.

There is therefore a danger that renewals could be poor as Albion fans instead buy on a game-per-game basis when they know they can actually attend a fixture – rather than forking out £800 up front, only to find out they cannot make half the matches because of television rearrangements and are subsequently leaving their seat empty.

The club may tell us that the current scheme is proving successful, but there have been several times in the past when Mr Barber has said that something which seems deeply unpopular with supporters is actually backed by the majority.

Premier League PPV got a mention earlier. You may recall he said that the vast majority of emails he had received on the subject were supportive of the league and broacdaster’s decision to charge supporters £15 each time they wanted to watch their side on television during lockdown.

He even went so far as to tell one Albion fan: “Unfortunately, fans will always want everything for free. But we are a business.”

One month later and Premier League PPV was quietly dropped in an embarrassing U-turn. Foodbanks across the country were the winners with fans rejecting the greed of football to instead make a donation whenever their side was on PPV. Albion fans raised nearly £5,000 for the Brighton Foodbank.

There was also the Seven Stars Bar debacle, when the Albion decided to introduce a £250 season ticket for access to the East Stand facility or a £12 entry fee per game.

Again, the club told us that take up and been good despite near-universal criticism of the plan. And despite that excellent take up, the bar was surprisingly closed come the end of the season.

If the club tell you something is working, take it with a pinch of salt. We will know come the end of the 2021-22 campaign how successful the season ticket sharing scheme has been should the £20 charge to transfer a seat and the requirement that you must be a £25 MyAlbion+ Member to be a recipient remain in place for 2022-23.

My suspicion is that we will instead get an announcement about a brand new, amazing season ticket sharing scheme which is the best in the Premier League – and where the costs have either been magically reduced or removed completely.

The club will not admit they have got it wrong, instead trying to spin a failure into something positive. Every Brighton fan will know why the changes have come in though – even if it is clickbait to point it out.