If I could buy a season ticket anywhere, it would be Brighton or Brentford — their success stories warm the h

THIS is a column that starts with a disclaimer. I am an admirer of Chris Hughton. Not only for the job he did in bringing one of our most likeable football clubs, Brighton, up to the Premier League but also for the wider contribution he has made as player and coach over almost 45 years in the game.

Ghana, who he recently agreed to manage, are fortunate to have on their side a man of great wisdom and humility.

But. This is also true. Standing with a group of reporters in a corridor at Wembley in April 2019, I found listening to Hughton talk greatly dispiriting. His Brighton team had just lost an FA Cup semi-final to Manchester City yet he spoke not with disappointment at an opportunity missed but with something closer to satisfaction bordering on relief that his team had escaped with some kind of honour intact.

The game had been poor and Brighton rarely threatened in losing 1-0. Yet Hughton said: ‘I am incredibly proud. We have raised the bar today.’

I went home feeling sad and wondered if that was that for the FA Cup. I wondered if — like the Premier League — it was a competition only a select few clubs could now win. City then beat Watford 6-0 in the final and you can imagine what I made of that.

But football has a pleasing habit of surprising you. Four years on, Brighton are back in the last four and this time they have designs on winning the cup. Hughton’s work was built on with innovation by Graham Potter before he left for Chelsea. Now it is the Italian Roberto De Zerbi who has Brighton seventh in the league.

Brighton will face Manchester United this time. Potter’s team beat them 4- 0 at the Amex Stadium at the end of last season and 2-1 at Old Trafford on day one of this. It’s a different United side now but De Zerbi’s players will not take an inferiority complex into the game and this is the nub of it. This is what makes me feel so optimistic about the state of our game in 2023. Because this is all about the cleverness of some clubs in managing to punch upwards. It’s about ambition and not settling for survival. And this is all about the quality of the coaching.

The idiots have tried to chase Potter out of Stamford Bridge but over time he will impose his intellect on Chelsea. Just as De Zerbi has at Brighton, just as Thomas Frank has at Brentford and, with the FA Cup in mind, just as Paul Heckingbottom has done at another semi-finalist, Sheffield United from the Championship.

Cash is king in English football.

Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp have been able to build teams playing styles of football we have rarely seen before.

But if I was going to buy a season ticket anywhere in the top division, it would be at Brighton or Brentford. Clubs with strong identities, inclusive cultures and superb fit-for-purpose stadiums fielding teams playing attractive attacking football that wins matches and embarrasses people.

Frank is fascinating and down to earth. He will coach a top club if he sticks around. He confesses to a wanderlust — an urge to see more of the world with a backpack on — and that may pull him away from football prematurely. But we are lucky to have him. Brentford have beaten United and Liverpool this season and drawn at Arsenal. Brighton have beaten United, Chelsea and Liverpool twice.

None of this has been achieved by throwing money around. Brighton have lost players, their manager and their football director to what we call bigger clubs. But they have made a virtue of it by reinvesting wisely while spending on the structure of the club which safeguards their future. Sacking Hughton at the end of that 2019 season felt like shooting Bambi. Hughton told me this year how much it hurt. Equally, he looks at Brighton’s progress and accepts it worked. It was cruel but it proved to be clever too.

Brighton will never win the Premier League. Nor will Brentford. If Heckingbottom drags Sheffield United back up, they will have it all to do to remain there.

But as money and the ugliness it brings continues to wash through our game, opportunities to succeed around the edges still exist.

One of my favourite recent memories is of being at Wembley when Leicester beat Chelsea in the 2021 final. About 20,000 fans were there after Covid lockdown and the sun shone as Brendan Rodgers’ team swept the legs from beneath their fancied opponents.

Rodgers is another fine coach, despite his difficulties this season. For all the fanfare and razzmatazz of the modern game, football is still a sport won and lost out on the grass. There remains a way to prosper for those clever enough and brave enough to look.