After our first taste of continental football in 23/24, any Albion fan would be lying if that night against Marseille doesn’t cross their mind at least once a week, and it’s safe to say a return to European nights couldn’t come any sooner in the minds of the fanbase.
Whilst our form has been, at best, iffy this season. A recent resurgence, which has seen three wins in the last five, puts us within three points off eighth, which, come the end of the season, will likely be a Conference League spot.
This has, expectedly, galvanised a portion of the fanbase into believing that a bout to qualify for Europe is still very much on the cards going into the last eight games. Are they right to believe in this, or, considering some of the elephants in the room, is this just a big pipe dream ready to come crashing down in the run-in?
Our Recent Form
After a truly dismal start to 2026, the momentum has begun to shift back in our favour, with three wins out of the last five, with two losses, albeit narrow ones against high-flying Aston Villa and Arsenal.
The three wins consisted of beating a fresh Nottingham Forest side, alongside two wins against high-flying Brentford and Sunderland.
This has been a fairly impressive turnaround, as not only are we winning, we’re doing so against good-level opposition.
When considering the viability of a late push, big, positive results against the teams around us massively weigh into it, and there’s no doubt the team have got a massive boost of confidence, which, with a goal like Europe in mind, could be a deciding factor in whether we can cement a late push up the table.
‘The Hurzeler Paradox’
Is being consistently inconsistent… consistent or inconsistent?
Obviously, the biggest barrier to a late push is Brighton’s consistency of being inconsistent (something I like to call the ‘Hurzeler Paradox’).
As opposed to a continuous, recognisable pattern of results, Fabian Hurzeler’s Brighton tenure has very much been that of peaks and troughs, with the Seagulls seemingly always between either a dismal or fruitful run of form, with never much indication of how long either run will go on for.
Take, for example, how little over a month ago, Fabian was being bombarded with a genuine number of his own fans calling for the sack following the Palace game, with the Albion flirting uncomfortably close to the fierce relegation battle below.
And yet, here I am, 36 days later, writing about how there is a fairly reasonable chance of qualifying for European competition. It’s safe to say that trying to predict how Brighton will perform in an extended run of games is nigh on impossible, and we can just as easily keep our bounce-back going as we can fall back into another slump.
If Europe really is to be obtained, falling into another string of poor and sloppy results simply cannot happen, and Fab certainly needs to home in on his second favourite saying and control the controllables.
The Run-In
Brighton have a fairly mixed run-in towards the end of the season, with a mix of more forgiving sides like Burnley, Tottenham, Wolves and Leeds. Alongside a difficult few games against a very volatile Liverpool, and Champions League drop-outs Newcastle and Chelsea, ending the season by hosting Manchester United, who have become very formidable of late.
It’s far from ideal, having already played in the second half of the season, and dropped points to Everton, Fulham and Bournemouth, with just Newcastle left in the current European race (that is, unless Liverpool continue to collapse) that we’ve yet to face for a second time.
However, should we finish strongly, the six points picked up against Brentford could end up being pivotal in this push, especially after seeing them drop points against Wolves, lowering our gap to them to five points.
One encouraging sign from this season is our improvement against relegation-threatened sides.
Despite our notoriously poor record against teams facing the drop, this season, out of all the teams in the bottom six, we’ve picked up points in every game and totalled sixteen out of a possible twenty-four, and while that’s still not perfect, it is a push in the right direction, especially looking at our woes in years gone by.
Safe to say that the prospect of playing four of the bottom six doesn’t ring as many alarm bells as it would’ve in recent seasons.
It’s also worth mentioning that we’ve picked up league wins against Newcastle and Chelsea already this season, and that I’d say we have every right to feel confident going into those games. But, as proved time and time again, results this season have been massively at the mercy of tactical decisions, flip-flop performances and a constant mystery of who’s match-fit and who isn’t, and we just have to hope that all the important variables fall into place at the minimum if we want to cement a late-season push.
What Do I Think?
My head says no, but deep down my heart hopes maybe, just maybe.
Whilst this recent run has instilled a healthy level of confidence and hope, there’s still a lot of things that simply must go our way for it to happen, and considering our overall metrics this season, it’s certainly going to take a hell of a lot on our end to manage to maintain a Europe-worthy run, before even beginning to consider what needs to happen around us.
It’s certainly a long shot, and while I’ll stay level-headed and consider all the impossibilities, I’ll dare to dream.
Fabian Hurzeler will certainly need to show something to both the board and, especially, the fans to avoid a summer exit, and what better way to do that than steer the ship around and bring Thursday night football back to the Amex.
Whilst the chances are unlikely and I personally don’t think it’ll happen, it’s not out of the question, and at the end of the day, only time will tell.
In the meantime, we need to get behind the team – we are at a point where it’s make or break.
