Brighton's season of injuries: Why has it happened, and how will they avoid a repeat?

In mid-February, we invited requests from our subscribers for articles you might like to read on The Athletic as part of our latest Inspired By You series.

Several of you, including Rob L and Alex W, asked for a piece on why Brighton are still suffering so many injuries.

So Andy Naylor took a look…

Fabian Hurzeler had only been in charge of Brighton & Hove Albion for two matches when he lost summer signing Matt O’Riley to injury.

The £25million ($32.5m) summer signing from Celtic was forced off nine minutes into his debut in a Carabao Cup at home against Crawley Town in August.

A tackle from Crawley’s captain, Jay Williams, led to ankle surgery, ruling out O’Riley for 10 club matches across all competitions.

Four days after the 4-0 win against Crawley, James Milner only lasted 17 minutes of a 1-1 draw against Arsenal in the Premier League. His hamstring problem also required an operation and Milner, 39, is still sidelined.

Those two early blows set the tone for a litany of unrelenting injuries in Hurzeler’s first season at Brighton. The pattern continued last week with Tariq Lamptey’s absence from Saturday’s 2-2 draw at Manchester City after the right-back suffered an ankle problem in training.

No other club in the top flight has suffered to the same extent as Brighton, who are nevertheless seventh in the Premier League table with an FA Cup quarter-final to come next at home to Nottingham Forest on March 29. The Athletic has investigated what has happened, why, and what the club is doing about it.

Ben Dinnery of Premier Injuries tracks and records data on injuries in the Premier League. His research makes grim reading for Brighton fans.

The table below shows that no Premier League team has lost more days due to injuries than Brighton this season (up to and including March 17).

Dinnery defines a time-loss injury as one that forces a player to miss at least one game, and as you can see, Brighton lead the way there too…

So, why are Brighton top of tables they would rather not be leading? A big contributor has been the change of head coach last summer, when Hurzeler replaced Roberto De Zerbi.

On Brighton’s pre-season tour of Japan in July, Hurzeler confided to people inside the club that he anticipated more injuries would be suffered due to his intense demands in training and matches. Senior players were taken aback by the amount of running demanded of them in sessions during the trip, especially close to two friendly wins against Kashima Antlers (5-1) and Tokyo Verdy (4-2), played in temperatures above 30C (86F) and high humidity in Tokyo.

Australia midfielder Jackson Irvine, St Pauli’s captain in their 2.Bundesliga title triumph under Hurzeler last season, gave a clue to the 32-year-old German’s high demands in an interview with The Athletic in June.

“Fabi is obsessed with training,” Irvine said. “It is a huge thing for him — you train the way you play. Fun was a topic of conversation that came up a few times during the season. Boys would say, ‘Bloody hell, mate, can we just play a five-a-side?’. For Fabi, his attitude is you find the fun in being successful, in getting better.”

The same message has emerged consistently from the Brighton dressing room in conversations with The Athletic, from players who have worked under many different head coaches and managers during long careers. Dutch full-back Joel Veltman, 33, speaking to reporters after the 2-1 FA Cup fourth-round win against Chelsea in February, said: “He (Hurzeler) is always hammering on about intensity, running back, running forward as well when the attackers have the ball.”

After the 3-0 win against Chelsea in the Premier League at the Amex six days later, Adam Webster said that Hurzeler’s team “train really hard”. He added: “We want to be the most intense team, and when you do that we are a tough team to play against. It’s hard — the forward boys are grafting their nuts off. ”

Danny Welbeck can testify to that last remark. Speaking to reporters after coming off the bench to seal a 2-1 home win against Bournemouth in February, the 34-year-old forward explained how hard they are working under Hurzeler.

“It is intense,” Welbeck said. “Every single session, we are really putting in the groundwork, sticking to that intensity that he wants and seeing what we can do to better ourselves as a team.”

Hurzeler is owning his part in the high number of injuries Brighton have suffered. Speaking to The Athletic before the Bournemouth game, he said: “One thing that is very important for me is that I also take a big responsibility for the injuries because I knew when I arrived here we would have a change of intensity in training sessions, we would have a big change in what we demand from the players during training sessions and also in the games.

“We knew we had to take some risks to make the players ready to play our style, to make them ready for our demands.”

De Zerbi had a different way of working. Although training sessions were long, they were also stop-start. Players stood around a lot, processing in-game situations to replicate the Italian’s forensic build-up from the back. They were more mentally demanding than physically demanding.

During matches, data from SkillCorner shows that the per-game frequency of possessions of 10-plus passes has nearly halved from 19.8 last season under De Zerbi to 10.9 this season. Although overall distance covered is down by around five per cent, high-intensity frequency/distance is up 10 per cent, and sprint frequency/distance is up by approximately 18 per cent.

Under Hurzeler, Brighton are not as aggressive in the press, nor do they go man-to-man as frequently, so they are making more sprints when closing down players to get out and cover spaces. Hurzeler puts a lot of emphasis on intensity without the ball from front to back. Having less of the ball, with more turnovers than last term, naturally makes games chaotic and demands more running.

Brighton’s players are running at a higher intensity under Hurzeler (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

Since the change of head coach, injuries have been happening far more frequently. Under De Zerbi last season, there were 9.3 injuries every 1,000 minutes of action. Under Hurzeler, that figure to 11.7 injuries every 1,000 minutes — an increase of 25 per cent.

There were still a significant number of injuries last season under De Zerbi (the 9.3 rate per 1,000 minutes was the joint-fourth-worst record with Tottenham Hotspur) and  total of 11 first-team regulars were out for two months or more at different stages of the campaign.

A higher-than-usual number of soft tissue injuries (muscle, ligament and tendon damage) was attributed to the increased workload of competing in the Europa League, longer stoppage times extending the length of games and the rise of multi-ball systems condensing in-match breaks.

There has been what Hurzeler describes as a “phase of adaptation” from what players were used to under De Zerbi. “So, the body needs to adapt,” Hurzeler says. “This takes time and in this phase of adaptation, some injuries happen. We knew that injuries would happen. We reflect on this and try to find the right solutions.”

All nine of last summer’s new signings, bought for nearly £200m, joined from teams in a different country or at a lower level, and those players need to adjust to the Premier League’s physical demands. Hurzeler has not been able to field an unchanged team in the Premier League.

Although the head coach has a squad deep in quantity and quality, periods with several players out injured can be a vicious circle for Hurzeler. Other players are used more regularly than would otherwise be the case, with fewer opportunities for rest and rotation, increasing the risk of them becoming injured as well.

Widespread changes in the medical and physical conditioning departments accompanied the change of head coach. De Zerbi brought in an array of staff that had worked with him before at his previous clubs and have been reunited with the Italian now he is in charge at Marseille. Marcattilio Marcattilii, Agostino Tibaudi and Vincenzo Teresa shared the title of ‘athletic coach’.

Former head of medical Adam Brett worked for the club for nearly a decade. He left in 2023 and is now Tottenham’s director of performance services. Club doctor Vicann During also left for personal reasons after less than a year in the post, while Will Abbott moved to become League One club Charlton Athletic’s director of performance services after almost 12 years in sports science and performance-related roles.

In June, Hurzeler’s German compatriot, Florian Pfab, became head of medicine, with Gary Walker named the new head of performance. Appointed with the assistance of headhunters after a global search, both men have high-level experience in their fields of expertise. A fee of around £170,000 was paid to buy Pfab out of a contract with Eintracht Frankfurt that ran until July this year.

A visiting professor at the renowned Harvard Medical School in Boston, Pfab worked for five years at Bayern Munich and for nine years at Ingolstadt. Walker worked with Welbeck at Manchester United for 11 years, initially as lead sports scientist and strength and conditioning coach during Sir Alex Ferguson’s managerial reign. He joined from MLS club FC Cincinnati.

Florian Pfab spent nine years as head of medical at Ingolstadt (Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images)

Jim Moxon will become a further addition to the medical department as men’s first-team doctor at the end of the season after serving his notice period at Manchester United.

Irrespective of pedigree, it takes time to establish what makes individual players tick in matters such as pain threshold, workload and speed of recovery from injuries. Pfab, speaking in December on the club podcast, said: “Everyone is responsible. The responsibility for injuries belongs to the players themselves, they have to be responsible for their body. Then it’s the medical team that gets involved with everything diagnostic, treatment-wise and prevention-wise. Strength and conditioning is super important as well. Then you have the gaffer’s team. If you suggest something and they don’t do it, that’s no use.”

Identifying why Brighton have suffered so many injuries this season is made harder because there is no underlying trend. Medical meetings take place at 8am most mornings. Individual players are discussed and treated, then the medical and performance departments assess suitable training loads.

At 10am, Hurzeler, his coaching staff and technical director David Weir enter the conversations. It is a scientific process, with consideration given to factors such as pitch conditions and referee appointments for matches (whether they are lenient and will let the game flow or clamp down, causing the action to stop and start).

A club source, granted anonymity to protect relationships, says: “We look at it all the time. The review goes on constantly with the medical staff, the performance staff, Fabian. But when you break down the injuries, so many are entirely random, there is no pattern. Some have been high-impact injuries in matches, which you can’t do anything about.

“A couple of them have been high-impact injuries in training, which happens when you train at high intensity. There is not a repeated pattern of soft-tissue injuries, so it’s not over- or under-training, it’s just bad luck.”

The table below shows the varied nature of Brighton players’ worst injuries (based on consecutive league games missed this season). Solly March’s knee injury carried over from last season, while the length of Igor Julio’s lay-off is based on the Brazilian central defender being ruled out from January for the rest of the campaign.

The search for answers is never-ending, as Brighton’s quest to qualify for Europe again reaches a crescendo. They face up to 12 matches in 58 days in the league and FA Cup after the March international break, with players travelling all over the world to represent their countries.

Hurzeler told The Athletic: “I have spent a lot of time with the medics, physios, sports science, the performance guys, talking about the situation. We always try to analyse the matches, but we also try to analyse the current situations with injuries.

“We are still trying to find the right solutions and we are on the right way. We are very honest with each other. We have changed some small things, the details we thought might help us keep the players more available on the pitch. They are very grateful that we can have an honest exchange, where not everyone has the same opinion. We have been very unlucky, a lot of injuries happened because of a bad contact or a bad tackle from an opponent. So, this is also part of the truth.

“We are all not happy about the situation, but we knew it would take time for players to adapt. We didn’t know injuries would happen because of bad tackles, but it is about finding solutions. That is what we are always trying to do.”

Additional reporting: Liam Tharme and Mark Carey

(Top photo: Sebastian Frej/Getty Images)