Brighton & Hove Albion have revealed plans to move the away section at the Amex Stadium to give the team a greater home advantage.
Visiting fans will be shifted into the south-west corner of the stadium from the 2027-28 season.
Brighton recently changed the pre-match music running order, delaying the club anthem ‘Sussex By The Sea’ from the entry of the teams onto the pitch until just before kick-off in a bid to boost the atmosphere.
Head of commercial Russell Wood told The Athletic: “We want everyone to feel welcome. However, we want to win football matches. We are definitely taking steps towards competitive advantage.”
Relocating 3,000 away supporters from their current position, occupying most of the stand behind the south goal, will be the final phase of a £40million ($50.8m) upgrade of the club’s 13-year-old home ground, aimed at improving the matchday experience for Brighton supporters.
A new fan zone called ‘The Terrace’, currently under construction outside the north-west corner of the stadium, opens later this season. The club says the indoor and outdoor sports bar facility, with space for around 3,000 supporters in total, will be “the biggest in the Premier League“.
GO DEEPER
The changes Brighton are making off the pitch to make the Amex their ‘castle’
Phase two of the project, funded by owner-chairman Tony Bloom, will see the club store doubled in size to over two floors, taking over the upper floor which currently houses the club museum and Dick’s Bar (named after former chairman Dick Knight).
The club museum will move permanently to the city centre in 2026-27, and Dick’s Bar will move to the north concourse which will be refurbished in the summer of 2025. Work on the new store starts after Arsenal’s visit on January 4.
Phase three of the overhaul, a new hospitality area added to the north stand for the 2026-27 season, will increase the capacity of the stadium to 32,500. Other plans include the introduction of safe standing in the north stand in 2025 and in the relocated away section.
Wood added: “We always want to be a club that is continually developing, driving things forward. If you do the same thing you have always done, you go backwards.
“If you go back 13 years, it was a 22,000-seater stadium. It very quickly became 25,000, 28,000, 30,000, 31,000, 31,800 and this will get us to 32,500.
“We’d be talking serious cosmetics if we wanted to go, to say 40,000, but there are little pockets where we can pinch a few hundred more seats and we will continue to make changes. We will definitely not be a club that stands still.”
Brighton lost 3-1 to rivals Crystal Palace on December 15, their first home league defeat of the season. Fabian Hurzeler’s side host Brentford in their next fixture on December 27.
(Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
