Albion ’s current jaunt to the USA is not quite a first. Exiled fan Ingram Losner from San Diego, California, recalls their previous visit - 44 years ago - and expects this trip to be very different.

 

As Albion embark on their pre-season tour to America’s East Coast as part of the Premier League’s Summer Series, only the most statistically obsessed fans with long memories will recall the club’s last tour to the US.

Because this is actually the second time that the footballing Seagulls have flown across the pond.

But this time, the circumstances are very different.

Albion are now seen as an established Premier League club, playing in a way that has excited those well beyond the shores of England, operating within a footballing and operating framework that is the envy of many.

They are seen as one of the Premier League’s most progressive and inclusive “brand leaders” which is why they were a natural choice to be selected as one of only six teams to be a part of the inaugural Summer Series, all games of which will be televised live by the NBC network.

You have to rewind 44 years to the late spring of 1979 to catch a glimpse of the last time Albion played a match in the US.

The Seagulls had just won promotion for the first time to the top flight of English football.

Their charismatic chairman at the time was Mike Bamber, an ambitious property developer whose business relationship with Bob Bell, a San Diego-based sports entrepreneur and real estate lawyer and developer, enabled the post-season tour idea to become a reality.

It was intended to be a celebration for the promotion-winning team, Bamber’s vice-chairman at the time was the late Harry Bloom, of blessed memory, whose love for the club inspired, as we know, one of his grandchildren a generation or so later to embark upon his own Brighton and Hove Albion journey.

The tour took in three games on the West Coast, including one in San Diego where the attendance was just over 5,000.

In one of Alan Mullery’s autobiographies, there was an additional zero added to the figure which was either wishful thinking or an inadvertent error!

Mullers could be excused for overstating the crowd number since his memory might have been dimmed by the abuse he was taking from all sections after he was sent-off for rushing on the field to admonish the referee for failing to award a free-kick following a nasty challenge by Sockers legend Juli Veee on Peter “Leo” Sayer.

Abused by all sections of the crowd bar five people. Yours truly and three friends from Brighton who had driven across America to attend the game, plus an expat who had emigrated in 1955 from Woodingdean.

For what it’s worth, the game finished 2-2 and post-game discussions between the respective owners included them negotiating a possible loan deal for Peter O’Sullivan to join the Sockers.

It was not a particularly happy tour. The hotels were sub-standard, the players were expected to perform at open training sessions and at other promotional events and there was a general disconnect between the organisers and the players as to how much of the tour was to be business and how much was to be a celebration. The current trip as part the Summer Series will be a little different.

The hotel will be first class, the organisation will be infused and packaged with the resources and infrastructure of the most lucrative league in the world, interactions with the growing band of the Stateside Seagulls “flock” (now over 1,000 strong) will be professionally staged and the worldwide community of Brighton and Hove Albion fans will be further strengthened.

Albion fans have experienced a lot of well-chronicled ups and downs in the 44 eventful years that separate those two American tours.

And whereas the last tour was a little disconnected, a little hastily put together, not particularly well planned (a metaphor perhaps for the tribulations that were about to afflict the club a few years later) and perhaps a little ahead of its time, this one will be meticulous in its organisation and will set the stage for the club to grow its ‘brand’ and fanbase among a nation of sports addicts hungry for the kind of inspiring stories that are now part of Albion legend.

Yes, we’ve come a long way together…….

Ingram Losner