Brighton 23/24 Fantasy Flashback

Joe Williams
Jul 14, 2024
6 min read

Before we look ahead to this season's prospects, let's first digest some takeaways from Brighton’s most recent season in our 23/24 Fantasy Flashback series. In this year's 24/25 Draft Kit, we are featuring both a Fantasy Flashback and a Fantasy Forecast for every single Premier League team. The flashbacks will be available on Draft Kit launch day, while the forecasts will drop closer to draft day. Check the 24/25 Draft Kit main page often, as it's updated constantly!

In addition to reviewing top Draft PL fantasy contributors, Brighton’s Fantasy Flashback will highlight a breakout player and a fantasy flop, analyze the impact of any injuries suffered by Seagulls players, and review the team's performance as a whole. Then, be sure to check out the Brighton 24/25 Fantasy Forecast to find out whether last season was a fluke or if we predict more of the same.

Check out our 24/25 Draft Kit for all the pre-season information you could ever need: Draft Rankings, Team Previews, Mock Drafts, Strategy, Draft 101. We've got it all!

Brighton 23/24 Fantasy Flashback

Quick Links:

23/24 Player Performance

Injury Impact

Overall Team Performance

23/24 Brighton Player Performance

Let's review how Seagulls players fared in 23/24, with an emphasis on their Draft Premier League fantasy assets. We'll also discuss any pertinent info regarding rotation, managerial tactics, and injuries below. What can we learn from their performance in the last campaign?

Note: The following table is interactive. Desktop users can apply the Filter, Group, and Sort buttons to arrange the data to their preferences. Mobile users can tap on a player card to view all data points. The table can be reset to its default state by refreshing the page.

To say that Brighton & Hove Albion had a challenging season in 23/24 after experiencing so much success in 22/23 is probably a massive understatement, especially for supporters of the club. We’ll touch on that more in the Overall Team Performance section. But as art mirrors life, we see unfortunate similarities in our Draft Premier League fantasy game. In the 22/23 campaign, BHA had five players post an average of 10 fantasy points per start (PPS), which is largely understood to be the baseline for a valuable fantasy asset. Four of those five players started at least 24 games. In 23/24, four Seagulls posted 10+ PPS, and only one started more than 18 games.

That one player was Pascal Gross, who is a fantasy monster. He amassed 470 fantasy points (FPts), placing him 9th overall, squarely between Son and Odegaard. Perennially undervalued as a fantasy asset, will we finally see him taken in round 1 in 24/25 drafts? Joining Gross in the 10+ PPS club in 23/24 were Solly March, Kaoru Mitoma, and Joao Pedro. They started 38 matches combined out of a possible 152 (largely because of injury and rotation). Obviously, this lot will feature heavily in the Injury Impact section of this flashback.

Those four players aside, the only fantasy footballing bright spot was Simon Adingra, who will be highlighted as our 23/24 Breakout Player below. Every single other BHA player was a streamer at best in this most recent season. With a leaky defense that kept exactly six clean sheets (the first of which didn’t occur until a scoreless draw with West Ham on January 2nd), the Seagulls defenders were a fantasy death trap. One of them is languishing below in our Fantasy Flop section. And if you bought into the hype surrounding Evan Ferguson, Facundo Buonanotte, or Ansu Fati, you were equally crestfallen over their seasons.

23/24 Breakout Player

Simon Adingra

Position: Forward

23/24 Points: 260 (28th best FWD)

23/24 Points Per Start: 9.5 (25 starts)

Now 22 years old, Adingra well and truly announced himself to Draft Premier League managers last season. When compared to his teammates, he was tied for 2nd in goals (6), 2nd in shots on target (22), 3rd in key passes (33), 2nd in accurate crosses (14), and top in successful dribbles (50). All of this meant that only 23% of his fantasy points were dependent on attacking returns as he posted 7.6 ghost points per start (gPPS).

Underperforming both his xG and xA, even a minor regression to the mean should see Adingra over the 10 PPS mark, especially if he can secure more play time now that Signore Rotazione is out the door. Adingra is an exciting talent bound for bigger and better things and 24/25 will likely be the last year he’s value in drafts.

23/24 Fantasy Flop

Pervis Estupinan

Position: Defender

23/24 Points: 132 (54th best DEF)

23/24 Points Per Start: 7.4 (15 starts)

Injuries can certainly ruin a player’s season, immediately tanking their fantasy value. However, injuries (especially those occurring in non-injury-prone players) do not necessarily make a player a “flop”. Thus, as tempted as we are to coin the likes of Mitoma and March as flops, Estupinan is the man truly deserving of this scarlet letter after last season. A player who averaged 9.2 PPS in 22/23 saw that number fall to just 7.4 PPS in 23/24.

Partly due to injury, Estupinan just never found true form last season. His reliance on goals, assists, and clean sheets for his fantasy points (%GACS) rose from 41% to 45%. And considering the sheer lack of clean sheets for BHA, his numbers suffered. As the season wore on, so did his body. An April 28 article from The Athletic reported that Estupinan was to undergo ankle surgery, which would keep him out of the Copa America and the beginning of the 24/25 season. Given his difficulty finding form last season after injury, drafting Pervis this summer only to hold him until September or October hoping he makes the XI is a non-starter for us.

Injury Impact

Brighton suffered 20 injuries in the 23/24 season, which led to 159 total games missed, ranking them the 7th most affected Premier League team in that department. Injuries were not the canary in the coal mine that many will lead you to believe they were. In other words, they were a contributing factor to BHA’s poor season, but not the root cause. More on that in a moment.

The impact that injuries really had on Brighton is far harder to quantify. Much like we focus on high WAR (wins above replacement) players in the fantasy game, the replacement players in real-life squads usually can’t hold a candle to the starters they’re subbed in for. And when losing players long term whose quality is as high as Solly March and Kaoru Mitoma, their absence also negatively affects their teammates’ stats. Naturally, stats like xG and xA fall for all remaining players when you subtract world class talent from the team. This is just one of many reasons that Brighton & Hove Albion players should see an (almost) blanket improvement in their fantasy scores in this coming season.

Brighton's Overall Team Performance

Hard Truth 1: Brighton had neither the squad depth nor the team infrastructure to compete in Europe. Instead what we saw was a horrifying witch’s brew of fatigue, rotation, injuries, and form struggles, which resulted in the grounding of the high flying Seagulls of 22/23. They will not be competing in Europe this season, which is a great thing for Draft PL fantasy football.

Hard Truth 2: Roberto De Zerbi is more Dr. Frankenstein than Einstein. It’s not hard to fathom that the man who set a Premier League record in 23/24 for goalkeeper changes struggled to create a cohesive team. His obsessive tinkering was true in all positions, too. A March 2024 article by CBS Soccer states, “[b]y way of comparison, a club in a similar position -- competing in the top half domestically while balancing Europe's second tier competition -- West Ham have 11 starters, each with over 2,000 minutes compared to Brighton's five. Only five Hammers have played between 600 and 1,999 minutes, for De Zerbi that number is 19.” When teams lack cohesion, they allow more goals defensively and score fewer on offense. The 23/24 Seagulls epitomized this.

Hard Truth 3: Outliers are exceptions. This common sense mantra is one that we should have been repeating to ourselves last summer after Brighton’s astounding 22/23 season. Instead, their draft assets rocketed up draft boards, only to ultimately severely disappoint fantasy managers. With talented and capable players, Fabian Hurzeler in as manager, and a return to fitness, we should expect Brighton to better their 23/24 season performance without fooling ourselves into thinking they’ll repeat the heroics of 22/23.