Promotion with FC St. Pauli, youngest Premier League coach ever at Brighton & Hove Albion and a good start in England: Coach Fabian Hürzeler’s year is a great success story. And yet he has to and wants to continue learning.
Fame came as a rectangle of a restaurant. With tomato sauce on dough. Topped with potatoes and currywurst. At the end of October, Hürzeler held a piece of pizza in his hands. But it wasn’t just any pizza, it was his: The Hurzeler. Named after him, Fabian Marc Hürzeler, German-Swiss, 31 years old, coach of the Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albion.
Now in England, affection may sometimes be expressed a little more quickly, more enthusiastically and sometimes in a more bizarre way than we are used to in this country. But the fact that Hürzeler, who had moved from Hamburg to the south of England just a few weeks earlier, was given this honor speaks for his work. And for his continued rapid rise.
Promotion is just one of the Hürzeler highlights in 2024
Hürzeler’s football year 2024 in fast motion: Second division champions and Bundesliga promoted team with FC St. Pauli, move to England, youngest Premier League coach of all time, coach of the month and all in all a solid start in the best football world. League of the World.
Little of what Hürzeler, who was born in Houston, Texas, has achieved this year, is a coincidence. Maybe you ignore the pizza. He – who, according to his self-description, “lives football 23 hours a day” – is far too keen and to some extent obsessed with work for that. A tinkerer. A strategist. Someone who tries to take some of the randomness away from the situational sport of football. With meticulousness, ambition and adaptability.
Hürzeler was a good fit for St. Pauli – and a good fit for Brighton
This made him a very good fit for FC St. Pauli – in tandem with sports director Andreas Bornemann – and was carried on his shoulders and hands through the Millerntor Stadium when promotion was certain.
This makes it a very good fit for Brighton – once known primarily as a seaside resort for Londoners fleeing the big city due to its kilometer-long promenade, but now one of the fastest growing regions in Great Britain economically.
Ambitions of club and coach match
Because Hürzeler also wants to continue to grow. That was already the case with the brown-whites, who, after taking over the coaching position from Timo Schultz in 2022, he transformed from a second division relegation candidate to a promotion candidate and finally to champions within months. And it was also the case with FC Pipinsried, a Bavarian fifth division club, which he took over as player-coach at the age of 24 after he had failed to have his own career as a player despite having good talents.
Shortly after taking up his post in England, Hürzeler, who has both German and Swiss and American citizenship, said, according to the “Neuer Zürcher Zeitung”, that he no longer wanted to be “recognized and seen as little Brighton & Hove Albion”. A demanding statement that seems to hit a nerve in the city and the club.
“Seagulls” as a high-profile development club
The club, also known as the Seagulls, has established itself as a permanent member of the Premier League since promotion in 2017. Graham Potter, coach from 2019 to 2022, built a defensively robust unit. Successor Roberto De Zerbi, a role model for Hürzeler, developed a demanding style of play focused on ball possession in the two years that followed.
It is now up to Hürzeler to develop things further, building on this foundation. His attention to detail and innovative spirit – for example in standard situations – fit well with the way the Seagulls work, one of the most prominent English clubs for the development of young, talented players in recent years. Between 2017 and 2024, the club is said to have achieved a reported surplus of one billion euros.
Brighton wants to take the next step with Hürzeler
Such sums can only be raised through innovative and partly different methods, and Hürzeler’s way of working and his demeanor suit the academic orientation of the club. The club works specifically on data-based analysis and recruitment. Developing and selling players is a must for a club the size of Brighton in the multi-billion Premier League business.
But it shouldn’t be that alone anymore. Brighton, owned by the city’s gambling billionaire Tony Bloom, wants to look up, attack and annoy the “big ones” – the Liverpools, the Manchester Citys, the Chelseas. Last summer, the club invested around 100 million euros more in new players than FC Bayern Munich (243 to 142 million euros).
“Attack” in England instead of “defense” in the Bundesliga
Hürzeler is supposed to lead this project by Bloom and Brighton. For him, the move in the summer meant the second promotion within two months – and “attack” in the Premier League instead of “defense”, in the sense of relegation battle, in the Bundesliga. But as in Hamburg, despite the enormous investments, Hürzeler has to prove in England that he can shape and improve individual players, such as St. Pauli captain Jackson Irvine or defense boss Eric Smith, just as much as an entire team. And he’s trying that in the Premier League in a similar way to what he did in Germany, as the English daily “The Guardian” reported in the fall.
By not only seeing the player, but the person behind them with their specific characteristics. By listening and by asking questions. According to the “Guardian”, he did this so excessively when he was working at Tottenham at the time that Spurs coach Ange Postecoglou had to refer him to a colleague from his coaching team.
But it is precisely Hürzeler’s willingness and desire to learn that have brought him his great successes in recent years and especially in 2024. It remains to be seen whether he, who more or less rushed from success to success as a coach in Germany, can also deal with defeats.
“He may not like to hear that. But at some point he has to learn how to lose again.”
— St. Paulis President Oke Göttlich
If you believe Oke Göttlich, there is an important lesson to be learned for the long-time newcomer: “He still has a big challenge ahead of him. He may not like to hear that. But at some point he has to learn again how to lose,” he said St. Pauli’s president called after him after the initial successes in England with highly publicized victories over both Manchester clubs and Tottenham.
And Hürzeler currently has a good opportunity to do so. He and his team have been winless for six competitive games (four draws, two defeats). A new experience for the 31-year-old, who described himself in the “Phrasenmäher” podcast as an “adrenaline junkie” for whom every victory gives him an enormous boost. He didn’t have to deal with such a “drought” in Hamburg.
Advice from Pep Guardiola
Before he moved to Brighton in the summer, he spoke to Manchester City’s star coach Pep Guardiola on the phone and asked him what it would take to be consistently successful in England. Hürzeler said in the podcast that the Catalan advised him, among other things: “You have to keep developing your game idea.” Just as you always have to develop a restaurant’s menu in order to be – and remain – competitive in the market. With a new pizza, for example.
And so Hürzeler, who probably fears nothing more than standing still, will look for and find new ingredients in the new year to expand his team’s “menu” and advance its development. From his perspective, just because this year was the most successful of his football career doesn’t mean that 2025 couldn’t be even better.
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Sports current | 12/31/2024 | 11:17 am
