“The vision is very realistic”: Why clever recruitment could help Brighton realise their WSL top four dreams at last – scout report

To say that Brighton Women had a turbulent time of things during the 2022/23 campaign would be putting it very mildly, with four different coaches taking charge at different stages of the season (Hope Powell, her assistant Amy Merricks for two interim spells, former Bayern Munich Frauen boss Jens Scheuer and ex-London City Lionesses manager Melissa Phillips) and the resulting lack of coherency leading to them spending the majority of the season attempting to stave off the threat of relegation.

However, despite the odds not seemingly being in their favour, they did manage to avoid the drop, and attention will very quickly be turning to the future as they try to make sure that the same mistakes are avoided. They do have lofty ambitions to be a top-four side in years to come, and, with the financial backing and infrastructure investment that they have off the field, it is a vision that is very realistic.

For now, though, attention will be on next season and improving their on-field performances, and, having appointed a progressive coach in Phillips, they now need to provide her with players who will help to usher in a new era for the team. This is something that the former London City manager is reportedly relishing, with the departures of long-serving players Megan Walsh, Victoria Williams, Megan Connolly, Danielle Carter and Kayleigh Green allowing her to really make her mark on the squad and to bring in players that she feels will suit her tactics.

With Brighton unlikely to attract too many star names, they may need to look at lower leagues to find new faces, and Phillips’ extensive experience of the Women’s Championship would come in useful if they decided to go in that direction. With this in mind, this tactical analysis will look first at how Brighton have been performing under her guidance and will then suggest some potential targets in the second tier that the club could look at, showing how they would match Phillips’ brand of football and how they could help to prevent them from being drawn into another relegation scrap.

Attack

When Phillips was appointed as Brighton and Hove Albion Women’s new head coach, there were many who saw it as a really difficult ask for her to keep them up, with the club on the rocks and struggling to pick up the necessary points to help them move away from the drop zone.

However, this didn’t seem to faze her, and what she did was to strip everything back and ask her players to focus on getting the basics right, with her showing a desire to keep things simple on the field and to not introduce too many complicated ideas.

This led to a few positive performances early in her tenure, which restored the players’ confidence in what they were doing and gave them added belief that they could stay up, and what really helped with that was Phillips’ desire to give each of them just a few basic instructions and to play them in positions that suited their capabilities. That meant that situations like this were common, when they got into promising areas and were able to test their opponents’ resolve, as Phillips wanted them to do more of, and the goal that Green scored against West Ham United Women here by heading in the cross from Katie Robinson was not something that would have come as easily to them earlier on in the campaign.