Brighton chief executive explains groundbreaking women's stadium plan
Brighton Chief Executive Paul Barber says he wants a purpose-built stadium for the women's team to help "fuel the growth" of the game.
Albion are exploring a way to return to the city of Brighton permanently, with the search ongoing for a site to host the new stadium. The women's team, currently 9th in the WSL, play the majority of their home matches at Crawley Town's Broadfield Stadium. Occasional fixtures are hosted at the Amex stadium, the main club stadia where the men's team play every home fixture.
Brighton have played in the top flight of the women's game since 2018, with the Amex also hosting matches at Euro 2022. And Barber believes that creating a stadium more catered towards female fans and families would help grow Brighton's match-going fanbase.
"We think there is an opportunity to build a stadium specifically for female athletes," Barber told Sky Sports. "With a slightly different bias in terms of the people that come to watch the women's team, where there are more women, more children, more families.
"Stadiums in this country tend to be designed for male athletes and usually for a male audience. If we can find the land and make it viable, we'd love to create a stadium for our women's team specifically designed for female athletes.
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"This, we believe, would the first of its kind in the world. If we're able to do that hopefully we can fuel the growth of women's football in this part of the country."
Brighton play the majority of their WSL fixtures at Crawley TownThe average crowd size at domestic women's football matches has increased dramatically in the last decade, leading to further questions of whether teams should now play every game at their clubs main stadium. In the last year, the WSL attendance record has been broken twice, with Arsenal setting the latest landmark when 54,115 watched their opening day defeat by Liverpool.
Manchester United and Chelsea have also played multiple fixtures at Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge respectively, with more planned in the future. Leicester and Bristol are the only two clubs in the league who play every league fixture at their main stadium, like their men's teams.
Manchester City and Chelsea both own stadiums that are shared between the women's team and reserve or academy sides. The majority of the league share with lower league or non-league men's sides. However, the teams usually schedule a minimum of at least one game at the main stadium. The only exception last season was West Ham.
And Brighton feel the time has come to explore an option somewhere between playing at Crawley and moving every women's fixture to the Amex Stadium, where their men's team have played since 2011.
Paul Barber (L) has spent over a decade at Brighton, first arriving in 2012"We think there is a gap between the 3,000 to 5,000 crowds we're attracting at Crawley Town," added Barber. "Which has served us well in the last five years of the Women's Super League, and playing the main stadia (the Amex) which is 32,000.
"Something in between Crawley and the Amex, we think this could work well. We need to build the audience for our women's team. Ideally if we can build it in a modular form, so then at some point in the future when crowds are big enough the women's team can be moved into the main stadium.
"We could adapt the facilities and the concourses, giving more choice to female supporters. We think that we be a good plan. But we've got a lot of work to do first and a we've got to work with a lot of local partners to make it happen."
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