Mel Phillips at Brighton: gone too soon?

After the surprise sacking of Brighton’s head coach, SOOYL explores her tenure at the club.

Brighton sacked Melissa Phillips as women’s manager with the club sitting 10th in the table, six points clear of the relegation place. The announcement came as a surprise to most of the league, with the club saying performances had fallen below the standard they expected given the investment made in the summer. So did Mel Phillips fall short - or will this decision prove short sighted?

Phillips rose to prominence in English football at London City Lionesses, leading the side to sixth place in her first season in charge and a second-place finish behind Liverpool in the 2021/22 campaign. By January 2023, London City were top of the Championship at the halfway point of the season, when Phillips left for a brief stint as an assistant coach at Angel City FC. She took the top job at Brighton in April 2023, arriving at a club sitting bottom of the table (with two games in hand).

Phillips’ tenure began with a strong show of intent; having lost 4-0 at home to title chasers Manchester United days before her appointment, Brighton then produced a tenacious display in their FA Cup semi-final against them, though ultimately falling victim to a late Rachel Williams winner. The Seagulls’ two wins and one draw from their remaining league games (along with Reading’s weak end to the season) was enough to save them from relegation, and the outlook seemed positive for the team.

These promising signs were enough to attract a mass of summer signings - particularly eye-catching arrivals included Pauline Bremer from Champions League finalists Wolfsburg, and defender Maria Thorisdottir, previously of Manchester United and Chelsea. Many of these transfers brought significant experience and league-winning pedigree.

Phillips cited the ambition at the club as a key incentive attracting players. While survival was the name of the game when she took the helm, the club were looking at 2023/24 as an opportunity to progress up the table, with the eventual aim of becoming a top four club. The club appeared to be all-in behind Phillips, allowing her to lead a total remodelling of the squad -  so much so that 13 players also left the club. That leap of faith was rewarded with promising pre-season performances - and the campaign began as scripted with a 2-1 win at Everton, a team they lost to by the same scoreline at the end of the previous campaign. 

So where did it all go wrong? 

Despite impressive investment and clear ambition, Brighton are currently only one place above where they finished last season and have recorded only three league wins. They have dropped points to sides spanning more or less the whole table - their second game was a disappointing loss to relegation strugglers West Ham, and they were beaten by top sides Chelsea and Arsenal. Far from their ambition of competing with the top teams, Brighton have found themselves on the wrong side of a gap in quality with mid-table sides Tottenham and Liverpool, against whom they fell to 3-1 and 4-0 defeats respectively.

There were flashes of positivity, such as holding Manchester United to a 2-2 draw and particularly a shock win over title chasers Manchester City. But the inconsistency in performances was cited by the club’s management as the reason for Phillips’ dismissal. 

Technical director David Weir said: “This is not a decision which has been taken lightly, but we feel it is vital for the progress we want to see in the Women’s Super League. We have invested heavily in the women’s squad and infrastructure going into this season, and results and performances have not been at the level we had expected, given that investment.”

At first glance, the numbers appear to back Weir’s assertion - particularly Brighton’s low position in the table. However, has the decision to abandon Phillips’ vision been too hasty?

10 months is all Melissa Phillips has had to set about turning Brighton into a club that could stretch the top four, and she spoke multiple times of her commitment to bringing the club’s potential to fruition. It appeared that her vision was what attracted so many experienced talents over the summer, a recruitment drive that she had a heavy hand in. Nobody would deny that the new signings haven’t integrated exactly as hoped - but it’s difficult to see how cutting ties with the woman who helped curate such a strong squad will improve cohesion. Instead, the feeling in some circles is that the club’s leadership has panicked because of the league standings - but even a basic look beyond the order of the table shows how little there is to truly panic about. Though six points off the bottom when Phillips was sacked, Brighton are also only seven points from the top six. Very few WSL fans or pundits would put any money on them falling back into the Championship - nor, at the start of the season, would anyone have expected them to compete for the top four. The disappointment to be sitting so low in the table is understandable - but the sense among players was still, at least outwardly, optimistic about Phillips’ plan, and understanding of the time it would take.

Speaking to Sky in an interview published only last week, Maria Thorisdottir spoke of a ‘bright future’ ahead under Philips.

 “You don't build a team over a few days so it will take time. This season, we are trying lots of new things so it will go up and down and it has.” 

Describing the ‘building’ of a team might feel dramatic when Brighton are an established club - but given the scale of activity over the summer, it’s not far from the truth. The club’s first starting lineup of this season had only 6 players in common with the last of the previous campaign.  Adjusting to such wide-scale change in personnel is a huge task, as is developing a group identity - Phillips was forced to focus solely on survival in her first months in charge, and only this season was she able to begin instilling her philosophy in players. There were clear flashes of the team’s potential under her leadership, particularly the upset they pulled off at Manchester City - but also by the spirit shown in some of their losses.

Many fans have been disappointed by the decision to cut her tenure short - she becomes the club’s third manager since the start of last season, but many had hoped she would be the one to end that high turnover and implement some consistency. Media reports indicate there was no feeling Phillips’ job was at risk, and she led the club’s pre-match press conference only hours before her dismissal was announced. The abrupt nature of her dismissal harks back to last season’s chaos, and could prove an extra disruption to the squad’s integration.

The man charged with avoiding that negative impact, at least for now, is interim boss Mikey Harris, who crosses over from the men’s academy. He faces a trip to Manchester United on Sunday - the same fixture with which Phillips began her tenure, and the same fixture in which Brighton produced a highlight of their season so far in a 2-2 draw in November. With the squad so heavily changed over the summer, this will be the first time many of them have played for Brighton without Phillips in charge. The match could be an interesting test of whether Phillips was the positive influence many signed hoping to play under - and whether that positive effect is now gone.