Barry Lloyd: A genuine Brighton and Hove Albion legend – Here's why

For readers of a certain age, the irony of both the subject of this tribute and the author would not be lost.

Almost 40 years ago, I started my ‘journalistic’ career as part of the fanzine culture, at first writing in the Brighton offering, “Gulls Eye” and latterly editing it.

It’s fair to say back then Barry Lloyd and I didn’t send each other Christmas Cards. The word nemesis would be quite apt, but with even more irony that after his departure from the Albion and my progression into local radio we struck up a friendship and a level of respect that remained to the time of his sad passing last weekend.

The crux being, and it took me a long time to realise this, that as fans, including fanzine writers, we think we know so much about the club, there’s almost a transparency, but that is so far from the truth, because what we actually get to know is almost minimal.

Barry had enjoyed an eventful career even before arriving at the Albion as Alan Mullery’s assistant. in the summer of 1986, a former England youth international, once valued as the most expensive teenager in domestic football, £70,000 when he left Chelsea for Fulham in 1968, he’d played over 300 games for the Cottagers, followed by brief spells at Hereford, Brentford and with the Houston Hurricanes in the NASL before embarking on a very successful Non-League managerial career with Yeovil and Worthing respectively.

When Mullery was sacked in January 1987, with the Albion sitting 13th in the old Division Two, Lloyd was appointed as his successor, but both the dire situation and the task in hand were made abundantly clear to him.

Despite being in the First Division and two lucrative F A Cup final appearances less than four years before, the money had run out. Relegation was not an issue (the Albion did go down finishing 22nd), the main priority was to get to the end of the season and basically have a total clear out of all the big wage earners.

Which throws up one of the great Albion urban myths, when Barry apparently disrespected Welsh international Dean Saunders by not picking him.

Basically, Saunders wasn’t picked, at the request of then chairman Bryan Bedson, because Brighton didn’t have the money to pay his contracted appearance fee.

So, nothing to do with Barry’s opinion of the player or the player who replaced Saunders, a gripe the Welshman appears to still trot out to this day!

And as one of the aforementioned high earners, the club were also prepared to let him walk out of the Goldstone Ground that summer for free, yet Barry managed to get £60,000 from Oxford United, yet for many years fans criticised both Lloyd and the Albion for selling him on the cheap.

A £60,000 profit on someone you were prepared to let walk away? Sounds in the realms of Victor Kiam to me!

With the decks cleared, Lloyd set up about rebuilding the Seagulls, putting together a virtually new squad which immediately won promotion from division three in 1987/88.

He nearly went one better, when after a couple of seasons of consolidation, he took the team to the Division Two Play off final at Wembley in June 1991, one game away from a return to the top flight, but it was not to be with Neil Warnock’s Notts County running out 3-1 victors.

But even with over 35,000 Albion fans at Wembley, there was the backstory that we didn’t know, where the Albion board had told Barry win or lose, there was once again no money for any credible budget the following season. Barry later told me his biggest fear would have been to have got back to the top flight and been embarrassed with a weaker squad.

Personally, having been given the relevant information some years later, I think it was in the summer of 1991 that Barry made the biggest mistake(s) in his career.

With his stock high after the Play Off near miss, he turned both the managers jobs at Chelsea and Southampton down, purely out of loyalty to the Albion, and the belief his side could have another go at promotion.

A loyalty that later him saw him have the dual position of both manager and chief executive at the Albion.

It was as CEO that he attempted to take the Albion into administration in the Autumn of 1993, a move that would have eventually almost certainly cost him his job, but secured the future of the Goldstone Ground, he was on the steps of the High Court waiting to go through the process when Bill Archer and Greg Stanley arrived to immediately abort the plans and go with their ‘rescue package’, of which every Albion fans knows the eventual outcome.

Yet over 30 years later, Barry’s part in some of the darkest days in the club history can only be viewed in a positive light, a testament to the man and his character.

To reiterate as fans we don’t see the full picture, or get anywhere near what lies beneath the surface. Without doubt the more Albion fans learn about the sadly departed Barry Lloyd, they will come to the conclusion which I did some years ago that, whilst legend is a title bandied around far too often, in Albion terms, and with what he did at Worthing previously, he was just that.