Six days on from one of the finest performances in their history at Old Trafford, Brighton & Hove Albion endured one of their most frustrating at home to Newcastle on Saturday, forced to split the points 0-0 despite a dominant display in general play.

It’s still all smiles ahead of their trip to West Ham on Sunday as they look to back up last season’s finish of ninth under Graham Potter, their best in five years in the top division. The Athletic’s Andy Naylor explained their continued upwards trajectory is no surprise given the off-field stability and on-field fluidity they’ve developed under Potter.

‘[Clubs] could learn quite a lot from the way Brighton is structured, I think they’re a good role model in the way they do things. They know they can’t compete with the big clubs financially so they have to find other ways of getting an edge… one of those is the recruitment of cheap players, young players more often than not, and developing them through Potter’s coaching skills’, Naylor told Box2Box.

‘One of the things Graham does is he takes players out of their comfort zone. They might regard themselves as a central midfielder or right back, but if you look through that squad now there are players almost without exception that have played in multiple positions. That happens game to game, and sometimes during.’

Any youth-heavy team needs guidance, and Potter is also extracting Indian summers from Premier League veterans Adam Lallana and Danny Welbeck, the latter terrorising the club where he made his name over a decade ago, last week.

‘Danny was excellent. The key for him is he’s had an injury-free end to last season. He then had a really strong pre-season, only Lewis Dunk played more pre-season minutes than him. So he’s hit the ground running, and you saw what he can produce when in that kind of health.

‘He’s also got experience and influence. They’re essentially a young team, but they do have experience entwined within that. It was interesting that Potter used Lallana just behind Danny, higher than anticipated when we saw the team sheet, and that worked really well.’

Both Welbeck and Lallana have their international careers behind them, but Naylor expects Brighton to still field strong representation at November’s Qatar World Cup. Although the added game load may cost the Seagulls at the back end of the season, it still represents a boon for a club that spent the first part of the century largely below the Championship.

‘It’s perhaps an indication of the club’s progress that they could have as many as eight or nine head to the World Cup. [Goalkeeper] Robert Sanchez might not get much game time, but he’ll be there with Spain, for sure.

‘You’ve got two players for Ecuador: Moisés Caicedo, this lad is a star in the making, he ran the midfield at Old Trafford at 20 years of age. He’s got a Brighton teammate in Jeremy Sarmiento, another attacking prospect they’ve signed from Benfica last summer who we’ll see as part of the World Cup.

‘Tariq Lamptey switched nationalities to Ghana from England… so I’m sure we’ll see him there. Kaoru Mitoma is a Japanese winger who they signed last summer… so Brighton will have more players than you might expect of a club their size, I suspect more than many of the bigger clubs in the Premier League.’