The Premier League fixture announcement took up the attention of most football fans on Thursday morning as they learned who their clubs were going to be playing and when next season.

Every club was obviously keen to get involved – it’s a big event that affects all of the teams and their fans. They have a duty to post their fixtures to inform the fans.

One club took that perhaps a bit too literally.

Brighton and Hove Albion are gearing up for their second Premier League season after an impressive march to survival last year. This time, they’ll be hoping for an easier ride, but they’ll want to enjoy it all the same. That’s probably why fixture announcement day was so big for them.

And yet, the club’s approach to dealing with the event on social media was different to all the others: it was a little bit strange.

Most clubs posted a couple of graphics and asked their fans if they were happy with the fixtures. Usually the focus was on the games the fans were most interested in: first and last days of the season, derby games, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day. These are the ones that matter, and the rest is just scheduling, really.

✍???? Hosting the Clarets…#FixtureReleaseDay #BHAFC ????⚪️ pic.twitter.com/oHCgRipReX

— Brighton & Hove Albion ⚽️ (@OfficialBHAFC) June 14, 2018

But throughout the day Brighton posted a different graphic for each and every game (home and away) and it seemed like an awful lot of work for very little in return.

The Seagulls are by no means the biggest club in the league, but they still have 180k followers on Twitter. So to see a tweet come out every ten minutes or so throughout the day (including while the World Cup opening game was taking place) and mentioning games like Brighton at home to Huddersfield on March 2nd was certainly strange – especially when they managed to pick up just a handful of likes and retweets.

✍???? Starting March…#FixtureReleaseDay #BHAFC ????⚪️ pic.twitter.com/JQsfnqgt1l

— Brighton & Hove Albion ⚽️ (@OfficialBHAFC) June 14, 2018

The engagement shouldn’t be surprising: fans care about their fixtures, but they really don’t give a hoot who they’re playing on any random week in March.

You wonder what the point was. It’s Boring James Milner-esque in its execution and even some of the captions make it clear whoever was posting these graphics was getting rather weary of the task set for them that day.

???? Download the fixtures into your calendars via the Stanza service!

Download ➡️ https://t.co/fh6oruVNey#FixtureReleaseDay #BHAFC ????⚪️ pic.twitter.com/NLW8MKmByq

— Brighton & Hove Albion ⚽️ (@OfficialBHAFC) June 14, 2018

So what was the plan? Was it a public service for fans? If so, the above graphic which included all the fixtures in one tweet would have sufficed. Was it to gain retweets and likes from excited fans? If so, they didn’t really succeed. In fact, in the end, maybe all they managed to achieve was to annoy the social media team who spent the first day of the World Cup posting pointless graphics to Twitter.

We applaud the attempt to give fans as much information as possible, but it certainly didn’t look like a fun afternoon for the person who had to create and post all the graphics… did they lose a bet or something?

Maybe one day it will all become clear that this was an elaborate ploy to do something really fun and innovative on Twitter. We certainly hope so. But we’re not holding our breath.