Brighton up: How the Seagulls have changed English football, and their city - Firstrand perspectives

Key topics:

• Brighton use secret data models to scout elite young football talent early

• Tony Bloom’s Starlizard system drives high-profit signings like Caicedo

• Club’s strategy fuels on-field success and boosts Brighton’s local economy

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By Carlos Amato

Owned by a secretive data-science mogul, the upstarts of the Premier League are finding the world's hottest young talents before anyone else gets a sniff

Don't look now, but English Premier League football is Britain's best-run industry. Eleven of the world's 20 top-earning clubs compete in the English top flight, generating an annual combined revenue of €6.4 billion, and an escalating chunk of that money comes from abroad, via broadcast rights, merchandise and tourism. The other big leagues – Spain, Germany and Italy – once used to dominate the English elite, but they are now financially dwarfed by the Premiership, whose global appeal lies in its lethal competitiveness.

In the Premier League, anybody can beat anybody on any given Saturday – and Brighton & Hove Albion are beating everybody in the boardroom war. They are far from the biggest club in the competition, but they are English football's best-run company.

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Brighton are owned by Tony “The Lizard” Bloom, a son of Brighton who made his first fortune as a sports betting wizard. He outsmarted betting firms in the 1990s by meticulously quantifying the impact of countless interlocking variables on team performance – from weather to away-day travel time to morale. Back then, Bloom consulted to wealthy Asian gamblers and made a killing. Now, under Bloom's ownership, Brighton have applied his data genius to transfer trading – and have become an unrivalled talent-spotting machine.

Brighton employ Bloom's fiercely guarded formula for identifying the finest young players in relatively obscure leagues – players like Japan's Kaoru Mitoma, Ecuador's Moises Caicedo and Paraguay's Julio Enciso. Armed with this unique market intelligence, Brighton capture the superstars of tomorrow before anyone else gets a chance. Once they arrive at the Amex Stadium, these mini-maestros get a chance to shine on the unrivalled stage of the Premier League before being sold onward to bigger English sides at a handsome profit. It seems fitting that the club are known as the Seagulls: like the notorious chip-thieving birds they are nicknamed after, Brighton have mastered the fine art of spotting a hot new thing and snapping it up.

But this brisk trade in elite talent hasn't come at the cost of on-pitch success: back in 2009, when Bloom took over, the Seagulls were stuck in the third tier of English football. Next season, they will compete in Europe (in the Europa League) for the first time, under the gifted Italian coach Roberto De Zerbi – and they got there by playing connoisseur's football. De Zerbi's men often dominate possession and construct elegant, controlled buildups, rejecting the defensive, counter-attacking posture traditionally adopted by smaller English clubs.

Two gifted coaches have been important factors in their success, but the philosophy of the club is more important: when the then-acclaimed Graham Potter was head-hunted last year by Chelsea (where he failed abjectly), Brighton had already lined up a brilliant replacement in Roberto de Zerbi, who has already improved on Potter's best Brighton campaign.

And the rapid rise of the team is elevating the city as a whole: helping to make a once-faded seaside resort town cooler and richer by the year. Brighton's economy is now the fifth-fastest growing of all UK cities, defying a living-cost crisis and a moribund national economy. It is also an unusually entrepreneurial place, with the second-highest rate of startups in the UK. The Seagulls are increasingly critical to this relative prosperity: the club now pumps about a billion pounds into Brighton's economy every year – equivalent to about 5% of the city's total GDP of £21 billion a year. Directly or indirectly, the club sustains more than 3500 jobs.

The club is also projecting a new glow of vigour and excellence over the traditional image of Brighton as a slightly dishevelled, bohemian university town. A massive international audience are admiring the Seagulls' giant-slaying feats, particularly in those countries whose players have flourished at the club, such as Japan and Argentina, whose World Cup-winning midfielder Alexis Mac Allister became a legend at the Amex Stadium before joining Liverpool this summer.

When the South African winger Percy Tau joined Brighton in 2018, the club's Twitter account was overwhelmed with thousands of comments from his excitable South African fans, much to the delight and bafflement of the club's social media managers.

Nowadays, every weekend, affluent new Brighton fans from across the globe are dropping thousands of pounds on a long pilgrimage to the Amex. This kind of pulling power is well documented in big European cities that boast mighty clubs with compelling histories and superstar squads – Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester and Liverpool. For decades, such cities have been significantly enriched by the spending of millions of football tourists each season. But in a smaller city like Brighton, the marketing impact of a suddenly sexy club has the added force of novelty. This writer is one small data point in this phenomenon: I had never given a second's thought to Brighton as a destination until the Seagulls became a Premiership force. Now I'd seriously consider living there if I ever emigrated to the UK, and I'm not alone.

One thing is clear: elite football has become a potent weapon in the arsenal of soft-power projection. The gobsmacking scale of the investments in football made recently by Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia illustrate the huge perceived value of football as a strategic tool for oil-rich autocracies that want to transform their economies and images before the oil era ends. The jury is still out on the strategic efficacy of such brutal spending, which may not reinvent national brands in the absence of authentic cultures of football innovation and genuine entrepreneurship.

The problem is that autocrats and their coteries of oligarchs tend not to spend wisely. For example, with many billions of Qatari riyals already sunk into Paris St Germain, the club remains a long way from their holy grail – a Champions League trophy. And the Chinese football boom of 2017 and 2018 fell off a cliff when the property behemoths that owned most of the biggest clubs entered a crippling debt crisis. Money is not enough: you need a strategy to guide it.

Which brings us back to Bloom's secret recipe for buying obscure diamonds at rock-bottom prices. His betting intelligence firm Starlizard licences its proprietary database of emerging player profiles to the club, but the algorithm that drives it is kept secret even from Brighton's staff. (A former employee of Bloom's, an Oxford-educated actuarial wizard called Matthew Benham, is now the owner of Brentford and has built a similar top-secret algorithm which is reaping similar rewards. Brentford are also punching well above their budgetary weight, much to Bloom's chagrin: he and Benham fell out in 2004 and they haven't spoken since.)

Bloom's approach has some open secrets too. For example, Brighton employ specialist scouts focusing on each position, as opposed to each geographical region as most big clubs do: applying specialist knowledge of the complexities of the striker's role or the keeper's role increases the speed and precision of the talent search.

While the Starlizard data mine is vital, it doesn't displace physical scouting: decisions are informed and vetted by a network of scouts who prowl stadiums from Quito to Lusaka to Stockholm. The key is the workflow, moving from raw data to data-guided observation: Paul Barber, the club CEO, told The Athletic: “We’ve got a different process to a lot of clubs, we don’t charge around the world, constantly watching matches, looking at players, which is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. We focus on the areas for improvement, focus on the players that we feel can fill that gap and then send our eyes-on scouts to look specifically at those players.”

And the Seagulls almost never buy Premiership-ready players who they need to perform immediately, unlike their trophy-hunting or relegation-threatened rivals. The horizon of value to be gained from any deal is always at least a year into the future, and sometimes up to five years – and because Bloom co-owns a thriving Belgian satellite club, Royal Union Saint-Gilloise, it can park younger and rawer talents in Brussels to mature for a season or two.

Crucially, while Brighton pay much lower wages than the big Premiership clubs, they have maximised their salary edge over European leagues: gifted players see Brighton as a gateway to bigger moves, but one that can pay them a wage at least double what a comparable Spanish gateway club like Real Sociedad would offer.

A key figure in the Brighton hierarchy is the recently appointed 33-year-old head of recruitment, the well-named Sam Jewell, who learnt Spanish during the Covid lockdown in order to give him an edge in dealing with South American players and clubs.

Jewell was pivotal to the capture of Caicedo, who was signed from Ecuador's Independiente del Valle in June 2021 for £4 million. Today, Caicedo is worth £80 million or more – a potential 2 000% return in two years. Caicedo's brilliance was not only known to Brighton: he was also being tracked by bigger rivals like Manchester United at the time Brighton bought him. But United were distracted. They were juggling an array of other targets, whereas Brighton struck a deal with a decisiveness that was guided by their rigorously compiled evidence that Caicedo was the best £4 million investment on the planet at that moment. That certainty has driven most of their best signings.

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Gradually, Brighton's bigger English rivals are copying their business techniques – as well as hiring their key people. Newly rich Newcastle United recently poached former Brighton technical director Dan Ashworth, who is overseeing a much more organic investment strategy than anyone expected to unfold when all those Saudi billions flooded onto Tyneside.

But even Ashworth doesn't have Bloom's magic algorithm. Only Brighton have it. The tourists can snoop around the Brighton pier all they like – but the Seagulls will keep on stealing their chips.