London, 24 October 2026 — EBM Weekend Read — By Nick Staunton
Fifteen years ago, Brighton & Hove Albion played third-tier football at a converted athletics track. On Sunday they travel to Anfield third in the Premier League, having scored 23 goals in seven games, the most in the division. The last team to manage that many at this stage of a season was Manchester City in 2022-23, according to Opta’s The Analyst.
City were built on Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth. Brighton were built on something rarer in football: a coherent business model. It was designed by a local man who made his fortune pricing football matches better than the bookmakers, and it has turned a provincial club into one of the most admired operations in world sport.
The Gambler’s Edge
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SubscribeTony Bloom was born in Brighton in 1970 and studied mathematics at Manchester. After brief spells in accountancy and options trading, he became a professional gambler. His consultancy, Starlizard, built statistical models to forecast football results with a precision that made him extraordinarily wealthy.
He took control of his boyhood club in 2009 and paid for most of the £93m Amex Stadium, giving Albion a permanent home for the first time since the Goldstone Ground was sold in 1997. Promotion to the Premier League followed in 2017.
Bloom’s real investment, though, was intellectual. Betting markets reward people who find mispriced assets and act before everyone else notices. The transfer market, he recognised, is riddled with the same inefficiencies. Big clubs overpay for reputation and proven stars, and they underpay for potential. The sport’s links with gambling are only growing, as the Gulf’s move to legalise casinos in the UAE shows. But Bloom’s genius was to use a gambler’s mindset to build an asset, not to place bets.
Buying Before the Market Moves
Brighton’s recruitment operation searches markets the elite clubs overlook: Ecuador, Argentina, Japan, Scandinavia, the Belgian league. It buys young players before their value rises, develops them within a clearly defined playing style and sells at the top of the market.
The returns would impress any private equity fund:
- Moisés Caicedo cost around £4.5m from Ecuador and was sold to Chelsea for a then British record of £115m.
- Alexis Mac Allister arrived for about £7m and left for Liverpool as a World Cup winner for £35m.
- Kaoru Mitoma cost roughly £2.5m from Japan.
Chelsea alone have paid Brighton more than £250m since 2022 for four players, plus around £22m in compensation to take manager Graham Potter and his staff.
It is the same logic EBM traced in how PSG turned Bradley Barcola into a £123m business. Footballers are now traded as appreciating assets, and Brighton do it better than almost anyone. Fittingly, Barcola is expected to line up for Liverpool on Sunday.
The key is succession. When a star is sold, his replacement has usually already been identified and often signed. That is why the team keeps improving while its best players leave. This season’s breakout talent, Greek teenager Charalampos Kostoulas, is the latest product of the pipeline.
Managers as Undervalued Assets
The same approach applies in the dugout. Potter was spotted at Swansea, Roberto De Zerbi at Shakhtar Donetsk and Fabian Hürzeler at St Pauli in Germany’s second division. Hürzeler was 31 when he was appointed in 2024, the youngest permanent manager in Premier League history.
Each fitted a defined style of possession and aggressive pressing. So the club’s identity, and the value of its players, survived each change of coach. Most clubs rebuild every time a manager leaves. Brighton simply replace a component.
The Balance Sheet
Player trading has transformed the club’s finances. Brighton made a pre-tax profit of £122.8m in 2022-23, then a Premier League record, and £73.3m the following year, according to the club’s accounts.
The model is not risk-free. In 2024-25, Brighton spent a record £210.5m on players but sold only £64.3m, and swung to a £55.8m loss. Wages climbed to £164.6m, about 68% of income, according to an analysis of the accounts by WeAreBrighton. Bloom is still owed about £406m in shareholder loans.
That spending marks a deliberate change of strategy. The aim is no longer just to survive and sell, but to build a squad capable of competing in Europe and challenging the established elite. Broadcast income, Brighton’s biggest revenue stream at £151m last season, is also under pressure as the sports streaming war reshapes how football rights are sold. Clubs that can generate their own value through player trading will be better protected than those dependent on television money.
The Bloom Network
Bloom has exported the model. He took over Belgium’s Union Saint-Gilloise in 2018 and turned it into a title-winning club, before cutting his stake to comply with UEFA rules. In 2025 he took a 29% economic stake in Hearts in Edinburgh and a 19.1% stake in Australia’s Melbourne Victory.
The network shares data, scouting and a footballing philosophy, a lean version of the multi-club empires built by City Football Group and others. But it is attracting scrutiny. UEFA is reported to be reviewing the Brighton-Hearts link, and multi-club ownership has become one of European football’s most contentious issues. Elsewhere, the money pouring into European sport is far less disciplined, from Gulf wealth buying up clubs and airports to billionaires and sovereign funds piling into padel.
A Founder’s Patience
Bloom’s approach looks less like a typical football owner and more like a patient private founder. Like James Dyson, who built a £6bn empire through thousands of failed prototypes, he has been willing to absorb losses and wait years for a system to pay off. It’s the same long-term thinking that is turning young athletes like Carlos Alcaraz into global sports businesses.
What I Think
Brighton prove that in football, as in business, a system beats a star. Most clubs depend on one great player or one great manager, and fall apart when either leaves. Brighton depend on a method: buy undervalued talent, develop it in a fixed style, sell at the peak and replace it before anyone notices. The risks are real. Last season’s loss shows how quickly the numbers turn when spending runs ahead of sales, and Bloom’s loans cannot grow forever. Rival clubs are copying the model, and the regulators are circling the network. But no other club has shown so clearly that intelligence can compete with petrodollars. Whatever happens at Anfield tomorrow, Brighton are the template every ambitious mid-sized club in Europe will be trying to copy.
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