As more billionaires from the United States and oil rich nations invest in Premier League football clubs, Brighton remain one of the very few successful top flight English teams being bankrolled by a genuine fan.
That fan is Tony Bloom, who has invested the best part of half a billion pounds into the Seagulls since becoming chairman in 2009. Off the pitch, that investment has built the American Express Stadium, and the American Express Elite Football Performance Centre. On the pitch, Bloom has taken the club from perennial League One relegation battlers to a club now rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ajax and Olympique de Marseille in the Europa League.
Two questions often get posed about Bloom and the Albion’s meteoric rise. The first is how much is the Brighton owner actually worth? The second is how did he make his money? Nobody knows the answer to question one other than Bloom himself; his wealth is so well hidden. But if he can afford to spend £500,000,000 on a football club, you have to assume he is close to or already in the billionaire club.
For the second question, the answer appears to be a mixture of property investments and gambling. We can all agree that property investments are dull as dishwater, so let’s focus on the exciting stuff that earned Bloom is ‘The Lizard’ nickname, shall we?
From West Street to Asia
Bloom comes from a family of gamblers and Albion-lovers. Grandfather Harry loved a bet and was on the Brighton board in the 1970s whilst dad Ray also served his time in the boardroom leading up to the day days of the mid-90s.
As a schoolboy, Tony was down the arcades in West Steet using his pocket money to play the fruit machines. He studied mathematics at Manchester University and put that degree to good use when approached by a well-known bookmaker about Asian handicap football betting. Bloom became one of the first people from Europe interested in the concept and was soon making a lot of money from it. So much so, that he decided to strike out on his own.
Tony Bloom and online gambling
With online gambling booming through the 2000s, Bloom decided to ride the wave. He set up a bookmakers specialising in his favoured Asian handicap system, which he went onto sell for £1.2 million in 2005. He also helped set up two gaming sites which both went onto be bought by blue chip organisations in performance-related deals worth up to $204 million. Like everything to do with Bloom’s wealth, how much he received from those sales is shrouded in mystery.
Whilst Bloom thrived at poker (more on that shortly), that is not the only card game popular in gaming circles. Any online casino worth its salt also offers blackjack as an option. Why? Because blackjack has been the single most popular casino game in the world for a very long time.
The popularity of blackjack stems from its simplicity. Anyone can understand the rules, which is the reason so many people play blackjack from US online. With their drawn cards, players win if they get closer to 21 than the dealer. Go over 21 however, and you bust.
Beating the house at blackjack requires different strategies to those involved in poker. But both games involve the ability to quickly calculate probability and use that information to decide what to do next.
Most casino games start out with the player at a disadvantage. The likes of craps, roulette and baccarat are all designed to favour the house. Blackjack though offers ways to beat the dealer for players willing to put the work in, who know what they are doing and devise a suitable strategy.
The Lizard
Gambling is not just work for Bloom – he does it for fun, too. His Lizard moniker was coined for the ice-cold blood he showed at the poker table, making him one of the most formidable and celebrated players in the world. His career winnings in live tournaments exceed $3.5 million.
That number only tells half the story though. As Victoria Coren wrote in The Guardian: “If tournament winnings (the flawed yet standard measure of poker success) were divided by number of tournaments played, the low-key Lizard would probably turn out to be the biggest winner in the world.”
Bloom and Brighton & Hove Albion
What Bloom has learnt from gambling and the strategies so successfully deployed to consistently win money he has applied to his ownership of Brighton. After the Albion won the League One title in 2011 under the management of the flamboyant Gus Poyet, Bloom said: “Poker gives you a good grounding in lots of things, including reading situations and reading people and making tough decisions. Those skills can be used in business and certainly in running a football club.”
Bloom has made six managerial appointments as Brighton owner. Five have been undoubted triumphs; the only black mark against his record being the disappointing six month reign of Sami Hyypia in 2014. Not many other football club owners possess such an impressive track record in terms of getting it right.
Where Bloom has really transformed Brighton though is through player recruitment. In 2006, he helped found Starlizard, a consultancy which advises very rich people where a sports betting market has underestimated or overestimated an outcome. That rich person can then gamble on said market, knowing there is a high probability of making a lot of money.
Brighton take the same sort of unique algorithms and data crunching dreamt up by Bloom for the purpose of exploiting betting markets and use it to identify signings from around the world with the potential to develop into players worth much, much more than their initial cost. The results – particularly since the club reached the Premier League in 2017 – have been stunning.
Alexis Mac Allister was found in Argentina, bought for £7.5 million and sold for £35 million. Yves Bissouma arrived from France for £15 million and was sold for £20 million. Marc Cucurella signed from Spain in 2021 for £15 million and moved to Chelsea 12 months later for £62 million.
The pièce de resistance remains Moises Caicedo. Discovered in Ecuador at a cost of just £5 million, two-and-a-half years later he was sold for a British record of fee of £115 million. Brighton made £110 million in the space of 30 months.
Most clubs in world football would be hampered by losing so many good players. But this ultimately is the beauty of Bloom and the Albion. Even before a player leaves the Amex, his replacement has been identified. Bissouma was sold and Caicedo seamlessly took over. Cucurella went, in came Pervis Estupinan. In his brief Brighton career so far, Carlos Baleba already looks the heir to Caicedo. And so, the wheel keeps turning.
Other clubs have tried to copy what the Albion do in terms of recruitment. Chelsea notably took the entire Brighton first team coaching team and the club’s head of recruitment to Stamford Bridge but with zero success. The reason is because Bloom is the key. Only he knows how everything works. And just like how rich he actually is, that is a closely guarded secret nobody is likely to find out anytime soon. Brighton benefit, whilst the rest of English football looks on in marvel.
