“Everything about the Premier League becomes more difficult every year,” Brighton & Hove Albion owner and chairman Tony Bloom tells The Athletic, speaking at the club’s training ground.
There can be no denying Brighton’s incredible progress since
Bloom first took over the club in 2009. They had just finished 16th in League
One — English football’s third tier — when Bloom arrived in the boardroom, but
in the eight years that followed, they won two promotions and a place in the
Premier League, and moved into both a state-of-the-art training facility and
their now-famous Amex Stadium.
The hallmark of Brighton’s spell in the Premier League has
been innovative thinking — be that in the transfer market or when appointing
new managers. This vision has helped keep the club punching above their weight
and regularly overcoming opponents with far bigger budgets, and has also
secured Bloom’s status as one of the most respected minds in the game.
“It’s getting to that point where the revenues of the league
are going up at a certain rate and transfer fees and salaries are going up at a
higher rate,” he tells The Athletic. “So there’s an element of
unsustainability there, which is why the rules we’re going to be voting on soon
are really important. Because it will only end in disaster if the losses
sustained by clubs go up at an even faster rate.”
What is really important — and why the Premier League is so
popular — is that, even though you’ve got some clubs with huge resources and
some of the best teams in the world, on any given day, the bottom few teams can
beat them. “So the gap between top and
bottom is somewhat competitive. And if that gap grows too much, the interest in
the Premier League will go down and the revenues of the Premier League will go
down — and that will not just affect the Premier League teams, it will affect
all the teams going down the pyramid. So that for me is paramount and that’s
the sort of level of detail that I’ll be looking at to make sure that will
continue for decades to come.”
He runs a tight but profitable ship. Brighton’s combined
pre-tax profit over the past two seasons was £208.4m. The figures fluctuate,
depending on player trading from year to year, but Brighton have never been in
danger of breaching PSR regulations, unlike clubs such as Everton, Nottingham
Forest and Newcastle.
Staying competitive at the top end of the table while
spending only what you can afford is increasingly challenging for Bloom. The
55-year-old sports betting entrepreneur has invested over £400m into his
boyhood club.
Bloom wants the Premier League to tap into what he sees as a
benefit of the influx of U.S. owners. “We need to embrace new ideas,” he says.
“Some American sports are excellent at marketing.
The fan experience is superb. Our fan experience
is also great, but there are just different ideas we can bring. You’ve got to
be a bit careful, because football is different to other sports. The spectator
experience in America and their expectations are quite different.
Brighton’s recruitment model, based on Bloom’s secret
algorithm, is their route to a competitive edge over their rivals. The process
of sourcing gems at low cost, developing them and then selling for big profits
has to keep on evolving for the club to keep on progressing.
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