Tony Bloom was just another intrepid young trader from Brighton for bookmaker Victor Chandler when the 1998 World Cup came around. When his employers were calculating the odds for the potential winners, Bloom advised them to wager their entire profit on France winning the tournament, rather than on favourites Brazil or the Netherlands. France, as it unfolded, hammered Brazil in the final. “The odds on a home win were massively underpriced,” he explained his rationale that was hiding in his employers’ plain sight. Bloom’s fame blossomed and pierced through the ceilings.
Eleven years after his career’s magic moment, he brought his favourite club, Brighton Hove and Albion, then struggling in League One and ploughing through their games on a converted athletics track at Withdean,. By then, his reported worth was estimated to be around a billion pounds (it is around 3 billion now). Much of the wealth owed to the firm Starlizard (“we answer the most interesting questions in sport,” reads the website), which offers specialised online sports betting advice using detailed and complex statistical models, thus providing more accuracy than the average bookmaker. His clientele includes football clubs, billionaires, and elite footballers, clandestinely placing bets. The biggest client, reportedly, is Bloom himself, who punts in different names and ID cards. He earned a nickname, too—the Lizard, for his composed decision-making nous on the poker table.
But football was different, its foundations founded on bedrocks of patience and planning rather than on a gambler’s whims. Some of his close coterie advised him against investing in a football club. Far too risky; but risk it is that built his empire that began on the accountant’s table of Ernst and Young. “I wanted to gamble because I enjoyed it and, therefore, I needed to do it properly in order to win,” he once said. The words came from his experience.
He placed his first bet when he was eight, with his grandfather, a car dealer who hopped casinos. In school, he told former England cricket captain Mike Atherton, that he procured a fake ID and entered betting shops, which permitted only adults. “Early on I was a hopeless gambler really,” Bloom told Atherton. “I liked to think that I understood the form and had a strategy but I was just guessing really.” But during undergraduate years, studying mathematics in Manchester University, he found relatively systematic ways to gamble. And make money. The mantra: “Occasionally, to win big, you have to risk losing.” He perhaps applied the same theory when buying the football club.
In 15 years, Brighton not only secured the promotion to the Premier League, set up an avant-garde home in Amex Stadium, but also became something of a paradox. Elite and established clubs pay for their analytics and data to scout hidden gems with the help of an army of mathematicians and strategists; bigger clubs raid their phalanx of gifted youngsters, snatch their managers and ideas – in 2023 they lost 30 staff members.
Yet, somehow, with a gambler’s zeal of finding new reasons and resources to invest, to risk more fervently, unbothered about the mundane everyday pressures of retaining their best talents or passionate about stacking trophies, they keep upending the established hierarchy.
Nonetheless, they have produced thrilling football in the last three years. The flames were supposed to be extinguished with the departure of maverick manager Roberto de Zerbi; or the brigade of players, from Moises Caicedo (for a then British transfer record) to Premier League winners, Nathan MacAllister, Leandro Trossard, Ben White, striker Joao Pedro last year and midfield Carlos Baleba before the start of this season. It’s not like they are a club solely bothered about discovering, polishing and selling young talents, like Borussia Dortmund.
Often teams fall apart when the nucleus is dismantled, but Brighton simply keeps rebuilding, building over the debris, every season, on an endless loop. Commendably, they finished eighth last season and had a rollicking start to the ongoing season. None more emphatic than their dismantling of the champions, Arsenal. It was not a David slaying Goliath ambush, but a thorough ripping apart. They out-witted and out-muscled the Gunners, pressing them to suffocation and uncharacteristically clumsy mistakes, inducing panic on the league’s stingiest defence, and instigating basic errors from their vaunted midfielders. The scoreline of 3-0, if any, flattered Arsenal. All these they achieved without half their first-choice squad (Kaoru Mitoma, Yankuba Minteh, Jack Hinshelwood, Evan Ferguson and captain Lewis Dunk). They sit third on the table and have scored more goals than any other club (16).
Like Bloom, his team is not afraid to lose. Bloom once lost $500,000 to Daniel Negreanu, a great of the game, on the poker table. But he also pocketed £600,000 on his thoroughbred to win the Queen Mother Champion Chase at Cheltenham. The next season, or even before, he could lose 19-year-old forward Charalampos Kostoulas or Mitoma, or manager Fabian Hürzeler, just 33. Bloom couldn’t care less. The structure he has installed at the club ensures stability, invulnerability against market fluctuations and talent drain. He anticipates eventualities and has a clear vision. Or in true gambling spirit, neither Bloom nor his club is afraid of losing.
