Seagulls soar: How to build the perfect football club
Brighton’s top-flight return comes 20 years after being close to non-League and at £250m cost to Tony Bloom
Find an owner who is a diehard fan
Paul Barber can still vividly recall his first meeting with Tony Bloom, the Brighton & Hove Albion owner and chairman. A former Football Association and Tottenham Hotspur director, Barber was chief executive of the Vancouver Whitecaps in Major League Soccer but planning his return to the Premier League. He needed persuasion from headhunters even to meet Bloom who, as well as going by the nickname of ‘The Lizard’ on the poker table, is a fanatical Brighton supporter.
Bloom’s grandfather, Harry, was vice-chairman in the 1970s and died following a heart attack on the team bus en route to playing Stoke City, but Barber wanted one question answered. “I said, ‘OK, but what’s your exit plan? At what point do you want to get off?’ Wealthy guys tend to get to the Premier League and look for a sale. He looked puzzled and said, ‘Look over there’. He pointed to a picture in his office of his son, who was two at the time. He said, ‘My plan is to pass the club on to him’. I thought, ‘Wow. That’s someone for the long term’. I was captivated. Tony was humble, down to earth and totally obsessed with football. This club is in his blood. On the day we got promoted to the Premier League, all I could see in my peripheral vision was my chairman jumping up and down like he’d had an electric prod in his backside. It was wonderful.”
Build the right infrastructure
Amid all the celebrations, one particular anniversary was never likely to be lost on the directors. It was exactly 20 years ago last week that Dick Knight, Bob Pinnock and Martin Perry shook hands on a deal to rescue Brighton. The team needed results in the final two matches of the season to stay in the Football League. Perry, who would become chief executive until Barber’s arrival in 2012, remains a director and has seen everything from what he calls the “wilderness years” at Gillingham, moving to Withdean and then finally securing permission to build a £120 million stadium in Falmer. “I always felt Brighton was a sleeping giant and, if we survived, we would somehow be all right even if we did not know where we would play,” he says. “There were many setbacks but there was this extraordinary unity with the supporters in pursuit of a common goal. There were two battles. Getting planning permission and then funding the stadium.
“Board meetings always used to be about how we would pay the players that week, let alone finance a stadium.” Bloom then got in touch. “I explained the stadium plan and what it would cost,” says Perry. “He listened and then just said, ‘OK, I’ll fund it’. I could not believe it. I told the fans and the council. They struggled to take it in as well but, once the work started and you can see the physical progress, there was this realisation that it really was happening.”
Create the correct culture
The fight both for survival and a place they could call home created a bond between club and community that remains a huge strength but Bloom, who became majority owner in 2009, had a much bigger vision. Indeed, you do not need long around the club to sense the compre-hensive and genuinely ‘bottom up’ approach. “We developed a mantra about doing things properly and, if we can’t, we wait until we can afford to do it or get the right people and processes in place,” explains Barber. Every department was reviewed and, long before it was an on-field possibility, the benchmark was being “Premier League ready”. Examples stretch to a community programme that touches 50,000 young people annually or how costly but important standards for disabled fans – still not met by most Premier League clubs – have long been in place at Brighton.
Bloom and his directors also thought about how to add what they call “glue” to their staff. Premier League promotion would be worth a guaranteed bonus between 10 and 20 per cent of any employee’s salary, right the way from a part-time car-park attendant or night cleaner to manager Chris Hughton (left). “It was a magnificent way of bringing people together and making sure they go that extra mile,” explains Barber. All 250 staff are also given the same nutritious food as the players freely for both breakfast and lunch. Away fans are treated with rare respect. Their concourse is always lit up in their colours. Local beers and even foods are shipped in. “It’s common sense,” says Barber. “If you treat people with respect, they treat your staff well, they treat the stadium well and they look forward to coming back in numbers.”
Build an excellent first team
After the stadium came a new £32million training ground and, including squad investment, Bloom’s overall outlay on Brighton now exceeds £250million. In Hughton, they also have a manager who places huge emphasis on the internal squad dynamic, where the obvious unity was so evident in their spontaneous show of solidarity to Anthony Knockaert when he lost his father last year. Paul Winstanley is the club’s head of recruitment and analysis and says that scouting focuses beyond the obvious to how a player warms up, how they might celebrate a goal and who they interact with. They will also consider how they behave on social media, their family background, off-field habits and broader interests, motivations and influences. “The last few years have been about building a core group who want to fight for each other and go to the next level,” explains Winstanley.
Planning for the Premier League is well under way. The success and failures of other recently promoted teams have been closely analysed but there is also a determination to savour the experience. “It’s incredible,” says Barber. “If you did not know the story and put it forward as a novel – a piece of fiction – people would say it was too far-fetched.”