Maybe United should hire Paddy Power as our head of recruitment. Amazing how many of the people at the forefront of the 'smart' recruitment frontier with backgrounds as bookies. There's Tony Bloom, Matthew Benham and Ted Knutson from Statsbomb who I'm nearly certain spent a chunk of his career in sports betting.
I am curious to see how sustainable Brighton's approach is and if it can be scaled upwards. We've seen clubs like Udinese and Seville develop excellent reputations as talent spotters in the past before eventually running out of steam and never really building on their transfer successes.
Failure is certainly possible, if a pipeline of prospects doesn’t burst as expected - or the market becomes unviable for us to compete with the biggest clubs.
Presently, there are Moran (19), Enciso (19), Ferguson (18), Buonanotte (18), Adingra (21), Ayari (19), Rushworth (21) and a few others of serious potential. Many are already full internationals. If say, two of ten prospects develop in line with what the club believes is possible when signing them, the club will be very happy.
I think it’s very much a numbers game too. They won’t all come off, of course, but the outlay is so relatively small per punt that all the transfers - good and bad - are easily absorbed with just one big sale. If Caicedo and/or Mac Allister go, it’ll be in the region of £75-100m apiece. Ayari for example (who came on as a sub for Caicedo on Tuesday night) just turned 19 and cost under £4m from Swedish football. He looks an excellent player. Buonanotte (£5m up front, rising to £10m with clauses) two months after turning 18, just got a full Argentina call up. It’s mental how we keep finding these players.
But yes, much bigger and more successful clubs than ours have ultimately regressed. For now we are just enjoying this incredible ride, after all we’ve been through.
And it’s all thanks to Tony Bloom.