Profile: Brighton’s King Lizard making good on football’s high odds ownership game
Alamy | Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion F.C.
Tony Bloom’s family have a half century-long tie to the Brighton boardroom. But it is the gambling entrepreneur who has brought them to the brink of European competition – and all its riches – for the first time.
Bloom has been described as a genius, who has used his mathamateical background to build complex analytics and modelling systems to make him rich from gambling. Now he has applied it to his football clubs with significant success.
Why it matters: Data analytics are seen as the forefront of football’s evolution, but few have applied them so successfully to the running of clubs as Bloom.
The perspective: Champions League qualification – of which Brighton retain an outside chance – could see revenues increase by 40 per cent.
12 April 2023 - 5:18 PM
In an ordinary year for Tony Bloom, few 4 minute 6 second sequences would bring the Brighton & Hove Albion owner more joy or cash than that which passed on 15 March.
It was the Cheltenham Festival, the first great event on the British horseracing calendar, and his gelding Energumene was up for the Queen Mother Champion Chase, a race he had won last year. Favouring the heavy ground, the nine-year-o
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