It’s about this time, just after one of the biggest clubs in the country has successfully paid more than £50m for a player from a smaller club or unsuccessfully tried to, that someone has the bright idea of cutting out the middleman. “Rather than buying the players from Brighton/Benfica/FC Someoneelse,” they will say, “why not just sign the players they are scouting to replace them.”
It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it? Benfica just made £80m profit on Enzo Fernandez having only owned him for 13 months, made £40m profit on Darwin Nunez over two years, originally paid £400,000 for Ederson and signed Joao Felix after he had been released by Porto. They haven’t just turned water into wine; they’ve become professional vintners.
Brighton are the same. They made £42m on Marc Cucurella in 12 months, signed Ben White after he had been released by Southampton before selling him for £45m and recently beat Liverpool 3-0 with a starting XI that cost £30m in transfer fees. Or less than half of what Moises Caicedo is apparently worth, a midfielder who cost them £5m from Independiente del Valle in January 2021.
Brighton’s scouting model is top class, no doubt. They employ specific scouts by position, use a team of recruitment analysts to oversee a data-led strategy that enables their net to be cast over a far wider area and they tend to seek markets in which other clubs in their peer group (ie mid-level Premier League clubs) are not exploring.
Doing that has two obvious advantages: you have less competition for your targets and you can pair together signings to make acclimatisation easier. Since June 2020: three Ecuadorian players have been signed (and two more from South America), three from Poland, two from the Netherlands.
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Ten Hag was wrong about this Man Utd squad, it has the depth to win trophies after all02 February, 2023Brighton also make mistakes; this is not a pursuit in which perfection is possible and it is important to concede as much. Jurgen Locadia left for a £14m loss, Alireza Jahanbakhsh barely fared much better and Jose Izquierdo rejoined Club Brugge on a free having cost Brighton £12m. The club probably failed to quite anticipate Viktor Gyokeres’s rapid development having been allowed to join Coventry for roughly £1m. This is not proof of any flaw in the system, merely that assuming Brighton have the cheat codes is simplistic to the point of fallacy.
More than their ability to find the players, it is Brighton’s (and Benfica’s and others like them) ability to develop them that makes them special. Every footballer is the product of nature and nurture and they will never prevail without both. If Lionel Messi had never gone to La Masia, he may not have been the greatest player of his generation.
Too many see only the finished product. “Why didn’t Chelsea just sign Enzo from River Plate?” – because he wouldn’t have played as many games, wouldn’t have made Argentina’s World Cup squad and wouldn’t have become a superstar in the same way.
Caicedo is a fine example. He was highly rated in South American football, with Manchester United, Chelsea, Newcastle and West Ham all interested in a deal; this was no unearthed diamond. But he chose a club that fellow Ecuadorean Jeremy Sarmiento had joined. He was loaned out to Beerschot in Belgium, a league where fellow Brighton loanee Kaoru Mitoma was also sent. There they would improve their English and adapt to a division far more similar to English football. Beerschot had also been tracking Caicedo themselves, so had a plan for how he would be used.
The reason Brighton is an attractive club to these players is that they provide a clear pathway. Last summer, Chelsea signed a then-18-year-old Carney Chukwuemeka from Aston Villa. He believes he is better either in a midfield three or playing further forward out wide. A list of his current competition in those positions: Fernandez, N’Golo Kante, Mateo Kovacic, Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Denis Zakaria, Conor Gallagher, Lewis Hall, Christian Pulisic, Joao Felix, Mykhailo Mudryk, Raheem Sterling, Hakim Ziyech and Noni Madueke.
You see the point: because Brighton are prepared to sell their players, routes into the first team appear – White, Yves Bissouma, Marc Cucurella, Neal Maupay, Dan Burn and Leandro Trossard have all left in the last 18 months for fees of £10m or more. Because Brighton tend not to buy experienced replacements (the last player older than 24 they paid a fee for was Aaron Mooy in 2019), the deputies get a chance.
And then Brighton sell; that is crucial too. For all the post-rejection wailing from some very online Arsenal fans, Caicedo will likely leave in the summer. Alexis Mac Allister might also go, another midfielder likely to command a mega-fee and turned into a star by Brighton. That acceptance of their position in the food chain gives Brighton’s strategy a self-fulfilling edge: players come because they know that if they impress then bigger clubs will come knocking; those players impressing improves Brighton and makes them even more attractive to prospective targets.
Being part of a food chain can be dispiriting, particularly for supporters. It can, at times, create an air of futility that engulfs your support. If every club exists as a cog in the wheel or a node in the vast interdependent complex of world football, it’s not always nice to have that reinforced on repeat while you’re busy trying to dream about European qualification or winning a trophy.
But then Brighton benefit from the same arrangement: they get players on the cheap and make a significant premium which fuels their own progress. And it also works for them; they would not be in the best shape in their history without it.
So a message to those who wonder why the financial elite couldn’t just go straight to source: they can and they do. Occasionally, those moves prove to be mighty smart because those signings are given a chance to shine. More often, they are lost in the noise and thinner air of that environment.
Brighton do not have the cheat codes on scouting and recruitment; they have a sensible, savvy, humble model. Just as you would go to a supermarket to buy a fresh chicken at a mark-up rather than driving to the farm, they know what their customer wants and they have become experts at developing it. Want to buy? It’ll cost you.
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