The army of maths prodigies who helped Brighton conquer the transfer market | Hacker News Reader

The army of maths prodigies who helped Brighton conquer the transfer market

uk.sports.yahoo.com

26 pointsTycho12 comments

It's interesting that they (claim to) have identified replacements for all these positions, but to say that they conquered the transfer market is a bit of a stretch. They finished mid-table last year, recruited shrewdly over the summer (only a handful of teams in the Premier League spent less on transfers) and are now sitting 6th out of 20. This is a surprisingly good set of results. However they still spent around the same amount as Serie A giants AC Milan and Internazionale, and over in the Bundesliga only Bayern Munich and Dortmund spent more than them.

They've certainly done well so far, but this isn't quite Billy Bean and the Oakland Athletics. This is still a big-spending club, they're just in a league that is positively swimming in cash that permits many teams to be comparatively very wasteful (take a look at what Nottingham Forest spent and where they are).

It'll be interesting to revisit this story to see how Brighton & Hove are doing in a couple of years time. I remember a little while back Southampton were also getting a lot of praise for having sold off multiple first-team players, being able to bring in low-cost replacements and not capitulating. Southampton are currently bottom of the Premier League.

Yes, but comparing those historic teams (all 4 of which have won the highest prize in European football - the Champions League; and IIRC at least 2 of those clubs have been represented in every world cup final I can remember) to Brighton is silly - Brighton have punched so far beyond their weight it's scary.

They aren't European heavyweights and still manage to recruit well enough that after selling their top players (who were relative unknowns or were not highly rated/valued) still continue to thrive.

Reminds me a bit of Southampton when they first came up, and Leicester after their title winning season - both clubs seemed to get picked apart year after year by the biggest clubs, yet keep on improving by bringing in yet more unknown or undervalued talent on the cheap.

This isn't moneyball, it's much more than that. It's moneyball if the spending power of the Yankees wasn't limited to just the Yankees, but 5-6 other teams and there was no salary cap or luxury tax - and the punishment for screwing up isn't a top draft pick but instead relegation...and the competition has an unlimited spending cheat code. To think Brighton is swimming in cash compared to Newcastle (owned by Saudi PIF), Chelsea (owned by a PE firm that also spends heavily on other sports teams), Liverpool (owned by a PE firm that also owns a baseball team and wants to buy an NBA team), Manchester City (owned by Abu Dhabi royal family) & United (owned by billionaires who own an NFL team, and part of the club is publicly traded), Arsenal (owned by a guy who has 5 other pro sports teams AND married into Wal-Mart family money), etc... is madness.

Conquered is the right term, because otherwise teams wouldn't be bidding stupid money on talent that Brighton is showcasing.

In comparing to these teams, I am saying that some of the largest names in world football spent as much buying players as Brighton and Hove did. Both Milan and Inter[0] are in the last 16 of the Champions League and it would not be a shock at all if either of them progressed into the final. Brighton appear thrifty because they didn't spunk upwards of 150 million on lower-table squad like Nottingham Forest have or because they can't commit untold billions in the coming decades like Newcastle United can.

Brighton have certainly shown the rest of the Premier League how profligate many of them are but they're still spending on the same level as big-name continental Champions League contenders, none of whom are considered particularly tight-fisted in the transfer market.

I'm also a little bit surprised at the English fascination with recruitment, it seems almost guaranteed to cause the situation I described (big-spending domestic league) with little to no success at the national level as a consequence. Far more interesting to me is player development, I'd love to see how smaller countries with smaller leagues like Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium and (in particular) Croatia continue to produce world class players.

> Reminds me a bit of Southampton

I think I added this to my comment while you were typing yours out, but I also raised this as an example. Southampton had this brief stint of skill/luck/whatever in the transfer market and are now bottom.

It sounds like we're both a bit sickened by the sheer quantities of money pouring into the English game. While it can lead to some funny things like Newcastle's Saudi away kit I agree that it is madness.

[0] - let's exclude Bayern and Dortmund. As I said, they spent more

I'm not sure what metrics you're using for "spent around the same amount," but from preliminary looks at AC Milan vs. Brighton that doesn't seem true at all.

Breaking things down into transfer vs wages: over the past two seasons, Brighton have a net transfer profit of ~80m euros per Transfermarkt, while AC Milan have spent ~110m net, so 190m difference. (Stretching back further, you get to some seasons of 60m net spend by Brighton while they were trying to get promoted, but this is during a time when AC Milan's ownership spent 100m+ net a few seasons.)

And on wages, Milan pay substantively higher: Swiss Ramble, probably the top public football financial analyst, has Brighton's wage bill at 109m pounds (https://twitter.com/swissramble/status/1512310039956049920) for the 2021-22 season and AC Milan's wage bill at 169m euros (https://swissramble.substack.com/p/milan-202122-finances).

Now -- Brighton are shrewdly run, but I doubt it's sustainable for any club to consistently show the kind of short-term player trading profit that Cucurella + whatever they get for Caicedo and Mac Allister represent. Given the owner's background, I would expect Brighton to continue to be solidly above-average, but other clubs have data analysts and scouts and such too (and are capable of just copying Brighton's strategy inasmuch as it's reverse-engineerable from outcomes).

I'm using Transfermarkt's summary of their 2022/23 transfer fees (https://www.transfermarkt.com/serie-a/transfers/wettbewerb/I... for Serie A, https://www.transfermarkt.com/premier-league/transfers/wettb... for the Premier League). It's not perfect but nothing is.

Brighton & Hove Albion - €55.73m

Milan - €48.67m

Inter - €38.90m

Stretching things out over multiple seasons and netting the expenses off makes things look a bit better, but only obscures the fact that they did spend big, they're just operating in a big-spending league. It's no small feat to compete in that league, but to say they have "conquered" the transfer market after half a season having splashed out what they did is declaring victory a bit prematurely.

It's a little bit harder to compare by looking at Brighton's wage bill in GBP but Milan's in EUR. After conversion to EUR we get:

Milan - €169m

Brighton - €123m

So a team currently who have never finished higher than ninth in the Premier League have a wage bill that is 72% that of the reigning Serie A champions (not to mention seven-time European Cup winner who have won their domestic league nineteen times). They may not (yet? these figures are from 2021) have a higher wage bill than a current giant of the European game, but they're certainly within the same ballpark.

Oh, transfermarkt is perfectly fine, and your general point about EPL money is definitely right -- just don't think it makes any sense to count pure transfer outlay without taking into account player sales.

You aren't "spending big" if you're spending 55m out of player trading revenue of 130m; you are (maybe) if you're spending 50m out of player trading revenue of 15m.

Yeah I just wanted to show how despite being a smaller club punching above their weight locally, they still had a chunk of resources to spend that would put them among the elite even in the big five European leagues. I don't know if net player spend is a particularly good way to look at that either, but the wage bills you posted were pretty interesting. I didn't think that kind of info would be easily accessible.

It's nice to encounter people who want to talk football on HN though :)

> “Our values are: Aim high, treat people with respect, exceed expectations, act with integrity, and make it special,” he says. “We don’t embrace these values because we are soft. We are trying to think of the future. Football is a small industry relatively-speaking. If we get a good reputation for treating people well, giving them the opportunity to progress if the circumstances are right, we have more opportunity to bring top quality players and staff in. Football clubs shouldn’t be prison camps.”

Basically "The No Asshole Rule"

Bloom is also among the best at understanding the limitations of data, accepting the inherent unpredictability of football and the importance of the human touch both in building a team and keeping staff happy, motivated and loyal. And so stories of Bloom’s kindness and generosity are numerous. The role of experienced scouts watching matches in person is still valued and, beyond combining that feedback with hugely sophisticated data, character checks on prospective new employees are considered highly important.

It's refreshing to hear that, after endless worship of "management by data" dogma that treats people as replaceable cogs and leads to derivative, uninspired products based on yesterday's trends.

With a lot of promises the data analytics may bring to football, I still don't see the outcome. It is probably the most difficult sport to measure. In fact, a lot of money has been invested into it and all we can see as amateurs is the marketing with buzzwords like in this article.

I found the Friends of Tracking youtube channel quite interesting, it is run by Soccermatics author David Sumpter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX85v-ASzQw&list=PLedeYskZY0...

I am very interested in that area, but most of the resources are a bit shallow. Do you have any recommendations?

I think that the edge Brighton has is real but temporary. Bloom has to be eyeing an exit to a very well capitalized entity. The competition in the EPL doesn’t necessarily care about making a profit so teams that need to be sustainable can’t survive in the long term. Even mid and lower table teams are now mostly owned by what would have been considered incredibly wealthy owners 10 years ago but they can’t spend like oil countries can. It will be interesting what exit the Chelsea owners were expecting when they went in. Owning a premier league team is not the country club life that owning an American sports franchise is, it’s likely a money losing proposition.

It's not mentioned in the article but it sounds like similar elements to the strategies and tactics made famous by Moneyball.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball

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