Who Owns Brighton & Hove Albion?
The 2024/25 Premier League season saw the emergence of a surprisingly large number of outside contenders for UEFA Champions League qualification. With Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United both plummeting down the league table, a group of upwardly mobile clubs have filled the gaps left behind, challenging with some of the richest, best-resourced outfits in world football.
As well as the likes of Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, and Fulham, fans have also noted the ongoing rise of a club that has been punching above its weight for years: Brighton & Hove Albion.
Brighton have progressed a huge amount as a club since they first achieved promotion to the Premier League in 2017. After winning promotion and stabilising themselves in the top flight under Chris Hughton, the Seagulls consolidated their status and played a more expansive brand of football under Graham Potter, causing the Englishman to be poached by Chelsea.
The coaches that have followed have gone beyond what even Potter was able to achieve, causing praise to be heaped on Brighton's owners and their successful running of the club. But who owns Brighton and how much money are they worth? That's what we'll be exploring in this article.
A Brief History of Brighton & Hove Albion
Brighton have spent the vast majority of their history outside England's top division. Founded in 1901, the club spent its early years in the semi-professional Southern League, building a reputation as a strong lower-league club and solidifying that status by winning the FA Charity Shield in 1910.
In 1921 the Seagulls — so named because of their position on the south coast at one of Britain's most popular seaside holiday destinations — were elected to the English Football League, joining the Third Division South alongside clubs like Southampton, Norwich City, and Brentford.
Albion stayed at this level for over 30 years before finally achieving promotion to the Second Division in 1957/58; their rise coincided with the de-regionalisation of the third tiers, and Brighton were initially able to consolidate their second-tier status before ultimately dropping down two divisions in two seasons and ending up in the Fourth Division in 1963.
After climbing back up the leagues, the Seagulls reestablished themselves in the second tier in the 1970s. This decade culminated in huge success as chairman Mike Bamber helped guide the club to the top flight for the first time ever.
After four top-tier campaigns (one of which included an FA Cup final defeat against Manchester United) Brighton dropped back down to the Second Division in 1983 and over the subsequent seasons the club's financial situation became dire, with multiple relegations and mounting debts leading Albion to the brink of extinction in 1997.
The end of that season was extremely dramatic; after lifelong fan Dick Knight completed a last-gasp takeover to stave off the threat of bankruptcy, a final-day victory against Hereford United saved the club from what would have been a disastrous relegation from the Football League.
When the new millennium rolled around, Brighton & Hove Albion had lost their home ground and were leasing a local athletics ground called the Withdean Stadium from the council, but on the pitch things were on an upward trajectory.
This was helped in 2009 when legendary fan-turned-owner Dick Knight sold the club to its current owner, who has since led an unbelievable rise from the Championship to the Europa League in just a few short years.
If you'd like to find out more about how Brighton have competed with England's richest clubs and managed to break their way into Europe, check out our deep dive into the rise of Brighton under Roberto De Zerbi. For now, though, we're going to shift our focus to the man who has played a bigger role in that journey than anyone.
Who Owns Brighton & Hove Albion?
Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club is owned by local businessman Tony Bloom, a multi-millionaire who took control of his boyhood club in 2009 after buying out former chairman Dick Knight.
Given Knight's popularity with supporters, there was plenty of pressure on the new owner when he entered the door, but so far he's exceeded expectations in his 16 years in charge.
It helped that the years before Bloom's entrance were tumultuous, with homeless Brighton playing at the Withdean and at Gillingham's Priestfield Stadium 70 miles away for a time.
But Bloom has already presided over some landmark moments, from moving into the state-of-the-art new Falmer Stadium (now known as the Amex Stadium for sponsorship reasons) to reaching the top flight for the first time in the Premier League era.
But who exactly is Tony Bloom, and how much money has he pumped into the club during his period in charge?
Who is Tony Bloom and How Much is He Worth?
Tony Bloom was born in Brighton in 1970, and grew up supporting his local club. He attended the prestigious local boarding school Lancing College and soon showed his mathematics prowess, ultimately utilising these skills in his post-university career as a financial trader.
One poker player's "crazy bet" changed sports history forever.
— bobthewizard (@bobthewizard23) March 18, 2025
Tony Bloom took Brighton FC from the brink of bankruptcy to brilliance.
Now his £584 million masterpiece is beating clubs with 10x their resources.
Here's how a gambler's mathematical model revolutionised football: pic.twitter.com/OjFcSBWc5R
In the 1990s he moved into the world of gambling, gaining a reputation for his razor-sharp analytical approach to sports betting. He became a professional poker player known as 'The Lizard', and by the mid-2000s he had accumulated a huge amount of wealth from betting (in 2022, it was estimated that his total poker tournament winnings were over $3,800,000).
In 2022, Bloom founded his own company, Premier Bet, a business that was designed to take advantage of the Asian handicapping system (a form of spread betting where handicaps range from one-quarter goal to several goals) online.
This business was a massive success, and Bloom sold Premier Bet for £1m after just three years of building it up. Interestingly, Bloom employed current Brentford owner Matthew Benham while he was at Premier Bet and in the early stages of building his gambling empire.
The pair worked together before Benham went solo in 2004, utilising his advanced gambling model-building knowhow to set up two of his own companies, Smartodds and later Matchbook.
After making a fortune from the sale of his company, Bloom combined increasing his wealth through clever investment and lucrative sports betting, ultimately combining his interest in sports and analytics further by acquiring Brighton & Hove Albion in 2009.
He paid Dick Knight £80m to buy a 75% stake in the club, which due to the ongoing stadium build was looking like an increasingly profitable enterprise.
He then invested a further £93m into the new stadium development at Falmer, and he's continued pumping money into the club ever since, with a total of £406.5 million in interest-free loans reportedly handed to the club by Bloom.
With an estimated net worth of £1.3 billion according to The Sun, the Brighton owner is one of the richest English owners of a professional football club, and his investments have made a huge impact on this flourishing south coast club.
What is Bloom's Brighton Legacy?
Throughout his time in charge of Brighton, Tony Bloom has relied heavily on his wealth of experience in the professional gambling industry, and the excellent understanding of data, analytics, mathematics, and risk-taking that this line of work instilled in him.
To compete with clubs that have greater resources, the Seagulls have used a 'Moneyball'-style approach to the transfer market, relying heavily on data and analytics to discover and exploit untapped potential from across the world.
When scouting talent and predicting player potential, analysts and scouts have pioneered the use of key performance indicators like Expected Goals (xG) while looking beyond performances to work out how much certain players could be improved.
"If we are going for a 25-26-year-old who is Premier League ready, I'd say two-thirds of the Premier League would be able to outbid us from a transfer fee and wages point of view," former Brighton technical director Dan Ashworth once explained.
"Our recruitment strategy has to be a bit different… we've tended to either go to a different market or buying potential rather than performance." Under Bloom, Brighton have become known for plucking talent from East Asia, South America, and less glamorous European teams, finding gems that other clubs haven't noticed.
In the last few years alone, they've sold several high-profile players at a huge profit: Moises Caicedo was bought from Independiente del Valle for £4.5m and sold to Chelsea for £115m, Marc Cucurella from signed from Getafe for £15.4m and sold to Chelsea for £63m, Alexis Mac Allister was signed from Argentinos Juniors for £7m and sold to Liverpool for £55m, and Leandro Trossard was signed from Genk for £15m and sold to Arsenal for £26m.
This shrewd recruitment has helped the Seagulls progress from relegation candidates to two-time FA Cup semi-finalists, Europa League competitors, and regular Big Six-beaters. And given Bloom's clear role behind it all, the current Brighton owner enjoys legendary status in his hometown, revered amongst fans in a way that most Premier League owners can only dream of.
There's one key aspect of Bloom's legacy that it's worth diving into in a little more detail. One London-based company founded in 2017 as an offshoot of Starlizard (a betting company closely linked to Bloom) has played a crucial role in fueling Brighton's rise: Jamestown Analytics.
This a low-profile organisation described by The Times as "the most cutting-edge data company in football", used to provide data to core affiliated clubs, the most highly prioritised club being Brighton & Hove Albion.
Jamestown Analytics provide bespoke data relating to players, and have played a key role in the signing of several uncut gems which the Seagulls have then turned huge profits on.
Making links with Jamestown Analytics would no doubt aid plenty of Premier League clubs, but according to managing director Justin Said, the group is "very selective about the clubs we want to work with". The club owner they trust more than anyone else? Tony Bloom.
Want to find out more about Jamestown Analytics? Check out our guide to the rise of this secretive data company here.
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