Brighton & Hove Albion will keep a lid on future spending, despite making a profit of nearly £200million ($254m) across the past two seasons.
That sum was matched by an unprecedented splash on nine new signings during last summer’s transfer window, including club-record £40m buy Georginio Rutter from Leeds United.
The £30m outlay on former Newcastle United winger Yankuba Minteh, which launched the spree in June, equalled the previous club-record fee paid for Brazilian forward Joao Pedro from Watford in the 2023 summer window. But chief executive Paul Barber has revealed to The Athletic that transfers on this scale are an exception, rather than the new rule for Brighton.
Instead they will keep their recruitment model of spending relatively low by Premier League standards, developing players and selling high in the pursuit of establishing themselves as a top-10 club with aspirations to qualify more often for Europe and win major domestic silverware.
Brighton announced on Friday a £73.3m profit for 2023-24, when the club reached the last 16 of the Europa League and finished 11th in the Premier League table under former head coach Roberto De Zerbi. That followed the Premier League record across all clubs of a £122.8m profit in 2022-23, when the Italian steered them to European qualification for the first time by finishing sixth.
Barber, speaking to The Athletic following the latest profit announcement, said: “Rutter and, to a lesser extent, Joao Pedro were high-tide marks for us. We are not comfortable buying at those levels and we will always be looking to buy at lower levels in order to make our model work.
“The problem when you are spending at those sort of levels is that the headroom is far more limited. You need a lot more things to go right. You need those players to really flourish in order for our trading model to work.”
Improving the quality of the squad comes at a price. Brighton’s wage bill for the 2023-24 campaign rose by 15 per cent to £146m, but they have spent wisely at the top end. Rutter, a No 10 tour de force with and without the ball, has six goals and two assists in his last 10 appearances. Minteh maintained a rich vein of form with a fourth goal to accompany two assists in the Gambian right winger’s last nine outings in Sunday’s 2-1 FA Cup win against his former club at St James’ Park.
Rutter’s signing was an exception for Brighton (George Wood/Getty Images)
Going back further, Joao Pedro has contributed an impressive 27 goals plus 10 assists in 63 games across all competitions since joining the club. Even so, the purchase also in the summer of 2023 of Carlos Baleba for Lille for £26m is more Brighton’s style, a then 19-year-old raw recruit from Cameroon who is maturing at 21 into a powerful central midfielder.
Baleba is attracting the same sort of attention as his Ecuadorian predecessor Moises Caicedo, whose British record £115m move to Chelsea in August 2023 formed part of the latest profit as it fell outside of the accounting period for 2022-23.
“We will always look to be at lower levels when it comes to bringing in players,” Barber said. “The challenge there is the reputation we have gained for buying at those lower levels and selling much higher. But also because the players that come at those levels aren’t, by definition, going to be accomplished or finished Premier League players.
“So, the higher up the league you are, the more challenging it is to improve your squad with young players who have got raw talent that you need to develop. That’s why maintaining our financial performance through good trading and our sporting performance on the pitch is a real challenge and, the higher up the league you go, the bigger those two challenges become, almost in parallel.
“Because to improve a squad that is in the top 10 or even the top six, as it was a couple of seasons ago, is really difficult if you are only looking to spend lower levels of money. And at the same time that you are trading some of the better players from your squad, that’s really hard then to bring all of that together to deliver the financial performance and sporting performance in sync.
“That’s why sometimes there will be a little bit of fluctuation in the two. As your spend goes up, hopefully your performance goes up, but if you are then actually selling in a period of time, your performance may come down with it.
“Last year, when we dropped to 11th with this (financial) result, it was the first time playing in all four competitions, the first time playing in Europe, Thursday/Sunday, the first time where we’d really been tested with squad depth with the number of injuries. There were so many factors that contributed to us coming down to 11th, but to put it into perspective, 11th in the Premier League for Brighton in its history is still a great performance (third-highest finish).
“It’s not as good as sixth, but it is still a very creditable performance for a club of our size and one that is relatively young in the Premier League. So, it’s a real challenge to keep doing what we are doing, but we are very committed to the model and we are very confident in the model.”
The fluctuation between financial and sporting performance that Barber refers to will kick in when the accounts for the current campaign are announced next year. Seven of last summer’s deals will be included in those figures, with the exception of Minteh’s move and of fellow 20-year-old Ibrahim Osman from Danish club Nordsjaelland (£16m).
Barber with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a Brighton match in January (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
The Europa League adventure last season was worth £20m, but the 2024-25 accounts will be impacted by those incoming transfers irrespective of how the rest of the season pans out under De Zerbi’s successor Fabian Hurzeler. He has guided the team to eighth in the table with 11 games to go and to a home quarter-final against Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup later this month.
Osman is spending the season on loan at Feyenoord, who face Inter in the last 16 of the Champions League. The Ghana forward is one of several young players loaned out at a high level to enhance their development and potential resale values. No 9 Evan Ferguson (West Ham United), No 10 Facundo Buonanotte (Leicester City) and midfielder Malick Yalcouye (Sturm Graz) are other notable examples.
Meanwhile, the pattern of purchasing more young talent a window in advance remains a feature of the recruitment policy of the fourth most profitable club overall in Premier League history (they were 41st at the end of 2020-21), according to football finance expert Kieran Maguire.
Greek No 9 Stefanos Tzimas was signed from Nurnberg for over £20m in January. The 19-year-old has stayed with the German second-tier club for the rest of the season before linking up with Brighton in the summer. The Athletic revealed that the purchase of 18-year-old South Korean winger Yun Do-young has also been lined up from Daejeon Hana Citizen, who play in the top-flight K League 1.
Barber said: “We have already made a couple of trades ahead of the summer which we think are going to improve and to help develop the squad. We have also got a lot of players out on loan who we are hoping during this season will progress, come back into the squad and give us strength in depth there as well.
“So, there are a lot of good things ahead of us. Not necessarily the same level of profitability, but certainly in terms of the quality of our squad and the depth of our squad.”
GO DEEPER
Hurzeler’s Brighton overcome adversity again. Now can they make history?
(Top photo: Paul Barber by Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
