The extract below from sporting news gives a bit more of a view on Bloom's huge contribution. I met him a couple of times many years ago and before he bought Brighton. He was always a massive fan as was his family and even though at the time they had no ground he was confident that if he ever got hold of them he could realise the club's huge potential. I don't remember once him calling them a small club and he was strongly of the view that you needed a big capacity stadium to attract the crowds otherwise people would be put off by how hard it was to find seats together etc. He was good company and it was refreshing to hear how positive he was about one day owning the club and then developing it big time. You will see from the extracted copy below that he at one stage he was owed £500m. Not something I suspect we will ever see at Blackpool. It does put into perspective though that Brighton has not achieved success organically.
Earning promotion to the Premier League was predictably transformative for Brighton: in 2019, the value of the club rose to £224m ($279m), local newspaper
The Argus reported.
However, the club recorded losses of £270m ($336m) in the four seasons to 2021/22, their accounts showed, and remained highly reliant on Bloom, to whom they were £499m ($621m) in debt at that point.
Brighton also paid £3m ($3.7m) to StarLizard in consultancy fees in 2021/22, although that represents good value given that the firm's analytics help them to sign players who realise a huge sell-on value for modest sums, such as midfielders Moises Caicedo and
Kaoru Mitoma.
In more recent seasons, Brighton have made the occasional lucrative player sale an integral part of their model, depending on it to turn a profit each year.
Ben White's departure to Arsenal for £50m ($62m), fellow defender Marc Cucurella's move to Chelsea for £62m ($77m) and former manager Graham Potter's switch to Chelsea for £21m ($26m) were among the deals that helped Albion record a profit in their most recently published accounts.
