Arsenal pivoted to brilliant effect, Chelsea bent FFP to their will and Man Utd were smart in the face of adversity. But Brighton are the new masters.
The losers – featuring Everton and Liverpool heavily – are here…
Facundo Buonanotte and Yasin Ayari
Those names might not be particularly familiar now but give it 18 months or so and both will be touted for nine-figure fees to clubs whose entire scouting network consists of one person combing through a Brighton squad list. The Seagulls spent £5.3m each on teenage midfielders Buonanotte and Ayari and will expect them to follow similar gilded development paths to January 2019 signing Alexis Mac Allister and winter 2021 addition Moises Caicedo.
Chelsea or Arsenal should save themselves time and just offer £100m now for Buonanotte, Ayari and Evan Ferguson, who himself moved to the Amex two Januarys ago. Sir Alex Ferguson once tricked everyone into thinking there is no value in the mid-season transfer window. Tony Bloom and his pals are meticulously disproving that theory.
Brighton
Seriously though. Since the summer of 2020, Brighton have sold Anthony Knockaert for £15m, Ben White for £50m, Dan Burn for £13m, Yves Bissouma for £25m, Leo Ostigard for £4.5m, Marc Cucurella for £56m and Leandro Trossard for £20m. Those seven players were bought for a combined £52.3m and moved on for £183.5m, having made a mean average of just 62 Premier League appearances for the club.
There have been misfires, as with any transfer philosophy. Jose Izquierdo, Davy Propper, Alireza Jahanbakhsh and Jurgen Locadia constitute tough lessons and sharp learning curves. But Brighton, who also paid £3m in compensation for Graham Potter and his coaching staff before receiving £21.5m for the same group from Chelsea three years later, are better now than they ever have been. They have mastered the art of prioritising the system and structure over any individual, which is sensible yet brilliant business practice for a club which will never top the football food chain, but could easily keep climbing the table.
Chelsea
‘Chelsea may struggle to find another Abramovich in a different world,’ read the headline to a Guardian piece from March 2022, the sentiment to which was by no means unique; a line in a Reuters report two months later predicted that ‘the new owners might like to run a tighter ship’.
The wider belief was always that the Blues would struggle to adjust to a less lavish lifestyle once the…
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