Brighton insider on whether Bloom can keep Hearts promise

The Herald Scotland

3 days ago

"I've only met him once and it was very, very briefly," Maguire told the Hearts Standard.
"He's a guy who's three steps ahead. I'm a teacher. I'm a pretty good teacher because I can take people through a series of steps. Tony's the type of guy who can identify something very quickly. He's already answered my next question before I've asked it.
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"Sometimes you do [come] across it. I teach at university. I teach very learned professors and so on, who are super smart. Tony is without doubt well ahead of those, and he's used that skill to create a culture at Brighton which allows the club to punch above its weight. You can only make progress if you're bigger or smarter, and he's gone down that smarter route."
Majority owner and chairman of Brighton and Hove Albion, Bloom has moulded the club into one of the English Premier League's mainstays. Although their quest for major silverware under his stewardship remains ongoing, the stability and effective manner in which the club is run is difficult to find anywhere else in Britain.
"He is [a] visionary," adds Maguire. "He employs smart people who are able to effectively transfer his ambitions and his strategy into reality.
"He's got a chief executive at Brighton, Paul Barber, who's one of the best paid in the Premier League, and effectively the driver of Tony's plan. They've got a succession plan for everything, so if Brighton lose a player, they've already recruited the replacement. It's a no-drama, no-crisis football club, and now the fan base, if they lose their best players, they just accept it as it's part of the price of being successful."
Bloom recently made headlines by emphatically stating that he believes in Hearts' ability to 'disrupt the pattern of domination of Scottish football'. The last time a club other than Celtic or Rangers won the top flight was in 1985, when Sir Alex Ferguson's all-conquering Aberdeen side brought the title to Pittodrie. Maguire delivered his verdict on whether Bloom can help end the Glaswegian monopoly and win Hearts their first league championship since 1960.
"Possibly yes, probably no, would be my assessment. Do I expect Hearts to be winning the premiership on a regular basis? No, I don't. Could they become more of a challenge in making third position not too far behind second? Yes, I think he probably could do that. Then, could that be narrowed down to taking second place? Well, who knows? I don't know. Nobody knows Tony's secret sauce.
"I think his first ambition will be to try to establish Hearts as the number three club in Scotland, with the aim of chipping away at the others. He sees that as an intellectual challenge and he likes the idea of being a disruptor. I think that will be interesting to see how it can be applied because there is such a financial gap between the two Glasgow clubs and the rest of Scottish football."
With Bloom's investment, Hearts are utilising his data analytics firm, Jamestown Analytics, to help new manager Derek McInnes sign players. Said supercomputer has enabled Brighton to become one of the most renowned clubs in Europe for buying relatively unknowns and moving them on for considerable profits; Ben White, Marc Cucurella and Moises Caicedo were sold for a combined fee of over £200 million between 2021 and 2023. And this money isn't being made against a backdrop of dark clouds and grey skies on the south coast.
"Brighton, it's a happy club," says Maguire.
"I think Tony's philosophy is, if the first thing a football player sees in the morning is somebody smiling at them, whether they're cleaning the toilets, whether it's the receptionist, whether it's the person in the canteen, the staff, they take lunch with the players. I think things like that, and you compare that to Manchester United where everything is down to just screwing the staff except the players.
"That's the culture that they try to have, and that takes time to implement. So, you need a good chief executive, you need a board of directors who are on board, and then you have effectively a coach and a director of football who are all rowing in the same direction.
"As soon as you get factions, as soon as you get infighting, the whole thing collapses. But he's always aimed to have people at Brighton who will effectively have that same philosophy.
"Brighton have got a manager, as everybody points out, he's 32 years old, nobody had ever heard of him. He spends his time cycling around Brighton, and nobody bothers him. It's not that pressure cooker that you would have elsewhere. You couldn't do that in Glasgow. Can you imagine Brendan Rodgers out on his bike? It's different, but it works again and again."
Things might well be all rosy in Brighton's garden just now, but it has taken Bloom over a decade to transform the club into its present state. He became chairman all the way back in 2009, and only in the past five years have we begun to see the fruits of his labour.
Demands for success at Tynecastle Park are as high as you might find in Scottish football, Parkhead and Ibrox aside. Patience could be key for the Gorgie faithful.
"I don't know how impatient Hearts fans will be. That's the one thing that you've got to buy into. It took Brighton six seasons under Tony Bloom to get from the Championship to the Premier League. But in those six seasons, they got to the playoffs on three occasions, and then they went up on the final time."