Can gambling’s data king take Hearts to a new level?
Former Hibs Sporting Director believes Gorgie faithful can be optimistic about the future if deal goes through with English data innovators
Football. It’s a funny old game, as the late and great Jimmy Greaves used to say to his great friend, Ian St John, in their hugely popular Saint and Greavsie sports show.
That is certainly true of the latest development at Tynecastle, where Brighton owner Tony Bloom stands ready to invest £10 million in Hearts, and where the Club is currently making use of his proprietary data analytics software, Jamestown Analytics, to help appoint a new Head Coach following the sacking of Steven Naismith.
It has brought a beacon of light to the end of a pretty dark tunnel for the Gorgie club, currently bottom of the league, an inexplicable slump in form from last season’s strong third-place.
Hearts have said they hope to have a short-list formulated within the next week and have already made it plain that they place great store in the systems that have allowed Brighton to storm through the ranks of English football, making enormous player-trading profits along the way.
From the third flight, playing at a council-owned athletics stadium, to the Premier League and European competition, before sell-out crowds of close to 32,000 in the magnificent new AmEx Falmer Stadium, Brighton’s ascent has been rocket-propelled.
But if things had worked out differently, Bloom may have been on the green side of the city. Graeme Mathie, then Sporting Director at Hibernian, had negotiated a partnership with Dan Ashworth, his oppo at Brighton, which was approved by both clubs and announced in the early summer of 2021.
It came to nothing. Mathie left Hibernian by mutual consent a matter of weeks later, in September of that year, and his role went unfilled. Ashworth left Brighton a short time later. After a successful spell at Newcastle United he is now Sporting Director at Manchester United. With the architects gone, the partnership plan gathered dust on a shelf.
So who is Tony Bloom?
Bloom is a Brighton & Hove Albion fan, who has strong family connections to the club. His uncle, Ray, is a director and his grandfather, Harry, was vice-chairman during the 1970s. To date, he has loaned around £500 million to the club, and his net worth has been estimated at between £0.75billion and £1.3billion.
He is a mathematics whizz, and a world-class poker player nicknamed The Lizard who has won millions in prize-money, but it as a professional sports bettor that he has made his fortune. His business, Starlizard – set-up by Bloom in an office space in London’s Camden Town in 2006 – uses data to analyse and predict the outcome of sporting events. And it does it very, very well.
The company is basically a betting adviser, which runs one of the most successful professional gambling syndicates in the world, placing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of bets each year. Starlizard is used to identify "value" bets — those instances in which the bookmaking market has underestimated or overestimated a team and which offer bettors sharper odds.
Mathie, today Managing Director of Ayr United as they chase promotion back to Scotland’s top-flight, told the Inquirer of what had drawn him to Brighton.
Believe in the data
“That’s an easy one really. For anyone involved in football two clubs in England really stood out as hugely outperforming expectations – Brighton and Brentford. For a guy like me, with a background in recruitment, their ability to make consistently good, data and logic-driven decisions was very, very interesting, not just in recruitment but in how they operated. And at the heart of that lies Tony Bloom.”
Interestingly, Brentford follow a similar, data-driven approach to recruitment – and that’s not so surprising when you consider that owner Matthew Benham once worked for Bloom in the world of sports bookmaking and betting, where both went on to make fortunes. Brentford have been linked to an interest in partnering with Dundee United in recent months.
Mathie has the highest regard for the owners of both clubs and the innovative ways they have harnessed their ability to crunch numbers to play the odds. While stellar recruitment lies at the heart, the ability to not only harness data but create truly insightful information brings benefits in other areas.
“I particularly remember one chat with Dan Ashworth which really stuck with me. During his tenure at Brighton Graham Potter went through a really bad, winless run of around ten games. It would normally be enough to get a head coach sacked, or at least prompt a conversation. But Tony Bloom was able to show Dan the data which proved that, regardless of the results during the run, Graham was progressing the team in many areas of their performance and they stuck with him.
“Not only did Graham have a very successful spell in charge of the team at Brighton, when he was headhunted to take charge at Chelsea Brighton received more than £20 million in compensation. So sticking with him through that tough time was another terrific decision, based on the kind of analysis Tony Bloom does. Every Club compiles and looks at data, a lot of data. But Brighton seem to be able to interpret it all better.”
Plan for success
While the cash that Tony Bloom may yet invest – around £10million for a minority stake in the supporter-owned club – would always be beneficial, Mathie believes it is the proven systems and processes that Bloom’s Brighton bring that is most likely to transform Hearts’ fortunes.
“They work to a plan that is underpinned by Tony Bloom’s systems, that have served him so well throughout his business successes. When they took over at Brighton in 2009 they created a ten year plan to get to the top level. At that time they were in League 1, playing at a council-owned stadium that had been built for athletics. If you’d told any Brighton fan that they would play in the Premier League in a fantastic, modern, 30,000 seat stadium within a decade they’d have bitten your hand off.”
Promotion to the Championship was achieved quickly, and the club then made the promised land and riches of the Premier League in 2017 – two years ahead of plan. By season 2022/23 they had finished sixth and qualified for Europe.
However, Bloom’s recipe has worked in less wealthy environments too. In 2018, Bloom completed the takeover of Royal Union Saint-Gilloise, known as RUSG, in the Belgian second division. At the end of the 2020-2021 football season RUSG were promoted to Belgian First Division A, their first time in the country’s top league in 48 years. In their first season, the club amassed the most points in the league, but then finished second in the end of season play-offs, securing Champions League qualification.
At that time, Bloom was the majority owner of USG however following the qualification by USG and Brighton for UEFA club competitions for the 2023-2024 season, he made changes to his investment in USG to ensure compliance with multi-club ownership rules and is now a minority shareholder.
Strong Foundation
Mathie added: “In many ways, that should excite Hearts fans more. He has shown that his way of running a club works away from the multi-millions of the Premier League as well. ”
Of course, Bloom has strong foundations to work from at Hearts. They are one of Scotland’s biggest clubs, and regularly contend for European competition. Supporters continue to pour £1.6 million a year of working capital into the Club through Foundation of Hearts.
And then there is the continued unconditional support of benefactor James Anderson, who provides more than £4 million every year. That total of close to £6 million a year makes it very difficult for major competitors like Hibernian and Aberdeen to match the spending power available to Hearts – even before Bloom’s investment.
If Bloom does take his involvement with Hearts further, he will find himself sharing the boardroom with Anderson. The former Baillie Gifford partner is a world-renowned investor, who generated tens of billions of pounds in profits when he made early purchases of shares in technology businesses including Tesla, Amazon, and Facebook.
He is another disruptive thinker, making decisions on detailed consideration of “outlier” businesses, those who are undervalued against their potential to grow in his view, and which he maintains therefore offer the best opportunity for long-term growth. He is also reputed to be one of Scotland’s wealthiest men.
In a recent interview he said “I think that if you can bear it, and if you have clients and savers who can bear it, trying to find the extreme winners is the best way to invest.”
Hibs have, of course, progressed their own model for the future. An investment by US sports billionaire Bill Foley and his Black Knights consortium saw Hibernian join a multi-club model that is increasingly popular throughout Europe in attracting and developing players, with others in the stable including L’Orient in France, Auckland in the “A” League Down Under, and of course Bournemouth in England’s Premier League. Foley has a track record of success on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bridging the gap to the Old Firm?
Over the past few days pundits in Scotland, notably former Rangers and Scotland striker Kris Boyd, have expressed excitement at Bloom’s involvement in Hearts, claiming both Rangers and Celtic “should be worried.” That may be a stretch. In 2023 Hearts posted record turnover of more than £20million - but Rangers hit £80million and Celtic a staggering £120million. That a £60million or £100million gap that gets repeated every year. The gap remains a huge one to bridge, but operating smarter will help.
Does Mathie believe the new partnership is reason for supporters to be optimistic? “I do. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be. He (Bloom) has so far been successful in everything he’s done in football, and he and Paul Barber (CEO at Brighton) seem to know exactly what they want to achieve and how to go about making it work. They make consistently good decisions – on everything from talent recruitment to succession planning.”
Bloom rarely gives interviews outwith Brighton’s own club TV, but in one given to the local newspaper The Argus he said of his method: “When it comes to football, people get very emotional. When I’m watching a game I get as emotional as the rest of them.
“But running the football club, it’s really important to get that emotion to the back. Otherwise you’ll end up doing what a lot of chairmen always do and make some horrendous decisions. I don’t quite understand why a lot of successful businessmen get into football clubs and sometimes make a pig’s ear of it.”