It’s a warm Friday lunchtime around London’s Camden Lock and office workers are mingling with tourists, enjoying the blue skies and the summer warmth.
Only the young professionals who emerge from a modern canal-side edifice called The Iceworks know that a business of cutting-edge Premier League significance lies within this place.
They step out from the redbrick building in the kind of casual attire which suggests an unstuffy working environment designed to keep minds clear and sharp. A motivational message placed at one of the airy atriums inside states: ‘Calm.’
The quality of the working environment in the building – a substantial gymnasium, sauna, cafe with barista coffee and, we’re told, a kitchen with a private chef providing fresh food including two types of fish and different menus every day: all of this free – is a measure of the company’s attempt to recruit and retain the brightest minds.
The only significant clue to the football connection is the lime green fabric lizard placed on a dark-green baize background in the airy dining area overlooking the canal.
The company is Starlizard – the brainchild and intellectual home of Tony Bloom, the Brighton and Hove Albion owner, whose cold-eyed calculation at the poker tables earned him a fortune and the nickname ‘the lizard’ long before he applied his mathematical genius to the club who have just thrashed champions Arsenal and eliminated Manchester United from the Carabao Cup in the space of four days.
Brighton’s genius owner Tony Bloom has transformed the fortunes of the club since his cold-eyed calculation at the poker tables earned him a fortune and the nickname ‘the lizard’
The HQ of Bloom’s company Starlizard at London’s Camden Lock (Starlizard’s office is in the redbrick building left-of-centre)
Brighton’s 3-0 demolition of champions Arsenal on Saturday took them into the Premier League’s top three
Starlizard is the engine of Brighton’s enduring success and The Iceworks is, you might say, the building where the secret codes are kept; the place where algorithms which pull together and weigh up every conceivable piece of predictive data about players and results are used to find value in the places where competitors aren’t looking.
Recruits must sign non-disclosure agreements which have always cloaked the company in secrecy. But drawing on the testimonies of insiders, who have spoken to us on condition of anonymity, Daily Mail Sport has attempted to build a picture of the company fuelling Brighton’s extraordinary success.
Behind the Iceworks walls, it is a picture of tight security and circumspection with unrestricted access for very few and employees sitting in rooms which require security cards to access. Meeting areas carve off into those private rooms with framed Brighton shirts on the walls – ‘all quite lock and key,’ in the words of one source – rather than this nerve centre resembling a frantic trading floor.
And contrary to the notion that an army of statistics geeks are crunching numbers here, it’s a relatively small team, perhaps 40 or 50 people, tapping into the real gold nuggets of the entire operation – the algorithms – which we understand are being developed far from The Iceworks by University of Exeter mathematics graduates, hired by Bloom and based off-site.
The Exeter recruits are the computer wizards; football industry equivalents of what the investment banking world calls quantitative analysts, or ‘quants’.
Though Bloom is neither a director nor owner of the Starlizard business, it is very much his – and his intellectual involvement on the small details of how to assess a player, team or likely result remains intense. The very few within the inner sanctum who get a look at the recruitment models and data include Brighton technical directors who have worked closely on the model with Bloom.
It explains why Brighton’s football department has been in such high demand in recent years. Executives like Paul Winstanley and Sam Jewell have been snapped up by Chelsea on the basis that if a club can’t have access to Brighton’s technology, they might get insights by hiring the people who used it.
Dan Ashworth, former Brighton technical director, knew the codes and reached Manchester United but Sir Jim Ratcliffe decided he had no need of him.
Bloom has a tight circle of people he trusts. Among them is Paul Barber (centre), Brighton’s impressive chief executive
Brighton’s recruitment model is the stuff of legend – with Moises Caicedo, now of Chelsea, one of the finest examples
It is Bloom’s formidable intellect which our sources all describe. ‘He’s pretty much got to a stage where he can model where Brighton ought to finish based on tens of thousands of simulations of his own,’ says one.
‘You have to be intellectually on your game to hold a conversation with him. He’s not intimidating in that regard. He’s very, very down-to-earth – but directly intelligent. You can’t really waffle your way through a conversation with Tony. He wants clarity. He wants facts. He wants access to information quickly. His brain works at a hundred miles an hour and he’s a mathematician at heart, so you can’t really bluff your way through those sorts of conversations.’
This intellectual intensity means that working at a high level for Starlizard is not a job for those who can’t face it being very, very full-on – akin to a graduate job at a City bank or broker.
Some describe an expectation from Bloom that work must be your life. Those seeking a more normal work-life balance depart, leaving those who live and breathe Starlizard to be a part of arguably the greatest ‘Moneyball’ success in football.
Moises Caicedo, bought for £4million and sold to Chelsea for more than 20 times as much. Marc Cucurella, bought and sold for a £46m profit inside a year. Alexis Mac Allister, sold for £48m after also contributing hugely on the field.
Starlizard was set up 20 years ago to use data and prediction models for Bloom to identify market inefficiencies in betting prices across the globe, often for fairly offbeat sporting events where you could place significant capital on the outcome.
When that had reaped him millions, the company sold access to its database to high-roller syndicates and clients, allowing them to place their own bets. And then, after Bloom bought Brighton in 2009, Starlizard’s data helped build successful football teams.
Bloom’s success as an investor in Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, transformed from a dormant lower-tier team into a dominant force in Belgian football, and Hearts, who came close to the Scottish title last season, have shown it’s been no fluke at Brighton, his home-town team. Starlizard’s profits have also provided the capital for Bloom to invest in Brighton.
All those we have spoken to describe the unusual significance Bloom attaches to loyalty and perhaps that is not surprising, given the highly secretive nature of his business. Many of those he has around him have been with him for a long time.
Fabian Hurzeler (pictured celebrating the Seagulls’ win over Arsenal) is the latest in a long line of successful managerial hires
There is no love lost between Bloom and his former employee Matthew Benham (left), now the owner of Brentford
Bloom has become inseparable from Adam Franks, his ‘No 1 disciple’ and right-hand man according to one source. Franks, a fellow mathematician he met when they were undergraduates at Manchester University, is now his key lieutenant who communicates and translates Bloom’s wishes to staff across his businesses. The two are very alike in personality.
Marc Sugarman and Steve Edery are other very long-standing lieutenants. So is Brighton chief executive Paul Barber, who will sometimes travel to games with Bloom and is the impressive public-facing leader of the club: the yin to Bloom’s yang. Their relationship has been a vital asset for Brighton.
An in-depth report on Starlizard by the US financial news website Business Insider in 2016 found that the Camden company’s employees were offered a stake in Bloom’s syndicate once they had completed a probationary period.
This meant that the office staff, who watch and record match data on anything from weather, morale, form and training information to feed into the algorithms and make betting assessments, could make anything between £100 to upwards of £500,000 every six months, depending on their stake. But if the syndicate sustained losses, its members would have to compensate Starlizard by topping up the pot available to lay future bets.
Some we have spoken to ascribe Bloom’s ‘paranoia’ around access and discretion at Starlizard to the way his one-time close friend and employee Matthew Benham left his business, to set up a rival company and, of course, run his own highly successful Premier League team, in Brentford.
Benham, who studied at Oxford and secured a job as a city derivatives trader, worked for Bloom at Premier Bet, the online bookmaker he’d founded, and certainly met his then boss’s intellectual expectations. But Benham left Premier Bet in 2004, taking staff and what Bloom considered to be proprietary information with him, to set up Smartodds. With loyalty so important to Bloom, Benham’s actions stung. The split was very acrimonious.
This has fed into the now fierce rivalry between Brighton and Brentford, whose fans know their owners can’t abide each other. Bloom has been known to sit in the away end at Brentford’s stadium and celebrate goals with Brighton’s fans. ‘He won’t go in the directors’ box when Matthew’s there,’ says a source.
That obsession about trust would have been reinforced by the High Court documents lodged in January by a former member of Bloom’s Starlizard gambling syndicate, Ryan Dudfield, who claimed the billionaire owed him a share of nearly £190m in gambling profits.
Dudfield alleged the Brighton owner screened his identity, to prevent being shut out of betting sites, by funnelling bets through sportsmen and businessmen. The case is understood to be unresolved. Dudfield claimed Starlizard made about £600m a year in winnings. Bloom rejected Dudfield’s claims.
Those who earn Bloom’s trust have benefitted after leaving his employment. In the past few years, he has helped a select few former colleagues by allowing them to access his football recruitment analytics data via a facility called Jamestown Analytics.
Bloom (front row, centre) has been known to sit in the away end at Brentford’s stadium and celebrate goals with Brighton’s fans. ‘He won’t go in the directors’ box when Matthew’s there,’ says a source
Under Bloom, Brighton continuously defy those who say other clubs are catching up and the dream era is over
One of Jamestown’s beneficiaries is Grimsby Town, whose chief executive, Polly Bancroft, was a much-respected head of women’s football at Brighton before leaving, with Bloom’s blessing, for the same role at Manchester United. She was recruited to Grimsby’s Blundell Park in 2024.
Swansea City, also beneficiaries of Jamestown, have former Brighton head of marketing and women’s team director Tom Gorringe as their chief executive.
Grimsby have mounted a push for promotion to League One, beat Manchester United in last season’s Carabao Cup and reached the fourth round of the FA Cup. Swansea are currently top of the Championship.
But it is Brighton on which Bloom continues to focus his Starlizard ‘quants’ and number crunchers, and the club, sitting third in the Premier League, are defying a view, prevalent in football all summer, that others had caught up with their data prowess and their dream era was over.
Maxim De Cuyper and the re-signed Pascal Gross are among the league’s outstanding players and though the £50m outlay to Tottenham for Luka Vuskovic looked high by Brighton’s standards, he has so far looked like another they may sell for double that.
How the beleaguered Michael Carrick could use a little of the Exeter University algorithm expertise which Starlizard’s Camden Lock staff are putting into effect at their canal-side location. There’s no chance of that, of course.
‘Brighton’s position is Tony’s priority and he won’t provide any access to clubs that will directly compete with them,’ says a source.
