Sports

Seagulls fly into EPL with a poker playing lizard at the helm

By Lee Davy
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Seagulls fly into EPL with a poker playing lizard at the helm

High Stakes poker player, Tony Bloom, joins the upper echelons of the English Football League system after achieving promotion to the Premier League with his beloved Brighton.

You expect to see Tony Bloom in the partypoker Premier League.

But the English Premier League (EPL)?

The world’s richest football league with combined income surpassing £3 billion, and an average 25 million eyeballs watching each match, is soon to be the newest home of The Lizard.

The man with over $3.5m in live tournament earnings on is Hendon Mob resume is the Chairman of Brighton & Hove Albion, the newest member of the EPL. A fact confirmed after the Seagulls beat former EPL team Wigan Athletic by 2-1 on the weekend, and Huddersfield failed to beat Derby on Monday night thanks to a late equaliser from Jacob Butterfield in a 1-1 draw.

You won’t see Bloom in that picture. Chairmen are rarely wheeled out of the boardroom unless it’s to appear as a caricature on a soggy piece of cardboard held up in the air by fans demanding your resignation. But there is something different about Bloom.

After pouring over £250 million into the club since taking over from Dick Knight in 2009, including £93m on their new stadium, The American Express Community Stadium (The Amex), you get the sense that the locals love the guy.

During a recent visit to the Unibet Open in the Rendezvous Casino in Brighton, most of my table were watching one of Brighton’s rivals losing heavily in the Championship title race. When I asked them what they thought of Bloom, there was nothing but praise.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for a club that was 30-minutes away from falling out of the bottom of the English Football League system in 1997. A late Rob Reinelt equaliser in a 1-1 draw with Hereford saving their wings from being permanently clipped.

Seagulls fly into EPL with a poker playing lizard at the helmAnd now they are in the top flight for the first time since 1982-83, the year in which they were both relegated from the old First Division, and beaten in the FA Cup Final by Manchester United 4-0 after forcing a replay in a crazy 2-2 draw.

Brighton sits on top of the Championship seven points clear of Newcastle with three games to play. Bodog has them as the 1/33 favourite to win the title outright with Newcastle a 10/1 shot. The title would be nice, but who cares, escaping from The Championship is like escaping from Alcatraz.

Brighton’s promotion will be worth an estimated £170m, and if they avoid doing a Middlesbrough, who are sure to be returning to their old cage in the Championship after a dismal season, that figure escalates to £290m.

But you sense that Bloom isn’t in this for the money. He is in it for the love of the game, and the love for his team. The entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has a goal to one day buy the New York Jets. But he isn’t interested in the day he buys the Jets. What allows him to wake up each morning with the energy to take on the world is the process.

I feel that’s the same with Bloom.

And what an amazing part of the process it is for the former One Drop participant to see his club reach the pinnacle of the English Football League after 34 years.

But it doesn’t end there.

Champagne will be guzzled.

Corks will fly.

But just like a poker game, the next hand is just around the corner, and the next one, and the next one. If anyone knows the importance of the very best coming out over time, it’s Bloom.

Making the leap to the Premier League is one of Bloom’s ambitions, but it’s not his ultimate goal. The next stage is to stay there. Then he will want to see his side become a mid-table stalwart. And then who knows? As Leicester City proved last season, and as Bloom knows only too well from his days at the poker table, anything is possible.