Harvey Barnes

[Sampson]

1 hour ago, Jordan said:

Brighton are super committed to a quant/analytical/Moneyball approach so I can see them having a ceiling on any of their players where they believe paying them over that amount would not be worth it. 
 

They’ll rather take their chances finding replacements (especially as long as they think their analytical models give them a competitive advantage in scouting).

 

From what I gather from The Swiss Ramble and others, Brighton actually lowered their wages-to-turnover ratio last season.

 

I agree they won’t panic like how we did last season (and to some extend, this summer).

 

Barring a cataclysmic event (edit: such as another pandemic or Super League) that upends the football economy, I think a more likely scenario for Brighton going from overachieving to a big mess includes either

 

- a mass embrace of hyper-analytical models (including a big commitment by big clubs towards this) whereby the types of attributes Brighton look for are no longer undervalued, and they cannot react, or

 

- more investment (such as Newcastle, Man Utd new ownership, and other possibilities with other clubs) driving transfer/wage spending so high that Brighton can no longer offer competitive salaries, and the brute force of 10+ big spending teams over time drives them down the table.

But we already saw with Cucarella last summer when they turned down a £50mil bid from ManCity for him and drove ManCity away before Chelsea came in for him after Cucarella pulled a Fofana to leave, that they’re prepared to try and hold on to their players by refusing reasonable bids for them.

 

We’re told we should’ve let Tielemans go for £50m after he’d just scored the winning goal in the FA Cup final and played in Europe and finished 5th, even though no one bid for him. Yet Brighton are apparently geniuses and not following the same model despite rejecting £50m for an inferior player when they’d just finished 9th. 
 

This idea that Brighton somehow know the market at a deeper level than anyone else and will continue at it indefinitely is weird. Cucarella would still be there, probably having the same piss poor season he’s had at Chelsea and lowering his value as his contract winds down if they’d got their original wish to turn down £50m for him and he hadn’t kicked up a massive fuss and forced the move himself 

 

The idea they’re doing something way deeper than every other club is weird to me too. Every club uses data analytics these days, every club has access to these numbers and Brighton won’t be doing anything far deeper than can be found publicly on fbref or whatever anyway 

Edited 5 May 2023 by Sampson

[honeybradger]

38 minutes ago, Sampson said:

And again - no one bidded for Tielemans and Soyuncu so we didn’t hold on to them by choice and they were on comfy contracts so could wind them down. Why do people always say “we should’ve sold Tielemans and Soyuncu 2 summers ago for £xyz million.”? We might well have sold them if we’d had offers but you can’t just sell players because you want to.
 

Teams started to think our players were too expensive or would just run down their contracts. Players at Brighton will get itchy and they won’t want to sell 3 or 4 players in a summer so they’ll either offer bigger wages which means teams won’t buy them anymore as they’ll consider them too expensive, or the players will run down their contracts. 

From what i heard we shut down all negotiations in 2021 after Covid as we felt that any offer would be below the required value. Naturally you wouldnt get any offers if the club are unwilling to even open a dialogue. It might be true that even if we did want to sell that summer we would only get 30-40 million for these players in which case the club would have been justified in not selling anyway. 

 

The 2021 summer window was an anomaly though and wont happen for a long time and does not reflect the success that we can have with the sell low buy high model going forwards. If we have the opportunity to sell maddison and barnes for 50 mil each this summer and reinvest in young talent we should absolutely do so.

Edited 5 May 2023 by honeybradger

[theessexfox]

Agreed on the above - we got a bit screwed by the lack of cash in the 2021 market where we could have otherwise got a good fee for one or two of our assets at their peak, instead we've ended up in a situation losing a couple of good players for nothing.

[sacreblueits442]

8 minutes ago, theessexfox said:

Agreed on the above - we got a bit screwed by the lack of cash in the 2021 market where we could have otherwise got a good fee for one or two of our assets at their peak, instead we've ended up in a situation losing a couple of good players for nothing.

...pretty much a judgment call, the market would have been the same for everyone!!!

If we had chosen to sell in that market and not look to replace in that same market we would be looking at a loss as one market would have been flat and the other buoyant.

 Buying and selling in the same market makes the transactions relative (or as relative as they can be). Knowing that contracts were due to expire, there may have been the thought that we keep what we have and negotiate later.

 

[splinterdream]

6 hours ago, Finnegan said:

One bad season and Aston Villa are buying our best players? 

 

 

Smells like rubbish to me. Assume his agent is trying to get him a new deal or put his name around in case we go down. 

 

If we stay up and hire an even halfway decent manager in the summer then a move to Villa is sideways at absolute best. 

Love your optimistic outlook, but I don’t share it myself. If we survive, we have a squad rebuild, we could be as likely to be fighting relegation again unless we pick some real talent which of late we seem to struggle with.

[Jordan]

2 hours ago, Sampson said:

But we already saw with Cucarella last summer when they turned down a £50mil bid from ManCity for him and drove ManCity away before Chelsea came in for him after Cucarella pulled a Fofana to leave, that they’re prepared to try and hold on to their players by refusing reasonable bids for them.

 

We’re told we should’ve let Tielemans go for £50m after he’d just scored the winning goal in the FA Cup final and played in Europe and finished 5th, even though no one bid for him. Yet Brighton are apparently geniuses and not following the same model despite rejecting £50m for an inferior player when they’d just finished 9th. 
 

This idea that Brighton somehow know the market at a deeper level than anyone else and will continue at it indefinitely is weird. Cucarella would still be there, probably having the same piss poor season he’s had at Chelsea and lowering his value as his contract winds down if they’d got their original wish to turn down £50m for him and he hadn’t kicked up a massive fuss and forced the move himself 

 

The idea they’re doing something way deeper than every other club is weird to me too. Every club uses data analytics these days, every club has access to these numbers and Brighton won’t be doing anything far deeper than can be found publicly on fbref or whatever anyway 

1) Brighton wound up getting a better deal from Chelsea for Cucurella than what Man City offered. They did very well in this deal. We can revisit this point if Brighton don’t get a better offer for Caicedo this summer than what they could have gotten in January, but I don’t know how the Cucurella transfer negotiations are supposed to make me think they’re not managing the transfer market well.

 

2) Rather than my point being “weird,” I think your assertion that Brighton are essentially using fb-ref stats is naïve. Every team does use some sort of analytics, but teams also have proprietary analytic models. Brighton are doing something different. Tony Bloom isn’t going to spill the beans on their models but it’s not “weird” to say they have a little bit of an advantage now.

 

Eventually, teams will catch up to Brighton, and/or the financial and footballing rewards will no longer be worth their approach if they cannot anticipate new areas where they can find value. But there is no question that Brighton are currently outpacing and outsmarting all of their peers, including Leicester City, in analytics, scouting, transfer dealings, value in player wages, and coaching (with possibly only Brentford—another quant-driven, gambling-inspired Moneyball outfit—getting more value for their investment).

[filbertway]

3 hours ago, Sampson said:

But we already saw with Cucarella last summer when they turned down a £50mil bid from ManCity for him and drove ManCity away before Chelsea came in for him after Cucarella pulled a Fofana to leave, that they’re prepared to try and hold on to their players by refusing reasonable bids for them.

 

We’re told we should’ve let Tielemans go for £50m after he’d just scored the winning goal in the FA Cup final and played in Europe and finished 5th, even though no one bid for him. Yet Brighton are apparently geniuses and not following the same model despite rejecting £50m for an inferior player when they’d just finished 9th. 
 

This idea that Brighton somehow know the market at a deeper level than anyone else and will continue at it indefinitely is weird. Cucarella would still be there, probably having the same piss poor season he’s had at Chelsea and lowering his value as his contract winds down if they’d got their original wish to turn down £50m for him and he hadn’t kicked up a massive fuss and forced the move himself 

 

The idea they’re doing something way deeper than every other club is weird to me too. Every club uses data analytics these days, every club has access to these numbers and Brighton won’t be doing anything far deeper than can be found publicly on fbref or whatever anyway 

Highly recommend this book if you like a read

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Football-Code-Science-Predicting-Beautiful/dp/1527211940?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=5f5e308c-4ffb-4fbf-adef-9c540860f37b

 

 

[SafewayFox]

1 hour ago, Jordan said:

1) Brighton wound up getting a better deal from Chelsea for Cucurella than what Man City offered. They did very well in this deal. We can revisit this point if Brighton don’t get a better offer for Caicedo this summer than what they could have gotten in January, but I don’t know how the Cucurella transfer negotiations are supposed to make me think they’re not managing the transfer market well.

 

2) Rather than my point being “weird,” I think your assertion that Brighton are essentially using fb-ref stats is naïve. Every team does use some sort of analytics, but teams also have proprietary analytic models. Brighton are doing something different. Tony Bloom isn’t going to spill the beans on their models but it’s not “weird” to say they have a little bit of an advantage now.

 

Eventually, teams will catch up to Brighton, and/or the financial and footballing rewards will no longer be worth their approach if they cannot anticipate new areas where they can find value. But there is no question that Brighton are currently outpacing and outsmarting all of their peers, including Leicester City, in analytics, scouting, transfer dealings, value in player wages, and coaching (with possibly only Brentford—another quant-driven, gambling-inspired Moneyball outfit—getting more value for their investment).

Another thing that on face value seems to have worked was how Bloom correctly has used Union SG.

 

Mitoma scored and assisted a bucket load for them last season.

 

We’ve got a manager at Leuven who has refused to play our players….such an own goal and missed opportunity.

[CosbehFox]

7 minutes ago, SafewayFox said:

Another thing that on face value seems to have worked was how Bloom correctly has used Union SG.

 

Mitoma scored and assisted a bucket load for them last season.

 

We’ve got a manager at Leuven who has refused to play our players….such an own goal and missed opportunity.

Refused to play players who were not good enough. He's played the players who were - Sowah and Opoku. 

[SafewayFox]

2 minutes ago, CosbehFox said:

Refused to play players who were not good enough. He's played the players who were - Sowah and Opoku. 

I mean Iversen seems good enough for us (where we are right now) and he didn’t get back in the reckoning after picking up his injury.

 

I’m sure there are others but regardless of that part of my post, us not using Leuven to gain work permits for some exciting, young players has been a glaringly obvious issue surely you can admit that? 

[moore_94]

2 minutes ago, SafewayFox said:

I mean Iversen seems good enough for us (where we are right now) and he didn’t get back in the reckoning after picking up his injury.

 

I’m sure there are others but regardless of that part of my post, us not using Leuven to gain work permits for some exciting, young players has been a glaringly obvious issue surely you can admit that? 

Iversen got unlucky in that his replacement Romo played well whilst Iversen was out so it would have also been unfair on him to be dropped - Iversen was soon doing well at Preston anyway

 

If they are good enough their manager has used them, it hasn't helped that so far they have also had Benkovic and Eppiah, and also got them to sign King

 

We have made £7m off it so far through Sowah

 

We can't just send a load of young players over to them to get work permits, as they actually need to play to get one and Leuven need to develop their own players and squad as well

 

Brighton still only send 1 or 2 players to USG a season which is more than enough

[Clarkey123]

Negotiation tactics for a new contract, because  nobody in the right mind is gona pay £60mil if they’ve seen him over the last few games!

[sacreblueits442]

1 hour ago, SafewayFox said:

Another thing that on face value seems to have worked was how Bloom correctly has used Union SG.

 

Mitoma scored and assisted a bucket load for them last season.

 

We’ve got a manager at Leuven who has refused to play our players….such an own goal and missed opportunity.

...on principle he refused, but what we were sending was not going to add value to their squad!!!

We were effectively using OHL as a reserve squad, in order to give LCFC contracted players game time.

   Unlike Cooper at Forest, who had 20-plus players come in, most you would have thought without his approval, Brys stood his ground, and it would be what you would want to see from a strong manager.

[sacreblueits442]

1 hour ago, SafewayFox said:

I mean Iversen seems good enough for us (where we are right now) and he didn’t get back in the reckoning after picking up his injury.

 

I’m sure there are others but regardless of that part of my post, us not using Leuven to gain work permits for some exciting, young players has been a glaringly obvious issue surely you can admit that? 

...I am sure the previous post from, (@CosbehFox) confirmed that we are using OHL to gain the necessary points in order to bring talented young players in!!!

[Dan LCFC]

14 hours ago, Walkerfox said:

If he isn’t signing a new contract then we have to sell whether we want to or not. 
 

We need to learn from our past mistakes. We can’t have another Maddison, Tielemans etc where we don’t make any/enough money from key players.
 

People are constantly forgetting why we’re in the mess we’re in. We need to go back to the model of buy, improve and sell. 60 million gets us 2 or 3 younger players who we can sell on for profit. I understand the worry that it could leave us severely depleted but that’s where our recruitment is key.

Losing four key players in one summer isn't anything like the model, it's nearer to suicide. We'd have to pull our best window in years out of the bag just to ensure we don't drop next year.

 

I think we have to take the hit and keep Barnes for another year unless the difference is mammoth.

 

This entire thing is an utter mess. Heads have got to roll for this shambles.

[justfoxes]

15 hours ago, Finnegan said:

One bad season and Aston Villa are buying our best players? 

 

 

Smells like rubbish to me. Assume his agent is trying to get him a new deal or put his name around in case we go down. 

 

If we stay up and hire an even halfway decent manager in the summer then a move to Villa is sideways at absolute best. 

I hear we have two cracking defenders Villa could sign from us, Vestergaard & Bertrand I’m sure we could do a deal for them £60m each plus Watkins that sounds a right steal !!  😉

[HeskeyForever]

As a fan base, we were naturally inclined to want our 'best players' to stay - which, to a large extent, makes sense - they've provided great moments, won us matches and offered quality on the pitch. With that said, our biggest mistake was becoming complacent in having a clear, identifiable pipeline of players that we could replace these players with should a good offer come in. We started to shoe-horn players in as 'replacements', rather than finding players with similar qualities that had room to grow. For me, this started to creep in when we sold Mahrez and bought in Maddison and Ghezzal. While we were never going to find a right-winger of Riyad's quality immediately, Ghezzal was, by all accounts, an awful downgrade. 

 

As much as I think Barnes is a great player on his day, we desperately need the money to reinvest in a huge squad overhaul. I also get the sense that he seems ready to move on to push himself in a new environment. His numbers are brilliant this season and his value is high as he still has a while left on his contract. Plenty of clubs will want him, so it seems like the perfect time to sell - we could easily buy 2-3 players with £60 million that would improve us hugely. 

[sacreblueits442]

1 hour ago, HeskeyForever said:

While we were never going to find a right-winger of Riyad's quality immediately, Ghezzal was, by all accounts, an awful downgrade. 

 

...Ghezzal had an abundance of skill, he just never believed in himself at this level!!!

  If he showed half the attitude that he now plays with, he could have been an asset for us.

[ARM1968]

1 hour ago, HeskeyForever said:

As a fan base, we were naturally inclined to want our 'best players' to stay - which, to a large extent, makes sense - they've provided great moments, won us matches and offered quality on the pitch. With that said, our biggest mistake was becoming complacent in having a clear, identifiable pipeline of players that we could replace these players with should a good offer come in. We started to shoe-horn players in as 'replacements', rather than finding players with similar qualities that had room to grow. For me, this started to creep in when we sold Mahrez and bought in Maddison and Ghezzal. While we were never going to find a right-winger of Riyad's quality immediately, Ghezzal was, by all accounts, an awful downgrade. 

 

As much as I think Barnes is a great player on his day, we desperately need the money to reinvest in a huge squad overhaul. I also get the sense that he seems ready to move on to push himself in a new environment. His numbers are brilliant this season and his value is high as he still has a while left on his contract. Plenty of clubs will want him, so it seems like the perfect time to sell - we could easily buy 2-3 players with £60 million that would improve us hugely. 

£60 million might improve us massively in the Championship. Only marginally at best in the Premier League - AND you’d have to spend it right. 

[SK3Blue]

13 minutes ago, ARM1968 said:

£60 million might improve us massively in the Championship. Only marginally at best in the Premier League - AND you’d have to spend it right. 

Historically our best finds, Mahrez, Vardy, Kante, Morgan cost very little. When Leicester have had big money to spend its usually not done wisely, Slimani being one example. 

 

We need to get back to finding hidden gems rather than just making kneejerk signings that don't fit the profile or bloodline that Pearson moulded to a certain extent. 

 

If the worst should happen then the likes of Souttar, Victor, Daka and KDH are championship standard and I would hope with some decent scouting we can put some quality around them to rebuild. 

 

 

 

 

[ARM1968]

5 minutes ago, SK3Blue said:

Historically our best finds, Mahrez, Vardy, Kante, Morgan cost very little. When Leicester have had big money to spend its usually not done wisely, Slimani being one example. 

 

We need to get back to finding hidden gems rather than just making kneejerk signings that don't fit the profile or bloodline that Pearson moulded to a certain extent. 

 

If the worst should happen then the likes of Souttar, Victor, Daka and KDH are championship standard and I would hope with some decent scouting we can put some quality around them to rebuild. 

 

 

 

 

Agreed to an extent. We should be looking for those hidden gems most definitively. However, times have changed, those gems are harder to find. I think we’ve tried a few times but failed. Big money does not guarantee success unless you have really big money - even then, Chelsea. 
 

certainly £60 million would be a huge bonus in the championship- along with likely £40/£50 million from Maddison. Just hope that isn’t the case. 

[yorkie1999]

43 minutes ago, SK3Blue said:

Historically our best finds, Mahrez, Vardy, Kante, Morgan cost very little. When Leicester have had big money to spend its usually not done wisely, Slimani being one example. 

 

We need to get back to finding hidden gems rather than just making kneejerk signings that don't fit the profile or bloodline that Pearson moulded to a certain extent. 

 

If the worst should happen then the likes of Souttar, Victor, Daka and KDH are championship standard and I would hope with some decent scouting we can put some quality around them to rebuild. 

 

 

 

 

That as a once in a lifetime event mainly due to steve walsh, Both our rise and fall is due to Pearson, shakespere and walsh working for the club, then not working for the club. We are now seeing the twighlight of their labours.

[SheppyFox]

@Ric Flair would do a better job than the people running recruitment. 

[Chocolate Teapot]

52 minutes ago, SheppyFox said:

@Ric Flair would do a better job than the people running recruitment. 

He really wouldn't.

[Jordan]

18 hours ago, SafewayFox said:

Another thing that on face value seems to have worked was how Bloom correctly has used Union SG.

 

Mitoma scored and assisted a bucket load for them last season.

 

We’ve got a manager at Leuven who has refused to play our players….such an own goal and missed opportunity.

Seeing Bloom get so much value out of USG while King Power just pissed away years and money at OHL just drove me nuts

 

At least we may be into something with Opoku, finally.