Brighton & Hove Albion FC’s 2-1 victory over Wigan at the weekend has sealed the club’s promotion from the Championship to the Premier League. One man deserves more credit than most for Brighton’s return to top-flight football: Tony Bloom, the team chairman and owner.
He has spent £250 million of his personal fortune on the club, giving them a new stadium and training ground. Promotion for Brighton could bring as much as £200 million in commercial and media revenues.
Last February, Business Insider profiled the unusual background of Bloom, a professional gambler, poker player and controller of the Starlizard syndicate. This is the story of the money behind Albion:
Tony “The Lizard” Bloom, the architect of Starlizard.Business Insider/Getty
CAMDEN, North London — It’s 12:45 p.m. on a Saturday, and the punks, tattoo artists, and tourists are gearing up for another day of drinking and shopping in the area’s famous tunnels, warehouses, and bridges.But the offices at the Iceworks building, overlooking the canal, are filled with smart young professionals. It might be the weekend for the rest of us, but for these workers it is the equivalent of Monday morning, the busiest day of the week, and the opening bell on their market is about to ring.
They have a huge sum of money on the line because they are in charge of the biggest gambling syndicate in Britain, believed to make up to £100 million, or $145 million, in a good year.
A mixture of men and women — mainly men — ages 25 to 45 gather around the TV screens dotted around the Camden office, some displays mounted on walls and others at desks. All are tuned to the weekend’s football.
The first Premier League match of the weekend is about to begin. And with it, a weekly multimillion-pound gambling bonanza kicks off too. Their company can have £1 million riding on the outcome of a single match and more on the nine others that will follow in the next 24 hours.
But this isn’t a bookmaker. It is Starlizard, a company that treats gambling the way hedge funds treat stocks. Officially, it describes itself as a betting consultancy that uses complex statistical models to generate football odds that are sharper than those offered by professional bookmakers. These are then sold to clients to help them beat the market. The company thus acts more like a betting adviser than a bookmaker — it doesn’t actually take bets.
But the highly secretive company also masterminds one of the most successful professional gambling syndicates in the world, placing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of bets each year on behalf of high-roller clients.
Football is its biggest business, and if the goals don’t go the way Starlizard’s models predict, then people will lose a lot of money.
The bulk of the money Starlizard bets comes from Tony “The Lizard” Bloom, a maths whiz who earned his nickname for his cold-blooded decision-making at the poker table.
Bloom owns Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, more commonly called Brighton or The Albion.Action Images/David Field/Reuters
Bloom, a veteran gambler who owns Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, made millions setting up an online bookmaker and poker websites in the 2000s, and his net worth — which is a mystery — is estimated by some to run into the billions.Bloom set up Starlizard to run his sports activities, and the business allows him to bring the cool heads and statistical rigour of Mayfair’s boutique quant investment world into the murky arena of Asian bookmakers. He told one interviewer, “I wanted to gamble because I enjoyed it and, therefore, I needed to do it properly in order to win.”
Starlizard workers are invited to share in Bloom’s winnings. They are offered a free stake in Bloom’s syndicate, putting them in line for payouts of up to £500,000 every six months — assuming the match results go Bloom’s way, of course. If they don’t, employees and other
