In August 2023, Chelsea paid Brighton and Hove Albion 115 million pounds for a 21-year-old Ecuadorian midfielder named Moises Caicedo, a British transfer record at the time. Brighton had signed him from Independiente del Valle in Ecuador for a small fraction of that fee. The deal was not luck. It was the output of a recruitment model built around statistical modeling that started, decades earlier, in the sports betting industry rather than in football at all.
Brighton and its Premier League neighbor in ambition, Brentford, have become the two most cited examples of clubs using data to compete with rivals that outspend them many times over. Both stories trace back to owners who made their fortunes finding inefficiencies in betting markets before turning the same tools on the transfer market.
