Two more sales that show the pattern lower down the price scale
Caicedo is the headline, but the same model produced smaller, equally instructive deals. Brighton signed left back Marc Cucurella from Getafe for 15.4 million pounds in 2021 and sold him to Chelsea a year later for an initial 56 million pounds, rising to 63 million with add-ons, a club-record fee received at the time. Winger Kaoru Mitoma arrived from Kawasaki Frontale in Japan's J-League for around 2.5 million pounds in 2021, was loaned to Union Saint-Gilloise in Belgium, a club Bloom also owns, to accelerate his adaptation to European football, and returned to become a first-team regular whose market value now sits many multiples above his signing fee. The Union Saint-Gilloise loan is itself part of the model: owning a lower-cost European club gives Brighton a development pathway that data alone could not provide.
