Tony Bloom's stats guys deserve a fair chuck.of the credit for Brighton. Be interesting to see where both Brighton and Newcastle are in 18 months time to judge whether Ashcroft still deserves the credit or whether Brighton are still finding gems.
Edit: Ashworth
Ashworth did not identify players. He devised a system from all levels as to hiw each age group trains including the womens team. Then how to use Blooms analytics to identify young up and comming youngsters to possible buy cheap, take them to the next level then sale high.
The scouts would look at players from outside the norm, pass info back to Ashwworth and his team would feed the info into Blooms
analytics system.
As soon as a player has signed, Brighton then use the same system to look for his replacement.
This is also used for the manager to.
Remember Chelsea took 3 of Brightons recruitment team but they still have to look at trying to buy
Brighton players, or look to see what other teams are doing and try to gazump the fee.