Brighton have made more than £360m from player sales in TWO seasons after Moises Caicedo's £115m Chelsea move... they have a knack of selling for a huge profit and their business model is the envy of the Premier League

Trying to identify the origin point of where Brighton's success began is a complex task. There are so many moments that make a football club what it is.

Robbie Reinelt's 62nd-minute goal against Hereford on May 3 1997 has to be up there. That was the goal that kept a homeless Brighton, playing their fixtures 70 miles away at Gillingham's Priestfield Stadium, in the Football League - at Hereford's expense.

You might point to the arrival of owner Tony Bloom in 2009, or Chris Hughton in 2014, or Graham Potter in 2019, or Roberto de Zerbi in 2022. Maybe that fateful promotion to the Premier League in 2017, or the three play-off heartbreaks that preceded it and toughened them.

From a strategic perspective, things really changed in the summer of 2017, when the Seagulls pivoted to a new type of transfer. That season, the average age of their signings was 24, and the next season it was 23. The two campaigns before? 28 and 30.

Gone were the days of signing players tried and tested on English shores, the Steve Sidwells, Bobby Zamoras, and Paddy McCourts of this world. In 2017-18, they didn't sign a single player from a British club on a permanent deal, but they fished in the brimming waters of Bodo/Glimt, Brommapojkarna, and Brugge.

Since then, Brighton have become a model club and one lots of smaller teams in the country aspire to emulate, plucking less-known players from abroad, giving them an inspiring structure in which to develop, and shipping them on for gargantuan fees.

All the while, they've handled a shift in identity from a direct to a possession-based playing style and kept a firm sense of club culture and unity. Now they're in the Europa League.

Theirs wasn't a profitable strategy to begin with. Between the summers of 2017