Brighton & Hove Albion have turned Moises Caicedo from a £4million player into a £115 million player in two and a half years.
The British record transfer fee agreed with Chelsea (and before that Liverpool) for the Ecuador midfielder they signed from Independiente del Valle in his homeland at the end of the January 2021 transfer window is the biggest triumph yet for the club’s scouting and player recruitment model.
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Sourcing players from across the world at low cost, developing them and offering them a pathway to bigger opportunities for a huge profit — providing that both the price and the circumstances are right for them — is part of Brighton’s DNA.
Caicedo is the most spectacular example yet of the policy. He will become, worldwide, the third most expensive transfer of all time, eclipsed only by Neymar’s move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017 (£192million) and Kylian Mbappe’s switch from Monaco to PSG (£125million plus £30million in add-ons) in the same year.
Brighton also have a significant sell-on in the deal with Chelsea, protecting their conviction that he is destined to become worth a lot more in the future.
It has been a rags to riches rise for Caicedo. The youngest of ten children, he comes from a poor neighbourhood in Santo Domingo, 100 miles west of Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, where he is known as “El Nino Moi” — the boy Moi.
His father owned a rickshaw, his mother sometimes washed clothes to bring extra money into the household.
Ivan Guerra, a local football coach who lived nearby, paid for his bus fares and food so that he could train from the age of 13 at the academy of Independiente del Valle (IDV), based in the Quito suburb of Sangolqui.
Progression through the youth ranks to a first
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