Brighton's Summer Transfer Business Is a Nod to the Future

Whilst most Premier League clubs spent millions upon millions of pounds during the summer transfer window improving their first team squads, Brighton & Hove Albion took a different approach.

Just two senior signings have arrived, Adam Lallana on a free transfer from a Liverpool and Joel Veltman for £900,000 from Ajax. In terms of incomings, that has left the Seagulls as one of the top flight's least active clubs.

Scratch below the first team surface though and you will soon see that it has not been a quiet summer on the Sussex coast. Far from it, in fact. Brighton have just taken a different approach to their Premier League rivals.

You might call it the Tariq Lamptey Approach. The Seagulls were widely praised for the way in which they swooped to sign the 20-year-old Chelsea full back for a cut price £3m back in January. Graham Potter was bold enough to chuck Lamptey into the first team early on and the pay off has been spectacular. Brighton now have one of the hottest young properties in English football on their hands and a player who will either stay at the Amex and push them into the top ten or be sold for a mega profit.

Brighton have spent this summer taking the Lamptey Approach and applying it to the rest of Europe, hoovering up some of the best young talent on the continent.

The Seagulls have spent around £20m acquiring such individuals in the hope that in two to three seasons time - via spells out on loan - these players in question will have reached their potential. If they do, they will be worth four or five times what Brighton paid but more importantly, there will be a very good team indeed on show at the Amex.

The two highest profile examples of the Lamptey Approach arrived on deadline day, when Brighton forked out a reported fee of £9.5m for 21-year-old Lech Poznan midfielder Jakub Molder and £5m for 19-year-old Legia Warsaw full back Michal Karbownik.

Both were immediately loaned back to their former clubs, Karbownik to spend the season helping Legia defend the Ekstraklasa title they won in 2019-20 and Molder until such time as Lech are eliminated from the Europa League. Should they fall in the group stages, Molder will arrive in England in January.

Karbownik has previously been watched by Celtic, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur, Napoli, Dynamo Moscow, Sevilla, PSV Eindhoven, and Real Betis. According to reports in Poland, Brighton saw off competition from Bayern Munich for Molder's signature with the deal clincher being the Seagulls' willingness to loan the midfielder back to Lech. That was a route Bayern did not want to take and so Lech instead sold Molder to Brighton, rather than the European champions.

Brighton fans who put their new found interest in Polish football to the test by sitting through Poland's 5-1 win over Finland would have seen an early glimpse of what their new signings are capable of. Both made their full senior debuts for their national team in Gdansk and both marked the occasion with assists.

Earlier in the transfer window, Brighton completed the £3.5m signing of 21-year-old Kosovan striker Andi Zeqiri from Swiss second tier club FC Lausanne-Sport. Zeqiri scored 17 times in 2019-20 to fire his hometown team to promotion and although the step up to the Premier League looks to be sizeable, Zeqiri has interestingly been handed the squad number 29 and looks set to be part of Potter's first team squad immediately.

Borussia Dortmund's 19-year-old midfield Reda Khadra has arrived for an undisclosed fee after previously trialling with Manchester United. 20-year-old Dutch defender Jan Paul van Hecke was signed from NAC Breda for a fee which could raise to £2.7m, before being immediately loaned back to the Netherlands with Heerenveen where he is already earning rave reviews in the Eredivisie and midfielder Lars Dendoncker - younger brother of Wolverhampton Wanderers' Leander - has arrived from Club Brugge.

Of course, this approach to transfer business is one loaded with risk. If none of these players end up making the grade in England, then Brighton will have wasted a lot of time and money. While their rivals in the bottom half of the Premier League are strengthening for the here and now, Brighton looking to the future could see them left behind. Having some of the best young players in Europe isn't much use if you have fallen into the Championship by the time they are ready for first team football.

The approach isn't universally popular with Seagulls supporters either. While Brighton were busy signing teenage defenders from Poland and midfielders from Germany, what Potter's squad has been crying out for is a new striker to ease the burden on Neal Maupay and Aaron Connolly and provide back up should the nightmare scenario of those two being injured or suspended at the same time come to pass. A senior striker that is, rather than someone from the Swiss second tier.

Brighton fans would say that they have good reason to be sceptical about the Lamptey Approach to doing things as it has actually been going on for some time at the Amex, albeit on a smaller scale. In January 2019, the Seagulls made no first team signings, instead buying Alexis Mac Allister for £8m from Argentinos Juniors, Romanian midfielder Tudor Baluta for £2.5m from FC Viitorul Constanta and Slovenian striker Jan Mlakar for £2.5m from Maribor.

All three were loaned back to the clubs they were signed from. With no first team reinforcements, Brighton under Chris Hughton ended up avoiding relegation by the skin of their teeth and Hughton found himself out of a job.

Mac Allister has since gone onto break into the Seagulls' first team, but neither Baluta nor Mlakar have made much of an impression; the former spending the second half of 2019-20 at Den Haag and the latter enduring scoreless loan spells at Queens Park Rangers and Wigan Athletic last season.

Baluta has agreed a season long loan with Dynamo Kiev for 2020-21 with a rumoured clause that allows Dynamo to turn the deal permanent next summer. Should they opt to do so, then for all the fanfare which greeted the signing of one Romania's hottest properties, Baluta will depart with a grand total of one senior appearance in the League Cup against Bristol Rovers under his belt.

The question for Brighton now is whether their latest batch of young signings can follow in the footsteps of Lamptey and Mac Allister or they end up being gambles which don't pay off. It should be said that Lamptey is a special case; there seemed little risk attached to his signing as everyone knew what a talent he was, including Chelsea who were loathe to see him walk out in search of the first team football that wasn't forthcoming at Stamford Bridge.

If Brighton have unearthed further gems like Lamptey in the likes of Molder, Karbownik and Zeqiri, then the future is going to look very bright indeed at the Amex. Such a transfer strategy and focussing so much on 2024 rather than 2021 is a massive gamble, but if it pays off then Brighton will be laughing all the way to bank - and perhaps, the upper reaches of the Premier League.