Ask anyone in the local area who Tony Bloom is, and they will know him as the charismatic owner of Brighton and Hove Albion. Yet unlike most Premier League Football club owners, Bloom’s rise to the top has been a very unorthodox one, involving a mix of business acumen and poker proficiency. Below, we discuss how Tony Bloom became a local sport, business, and poker legend.
Poker Earnings
It is estimated that Tony Bloom has a net worth of around 1.3 billion. However, this is a hard number to pin down as he is secretive about his personal, business, and financial life. His wealth has been amassed by a regime of playing poker and investing money in a range of businesses.
When it comes to poker, Bloom has garnered the affectionate moniker of “The Lizard”. One of his first public appearances was on the television series Late Night Poker. Popular in the United Kingdom during the noughties, it was the first to use under-the-table cameras to show cards to the viewers.
These early shows were important to the growing popularity of the game and led to a huge increase in the popularity of poker in Great Britain. A forerunner to today’s modern gaming casinos, they would have the format used in later years online as part of live dealer casinos. These are where croupiers stream games to players in the comfort of their own homes, often offering a live casino bonus to players.
One of Tony’s biggest wins was as the winner of the Australasian Poker Championships. In 2004 he reached the final, winning a prize of around £180,000. His winnings for poker in total are now expected to have exceeded USD 2.2 million. He is also a keen sports bettor and is known to be part of a private betting syndicate.
Brighton and Hove Albion
One section of his income comes from property and private equity portfolios. He also has several high-profile business investments, most particularly the premier league football club Brighton and Hove Albion.
Bloom’s first investment in Brighton and Hove Albion came in the early 2000s. As the team in his hometown, he had a long association with the club. His grandfather had been the vice chairman during the seventies and his uncle is a director at the club. However, it was not until 2009 that he put £93 million into the team and became the chairman.
One of his first acts was to appoint the former Uruguay international Gustav Poyet as the manager. With investment in a new stadium, the team kept narrowly missing promotion to the top flight and had a string of managers follow. However, new grounds in the form of the Falmer Stadium showed how serious Bloom was about his investment.
By the 2016/2017 season, they had returned to top-flight football, and he is reported to have invested around £360 million in the club since then. In 2018 Bloom acquired a takeover of Union SG, a second-division Belgian league squad. In the 2021 – 22 seasons, Brighton placed 9th in the Premier League with their highest place of all time.
