From Roberto De Zerbi to the new club chef whipping up a fake Oreo milkshake, the player liaison officer and the social media guru… the staff helping Brighton to strive for success

• Mail Sport were given unprecedented access to Brighton for a week 
• Nick Harris profiles the staff members that are helping Brighton’s progress 
• As well as Roberto De Zerbi, there are many other key figures at the club

Brighton have received a lot of praise for their progress and football philosophy, and there are many staff members who are working very hard behind the scenes.

Manager Roberto De Zerbi is at the forefront of proceedings, but the new club chef, the player liaison officer and the social media manager are all contributing. 

Mail Sport provides an insight into the various staff behind the scenes at Brighton.  

Alongside manager Roberto De Zerbi, many other staff make the club tick behind the scenes

THE CHEF – WILL CARVALHO
Will Carvalho  arrived from Portugal as a flair summer signing — for the club kitchen. The 40-year-old has been Brighton’s executive performance chef for a month. He has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants, for leading rugby union clubs and national teams, and for the Brazilian women’s football team. He speaks fluent Portuguese, French, Spanish and English.

Quality and variety are key to feeding the players. ‘I try to do different things and not repeat dishes often,’ he says. ‘ The food must be tasty and different each day, surprising even. That is why there’s a different flavour porridge every morning.’

He sees his task as a simple equation: needing to fulfil the dietary requirements of elite sportsmen, while making food they love.

Chef Will Carvalho arrived at Brighton this summer and his enthusiasm is infectious

Kitchen staff at Brighton’s training ground feed around 270 people per day, and Carvalho takes a hands-on role in hotels on away trips

Carvalho’s tasks include going to hotels on away trips and taking a hands-on role in kitchens where he has already forwarded his menus. He is aiming to build a team of 10 chefs to feed 270 people a day at the training ground alone, between 8am and around 2pm. Free high-quality food is available to all staff for breakfast and lunch, and increasingly the players are taking bags of food home for dinner.

Carvalho’s enthusiasm is infectious. When he talks about plans for the next Premier League home game and post-match fare in the dressing room, he’s envisioning sushi platters, a burrito station and a grill station. 

He is also going to introduce a fake Oreos milkshake to the players’ canteen menu. ‘It hasn’t got Oreos in it, but it tastes like it has,’ Carvalho (right) says.

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR – DAVID WEIR

The long list that ended in Verbruggen’s recruitment went across the desk of Brighton’s technical director, David Weir, a stalwart centre-half for years with Everton and Rangers who played for Scotland until he was 41. His portfolio of responsibilities including anything at the training ground that helps players to improve, technically, club analysts, sports science and medicine, the academy, the loan arrangements that help young players develop, and, famously, recruitment.

He works with the heads of all those departments, and liaises with the board.

‘I can’t tell a doctor how to treat a patient, or tell an analyst how to clip a game, or tell Roberto how to pick the team,’ he says. But he can put in place systems to assist.

It’s no surprise that Weir won’t divulge information about the ‘secret sauce’ data that comes from the StarLizard company that informs much of Bloom’s professional gambling. It’s massively complex, proprietary, exclusive to Brighton among football clubs, and evidently best-in-class, tracking more players in more ways than any comparable system.

‘No doubt data is very important but we [also] have eyes on players. It’s not just a numbers game,’ Weir insists.

Brighton technical director David Weir says that the club’s approach isn’t just based on data

The club have a detailed progression plan in place and initially set out to become a top-10 club

‘Recruitment is a combination of lots of things [including data, traditional scouting, background checks] … We’ve been really lauded for recruitment but it’s also about [our reputation for] how players are treated and looked after when they’re here … We give young players opportunities.’

But back to the data. Is is basically a clever algorithm? ‘It’s an objective measure that challenges your subjective opinion … fundamentally [the output] is a determinant of quality.’

Sometimes even Weir is surprised by who Brighton manage to sign, the loan for Ansu Fati a recent case in point. ‘Signing him sent a strong message,’ he says. ‘The fact Barcelona and the agent let him come to us says a lot. We were even a bit surprised we got it done to be honest.’

PLAYER LIAISON OFFICER – STEVE GIBBON

I’ve been waiting to speak to Steve Gibbon for most of the week. He’s been too busy to talk because his role as ‘Player Care Lead’ can be all-consuming at times. The same position is commonly known as ‘Player Liaison Officer’, or in layman’s terms, the person who sorts out all kinds of everyday issues for players and their families, especially foreigners.

In such an important week for the club, Gibbon has spent countless hours trying to satisfy ticket requests for the players and their families and entourages. But an hour before kick-off tonight I get a text that Steve is available for a chat. He has a colourful CV, managing greyhound stadiums, betting shops, pubs. I suggest that might have helped in his years in his current job to find ways out of various scrapes for Brighton players. But Gibbon insists he rather deals with multiple mundane, and sometimes sad, and often banal problems: how to buy or hire a car; how to pay a bill.

Housing and schooling are key issues where he provides guidance to players. I’m told by one staff member that the traditional mantra of many player liaison officers is ‘Happy wife, happy life’.

‘That is seriously key,’ says Gibbon. ‘Often with new players coming in you tend to concentrate more on the wife than the player.’

Ansu Fati is one of the players to benefit from the work as player liaison officer Steve Gibbon, as he is looking for a chef for the youngster to help him settle in

This isn’t sexist, but a practical issue for the partners of men in a peripatetic industry. Players tend to focus on playing and leave partners to deal with schools and family life. Gibbon assists with that.

He reveals current things on his to-do list are 1) find a personal chef for Ansu Fati, and 2) regular dialogue with immigration officials at Gatwick and Heathrow over visiting family members of his players who haven’t got all the right paperwork.

Ansu Fati eats two meals a day whenever he’s at the training ground, and loves that food; but wants a chef for other times. ‘But it has to be the right person, a good fit,’ says Gibbon. They’ll need to form a bond with the player, and cook the Spanish cuisine he wants.’

Gibbon has had to find a dog walker for a player who needed to travel and leave a pet behind. Since Brexit his team have formed business relationships with immigration officials at London’s biggest airports, where, on a weekly basis, a relative or friend of a player will arrive and face a potential hurdle to entry because of paperwork.

Gibbon tackles a whole host of issues for players, including finding them dog walkers or helping them pay bills

Inevitably Gibbon provides the reassurance that the incomer will be accommodated because their host is ‘good for the money’ and the guest will ‘usually get the 180-day stamp in their passport’.

Gibbon says he has stories respectively about a washing machine, a dog, a beach and Tenerife that he cannot tell me. The four elements were in different stories, he assures me.

His most emotional moment he says was a few years ago when a Brighton player from overseas called him in tears to say his father had died suddenly and he needed to go home. Gibbon was the first person he’d called, so close was the bond.

‘He was sobbing,’ Gibbon says. ‘We sorted him a private jet and I rang the manager to tell him what had happened.’

SOCIAL MEDIA GURU – MATT BISHOP

Matt Bishop is Brighton’s ‘social media executive’, an amiable 28-year-old journalism graduate with sole responsibility for every item posted on the men’s team’s X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn accounts. His digital numbers thanks to the 3-1 win have been brilliant. A single TikTok he put together about the finale of the uninterrupted 30-pass move for 2-0 is heading towards 3 million views as we speak.

Bishop is uncertain whether some players know he has a name. Literally everyone at Brighton calls him ‘Admin’, as in administrator of the club’s social media. He talks me through the follower numbers on Twitter (960,000), Facebook (1.5m), Instagram (1.5m) and TikTok (2.5m) and explains how the content is subtly different for each audience.

‘Twitter is aimed at football fans in general and club diehards. If you lose, you post and everyone is telling you to f**k off! Facebook has similar content but the audience is much more international and you can focus on geo-located posts. Facebook is massive in Africa so if there’s content on an African player, you amplify it on Facebook. Insta is obviously visual. TikTok needs to be short and snappy, typically 15-second posts that tell the story quickly and slickly, always with video action.’

Followers can surge on a single signing: Ansu Fatu and Mitoma have been two cases in point.

Social media executive Matt Bishop is responsible for every item posted on the men’s team’s X (formerly Twitter),Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn accounts

‘My job is much easier when the team is winning and players buy into it,’ he says. And do the players buy into it? ‘Yes, they’re great,’ he says. ‘But they are relentless in winding me up, swearing when I’m trying to get content so I can’t actually use it. And taking the p*** out of me. But it comes from a good place!’

At a match when a goal is scored, Bishop aims to have a polished tweet and celebratory graphic posted inside 10 seconds, before posting on Facebook and Insta. ‘It’s hectic, but it’s doable,’ he says. ‘If the internet is working at the club you’re at. Which it isn’t always.’

The club’s most successful post to date was a film welcoming Alexis Mac Allister back to the club after winning the World Cup. It was the single most-viewed post of any Premier League in 2023, garnering some 17m impressions across Brighton’s own channels, and tens of millions more as other platforms repurposed it. ‘We got very excited because Lionel Messi commented on it!’ says Bishop.

His biggest blunder was accidentally posting a photo of a plug socket, taken to illustrate an electrical problem to his girlfriend, in a post about centre-half Adam Webster returning from injury.

‘People started asking if it had a hidden meaning! I just had to own my mistake,’ he says. ‘The next time I posted about Adam, I also posted a plug socket emoji. It kept our fans entertained for a few days.’

THE LAWYER – LLOYD THOMAS

One employee who knows this better than most is Lloyd Thomas, 37, an Oxford University law graduate who became Brighton’s general counsel in late 2021, joining from Arsenal, where he was an in-house lawyer. Thomas deals with everything from fine print of all Brighton’s transfer and loan deals, in and out, every player contract, all sponsorship agreements, and even the ticketing Ts&Cs and regulatory issues over signing foreign players. The variety appeals. ‘There’s lots of scope for clever drafting, add-ons, sell-ons, there are ways you can bolster your position in various ways.’

Dealing with agents, or rather their commissions, is important and will become more so when a new agent fee cap of six per cent of a players’ wages is introduced next month. Thomas says he knows lawyers at other clubs where agents were demanding 20 per cent this summer in an attempted last hurrah to cash in.

Lawyer Lloyd Thomas works on issues including player contracts and sponsorship deals

Players typically have two contracts with their club: an employment contract and a Schedule 2 contract that lays out their specific wages, signing-on fees, loyalty bonuses, travel and accommodation terms and often personal performance bonuses payable for international caps and the like.

Fine print can be lucrative in other areas. When Graham Potter was poached by Chelsea in September last year, his contract, drafted before Thomas arrived but now needing enforcement, meant Brighton were received £21.5m in compensation for Potter and his staff.

Presumably Roberto De Zerbi has a similarly big or even huger compensation clause? Thomas declines to comment. Lawyers have all the best stories, and rarely share them …

Source: Read Full Article