Femi Azeez: How Brighton’s £10m pursuit affects Zadok Yohanna

Brighton & Hove Albion are pushing hard to land Super Eagles winger Femi Azeez before Tuesday’s transfer deadline, Afrik-Foot reports.

Azeez, 25, is understood to be keen on the switch to the Amex Stadium, having been left out of Millwall’s last three Championship matches, and arrives on Brighton’s radar off the back of a 2025/26 Championship Team of the Season campaign in which he scored 11 goals and provided seven assists.

Yohanna, meanwhile, is only three months into his own Brighton career after the Seagulls signed the 19-year-old from AIK for £21.5 million.

The Nigerian teenager has managed 12 Premier League minutes so far this season, coming on as a late substitute in Brighton’s 4-0 home win over Aston Villa in August. Whether Brighton land Azeez this week or return for him in January, the pursuit affects him in two specific ways.

How Brighton’s Femi Azeez pursuit affects Zadok Yohanna

1. Competition

The first impact is tactical. Yohanna is a left-footed right winger who prefers cutting inside onto his stronger foot to shoot, the fashionable inverted winger profile that lets a player create and finish from the same position, but Femi Azeez does the same thing.

That overlap is important because Brighton’s right-wing department is already stacked.

Yankuba Minteh and Ibrahim Osman are ahead of Yohanna in the pecking order, and Amario Cozier-Duberry has been another option in the head coach’s plans this season. Adding Azeez to that group turns a queue into a traffic jam, with the £21.5 million teenager the least experienced in that list.

The pursuit itself is a statement about how quickly the club expect their summer signing to break into the eleven, and that statement is not the one his camp would have hoped for after a £21.5 million transfer.

2. A January loan for development

The second impact follows the first. Yohanna is 19, has a transfer fee that requires justification, and needs regular first-team football to grow into the player Brighton paid for.

Sitting on the Amex bench for extended stretches while Minteh, Osman and potentially Azeez rotate through the right-wing slot serves neither the player nor the club’s investment.

That is the argument that makes a January loan the sensible next step if Azeez completes his move or if Brighton return for him in the winter window. The Championship, where Azeez himself has built his reputation, offers a natural landing spot.

So does a mid-table Bundesliga club of the type Brighton have used to develop teenage talents before recalling them, or a Belgian or Ligue 1 side where inverted wingers are given the freedom to express themselves.

None of those loans would be a step back for Yohanna. They represent the kind of guaranteed competitive matches that a teenager at his stage of development needs.

The alternative, in which he spends the first half of 2026/27 accumulating late-cameo minutes at the Amex, delays rather than accelerates his path to becoming a Brighton starter.

The Nigerian angle is a Brighton problem

Ultimately, this is a squad-planning question the club will have to answer before the January window closes.

Brighton have built their reputation on scouting, signing and developing young attackers, but they have rarely stockpiled quite this many at once in a single position.

For Yohanna, the club’s hunt for Azeez brings that squad-planning question into sharp focus at exactly the moment he would rather be settling into the shirt he was signed to wear.