“They’ve got a great data scout system, that’s all I can say,” says Promise David of the moment Belgian club Union Saint-Gilloise first made contact and changed the course of the new Brighton & Hove Albion striker’s career.“They picked me out of thin air, but they said they had been monitoring me for a while,” he adds. “At first, I thought it was a spam, like a scam. Because if you’re playing in the third division in Estonia, you don’t expect a team playing in the Europa League to call. But they did and I went. A couple of months in, I was having the best times of my life.”David was at Estonian club Nomme Kalju, where he had regularly been playing for their under-21s in the third tier, when he received the message from USG. “Me and my agent at the time both saw it and I was like, ‘Nah, it’s not that’,” he says. “And then we sat on a Zoom call and I said, ‘Oh sh*t, it is them’. “They gave me a whole pitch, but I said yes before the pitch. It’s like sitting in a job interview and you’ve already accepted the job, telling all this bullsh*t, and I’m already there. I was packing my suitcases mid-call, trying to think how I was going to box everything together. And then, two weeks later, I was in Belgium.”David’s eagerness to make the move two years ago to USG — the Brussels-based club in Belgium’s top flight where Brighton owner-chairman Tony Bloom is a minority shareholder — is understandable when he reels off a pathway that sounds more like a student’s gap-year jaunt around Europe than the glitz and glamour associated with making his Premier League debut as a substitute in Brighton’s 4-3 defeat at Chelsea on Sunday.David makes his Brighton debut as a substitute in a 4-3 defeat at Chelsea (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)“A year and a half in division three in Croatia (at Trnje). Eight months in the USL (with Tulsa), didn’t play,” he tells a small group of reporters after his Premier League debut at Stamford Bridge. “A year in Malta with (Valletta) under-21s and the first team. A year in Estonia, playing division three with under-21s and then six months on the first team, and then two years with Union Saint-Gilloise.“I was just backpacking and having fun playing football through Europe. And seeing where things would take me next. I couldn’t fit in or stay long anywhere and I just kept packing my bags and moving on. I found a really good place. Actually, I didn’t find a good place. A good place found me at Union Saint-Gilloise. There, I was able to train like a professional and live like a professional. And good things came out of it. And then, boom, here I am.”David made a season-long loan move to Brighton in August, days before they opened the campaign with a 4-0 win against Aston Villa at the Amex Stadium. The deal includes an obligation to buy for £22million ($29.7million) if certain conditions are met. Goals have been the currency of the laid-back 25-year-old at every level he has played at so far.