How Brentford punched above their weight

In today's Financial Times football (and many other things) guru Simon Kuper reviews Alex Duff's book Smart Money: the Rise and Fall of Brentford FC published by Constable at £22.

Here are some excepts from his review:

'One day in 2005, when little Brentford Football Club were threatened with administration, a man named Matthew Benham phoned the club offices asking how he could help. He ended up making an anonymous loan. Benham, an unflamboyant professional gambler who grew up supporting Brentford, went on to use statistical insights to lift the west London club up the divisions to the Premier League.

Founded in 1889, Brentford were for almost all their history a suburban neighbourhood club. They drew their support from the white working-class streets around Griffin Park, their ground until 2020, which had a pub on each corner. They had a brief heyday in the then first division either side of the second world war, marked by an ill-judged tour of Nazi Germany in 1937. After relegation in 1947, they went through a 70-year lean patch. In the 1960s they nearly merged with Queens Park Rangers.

To this day, Brentford lease a training ground from the 700-year-old Mercers’ Company, which channels the proceeds — in a very British story — to the expensive private school St Paul’s. The club’s seemingly permanent lack of potential was nicely summed up in a chant by QPR fans in 2018: “You’re just a bus stop in Hounslow.”

But by then, Benham was already working his quiet magic. Benham was raised near Eton school, where his parents were teachers. He began watching Brentford because it was the nearest professional football club, only 17 miles away. He studied physics at Oxford, then “became a star derivatives trader” in the City, before going into sports gambling.

There was money to be made here, because bookmakers were miscalculating the odds of football matches. Quants (data analysts) had developed more sophisticated methods to assess the true form of clubs. They looked beyond results, which were skewed by chance — a ball that rolled in off the post, or didn’t.

Once his loan to Brentford morphed into a full-blown takeover of the club, he set his quant employees a new task: as well as predicting the results of matches, they would try to win them, for Brentford. They identified undervalued players, and developed new tactics.

One of many inefficiencies they spotted in football was a neglect of the set pieces — principally corners and free-kicks — that produce about 30 per cent of all goals. Many clubs barely practised them. To Benham, this was as if a student didn’t bother preparing 30 per cent of an exam, so Brentford hired an Italian set-piece coach. Through superior intelligence, they routinely beat richer opponents.

[Of course, other clubs have now woken up to this and Liverpool are using AI to analyse and advise on corners as I discussed recently].

They also managed to make a profit from transfers while getting promoted to the Premier League. Today Benham, whose wealth is estimated at $300mn, is the Premier League’s second-poorest owner, yet his club are likely to survive again this season.'

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The Political Economy of Football V2

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