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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