A Formula for Success

You were probably wondering what the link was between my previous two blogs; one being a look at modern scouting practices in football and the other about technological advancements in the sports betting industry. It’s about to make a lot more sense. This is the story of how a professional gambler with no football experience took over an English football club and brought them to unprecedented heights.

Matthew Benham is a very successful gambler, and a huge football fan. He made his millions gambling on sports(mostly football) and then went on to own his own sports betting company, smartodds.co.uk. In 2012, he gave up his gambling career and bought his boyhood club, his beloved Brentford FC (Wigmore, 2020).

Brentford, up until now, were an unspectacular lower-league English team, generally moving between the third and fourth divisions of the football league (Brentford F.C., 2020). The season before Benham took over, they finished 9th in the third division. They had an average budget for this level of football and every time they got promoted to the second division(the Championship), they struggled to compete with the other teams due to budget constraints and got relegated straight away. They didn’t have the finances requires to sign quality players or offer competitive wages.

In 2014, under Benham’s guidance, they made it back into the Championship and, instead of going straight back down, Brentford finished in fifth place. This was the best season in the clubs history and particularly impressive when you consider that they were of the poorest teams in the league. Since then, Brentford have enjoyed five consecutive top half finishes in this, very competitive, twenty-four team league. As we speak, Brentford are currently in the play-off positions at the top of the Championship. There is a good chance this might be their best season yet, and a first promotion to the Premier League is certainty a possibility(Talksport, 2020).

A rise like this is nothing new in football. Every few years, a lower league team is bought by a rich tycoon who can afford to invest their millions into the club. The increased financial power that comes with a new owners allows clubs to buy better players which leads to better results and subsequent promotions to higher leagues.

But this is not how the story goes for Benham and Brentford. In fact, Benham invested very little money into club operations, and a large part of what he did invest was spent on staff rather than players. It was the lessons from his days as a gambler which led Benham to success running this club. Benham learned from betting that the human gut instinct can lead to bad decisions but numbers never lie. He wanted to prove that this wisdom would apply to football too, so he turned Brentford into the benchmark for analytics in English football.

One of the first people that Benham hired was Danish ex-football Rasmus Ankersen. Ankersen was forced into an early retirement from football due to injury and since then had been studying business consulting and trying to figure out how to apply its principles to football. Prior to his work at Brentford, Ankersen had been applying his studies at Danish club FC Midtjylland (Medium, 2020). He was integral in a five-year period which saw this team rise from mid-table obscurity to their first Danish Superliga title and even record a victory against Manchester United! He took the job as Chairman of Brentford FC in 2015, and with him, he brought the moneyball statistics-based approach which brought Midtjylland such great success.

The term ‘moneyball’ comes from the title of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book which was immortalised in the 2011 film starring Brad Pitt. It tells the true story of a baseball team which was in the midst of a crisis and a long losing streak. In a desperate attempt to turn things around, the team tried a new scouting and recruitment policy for signing players which was seen as incredibly risky at the time. They ignored the usual factors which indicate whether a player should be signed or not such as form, reputation and sometimes even age. They used algorithm-based approach, and considered only the recorded performance statistics of each player. They had a database with all of the player statistics and they only signed the players who outperformed their market value. This smart recruitment tactic saved their season and led to a record 20-game winning streak (Moneyball (2011) - IMDb, 2020).

Obviously baseball and football are very different games, but Ankersen still insisted that these lessons could apply to football teams. He thought that moneyball would be particularly important to teams with smaller budgets, who can’t afford to splash the clash on the top players. His analytics team has algorithms for working out the transfer value of each of their targets and they strictly never exceed this value, with Benham’s insistence of trusting numbers over instinct a very strictly enforced mantra.

Football is always changing and there are always tactical innovations and revolutions in every generation. However, football is about to go through a completely new type of revolution. Just like it has in baseball, a data revolution is about to take off in European football, and Brentford FC are leading the way.

“For David to beat Goliath, he needed to use a different weapon. If David had used the same weapon, he would have lost the battle. You've got to find your weapons. That's what Brentford is about.”

References

En.wikipedia.org. 2020.Brentford F.C.. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brentford_F.C.> [Accessed 16 March 2020].

IMDb. 2020.Moneyball (2011) - Imdb. [online] Available at: <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/> [Accessed 18 March 2020].

Medium. 2020.Brentford FC’S Owner Matthew Benham, The Closest Thing To ‘Moneyball’ In Football | 10 People Who…. [online] Available at: <https://medium.com/@TrademateSports/brentford-fcs-owner-matthew-benham-the-closest-thing-to-moneyball-in-football-10-people-who-b6ac0bda9646> [Accessed 17 March 2020].

talkSPORT. 2020.How Brentford Flipped The Script To Become England's Smartest Club. [online] Available at: <https://talksport.com/football/fa-cup/659667/brentford-data-revolution-england-smartest-club-championship-leicester-fa-cup/> [Accessed 17 March 2020].

Wigmore, T., 2020.Brentford's Moneyball Way To Beat Football Teams With Huge Budgets. [online] Bleacher Report. Available at: <https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2718752-brentfords-moneyball-way-to-beat-football-teams-with-huge-budgets> [Accessed 17 March 2020].