Smart Money: The Fall & Rise Of Brentford FC - How Brentford reached the Premier League Using Mathematics
When:
—
Venue:
373 Euston Road
*This is a hybrid event( In-person & Online)
In this presentation, drawing on material from his recently published book Smart Money: The Fall & Rise Of Brentford FC, author and journalist Alex Duff will tell the story of how a scientist with an inquiring mind entered the backwaters of English professional football, and turned a modest, little-known team into a serious competitor in the English Premier League.
In 2005, Matthew Benham, an Oxford University physics graduate and lapsed fan of Brentford Football Club, phoned the club’s switchboard to ask if he could help the team out. Benham was using mathematical modelling to make millions of pounds from gambling on football. Brentford, which had not played in English football's top division since 1947, were lurching towards bankruptcy. But rather than just write the third-tier club a cheque to bail them out, Benham set about encouraging Brentford to operate more efficiently. Eschewing the decades-old football way of relying on the manager to make or break a team, Benham brought in quantitative analysts from his gambling operation to make better decisions on which players to sign and how to approach games tactically. One of these quantitative analysts become Brentford’s first sporting director.
In suburban west London, almost two decades after Benham called the club switchboard offering a helping hand, Brentford continue to use statistics to maximize their performance, collecting and analysing data on everything from throw-ins and corner kicks to pressing. The 2024/2025 season marks Brentford’s fourth consecutive season in the Premier League, a remarkable achievement for a club that has spent almost all of its history in levels 3 and 4 of the English football pyramid. In this presentation Alex Duff will illustrate the context to this transformation and concludes by presenting an assessment of what might lie ahead for the Brentford FC experiment.
Introducing Alex Duff
Alex Duff is an author who covered the business of sport for 15 years for Bloomberg News.
He worked as a reporter for news organisations in London, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, covering everything from the unorthodox business dealings of Bernie Ecclestone to the ‘Galactico’ era at Real Madrid when David Beckham arrived to propel marketing revenue.
He has written books about the family that owns the Tour de France (Le Fric, 2022) and under-the-counter deals in the football player transfer market after the global financial crisis of 2008 (Football’s Secret Trade, 2017).
His new book ‘Smart Money: The Fall and Rise of Brentford FC’ (2004) uncovers the behind-the-scenes transformation of the football club he supported for all his life and, to his astonishment, is now in the Premier League.
Contact name:
Kelaiah Amador