So, Brentford FC, then

[Uilleam 6,471]

An interesting piece, from last month, on Brentford. 

 

How to spend money on a Football Club. 

Perhaps our new owners will implement like financial rigour. That would make a change. 

 

 

How Brentford’s data geeks turned them into top-flight mainstay

When owner Matthew Benham realised his money was being spent on players without any scientific rigour, he set about changing the way football teams work. Next stop: global status

Brentford have shown they can compete with the elite on the pitch — now they are looking for a little Hollywood glamour off it

Alex Duff

Saturday April 05 2025, 7.00pm, The Sunday Times

 

https://www.thetimes.com/sport/football/article/how-brentfords-data-geeks-turned-them-into-top-flight-mainstay-z8sptt96t

 

The moment when the Brentford owner Matthew Benham began questioning football’s decades-old way of operating can be traced back to 2010.

On a summer’s morning that year he invited the Brentford head coach, Andy Scott, to the offices of his gambling syndicate in a former Victorian warehouse in Kentish Town, north London. Scott, a popular former Brentford winger who had guided the club out of League Two, wanted to discuss the budget for the new season.

A year or two earlier, some Brentford players were on £120 per week and the team were playing in front of crowds of 5,000 at a decaying Griffin Park. The club were controlled by a fan group called Bees United, but Benham was the leader in all but name because he was the only one with any money to spend.

 

Benham, left, with present Brentford head coach Thomas Frank, whose ability to forge team spirit has dovetailed with their analytical approach

 

Benham asked Scott how much he needed to form a squad. Scott, picking as high a number as he dared, said £3million. “Where would that get us?” Benham asked. “Around ninth,” Scott said.

Benham eventually released £3.5million. Over the coming months, he learnt that there was little or no scientific rigour in how his money was being spent: Brentford signed more than a dozen players, most of them on free transfers or loan deals. None, Benham told a club executive at the time, seemed to improve performance.

A few weeks into 2011, Brentford were 18th and flirting with relegation back to League Two when Benham decided to intervene.

 

Creating a buzz for the Bees

A decade and a half on, the main aim for Benham and club executives is something that would have seemed fanciful at the time. It is no longer to avoid relegation into the fourth tier, but to get their global profile nearer to that of their west London neighbours Chelsea.

While they are thriving amid Benham’s data science adventure, which involves a cell of PhD students mining the physiological and biological data of the first-team squad, they are looking for some help to make the club nicknamed “The Bees”, well, a bit more glamorous.

 

Their geekery has helped to garner a smattering of new American fans, taking Brentford’s social media following to about five million, but that’s still a fraction of Chelsea’s 150 million followers. “When you’re not one of the top six or seven it’s very difficult to create a positioning,” the chief executive Jon Varney says.

With a view both to strengthening the squad and “a big investment around content creation” — there are at present no plans for a Welcome to Wrexham-style series — Benham’s entourage is more than a year into various talks with potential investors, many of them from the US and UK, according to Varney.

“We have a big opportunity in the US,” Varney adds. “There are live conversations.”

The preference would be for Benham to sell a minority stake, but he is nothing if not picky: a previous roadshow for investment when the club was in the Championship, at which he courted suitors including the former Walt Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, ended without him ceding any part of his 100 per cent stake. Eisner, who wanted a bigger say than Benham was prepared to give up, went on to buy Portsmouth.

 

Apart from a brief spell in the 1930s, Brentford have lived in the shadow of Chelsea. While Brentford dallied in non-League for the first three decades of their existence, Chelsea strolled straight into the Football League: in their first season, 67,000 spectators turned up for a home game against Manchester United in 1906.

The Mears family who owned Chelsea were billionaires in today’s money, building Stamford Bridge by a London Underground station to pull in the crowds that kept on coming. Brentford, meanwhile, slipped into lower-league obscurity after the war, attendances dipping to 5,000, until Benham arrived.

 

Betting syndicates and fallout with Tony Bloom

Benham was raised amid the grounds of Eton College, where his parents were teachers. He attended Slough Grammar School, and his father took him to Griffin Park for the first time in 1981 when Brentford were in the middle of a 74-year purgatory in the lower leagues.

After graduating with a physics degree from Oxford University, he took a job in the City of London with Yamaichi Securities, later moving to Bank of America.

As a 22-year-old trader, he overheard an older peer say that his gut feeling was the market would rebound. Benham considered this kind of intuitive thinking to be nonsense.

In the complex world of derivatives trading, Benham went on to excel using a predictive model to gauge the expected value of financial assets.

 

After a decade in the city, Benham took a job at a start-up online bookmaker owned by Tony Bloom, now the Brighton & Hove Albion owner, who had a side hustle: a syndicate betting in the Asian football market using a maths-based approach. Together, they developed a metric later known as expected goals, which judged a team’s form on goalscoring chances. This was a better benchmark of form than their points tally. After all, goalscoring was quite random.

Their trust in the numbers paid off and they began to make a lot of money, but before long Bloom and Benham fell out. The dispute was over whether Benham had the rights to use the syndicate’s model privately, according to a source familiar with the issue. Bloom sued, they settled out of court, and went their separate ways, setting up similar gambling operations, Benham calling his Smartodds.

To help transfer the brainpower of smart PhD students he employed to Brentford, Benham appointed Smartodds’ chief quantitative analyst as Brentford’s co-director of football. Phil Giles had a first-class PhD in statistics from Newcastle University, but no experience of working in football.

 

Yet Giles had already started working informally for the club and showed himself to be skilled at breaking down complex data sets to work out how Brentford could spot underrated young players in the transfer market. When the other co-director, Rasmus Ankersen, left in December 2021, Giles became Benham’s right-hand man and chief strategist.

Benham, who avoids speaking to the media, prefers to be involved at arm’s length, but he is still close to his project. He and Giles watch home games together in a box at the Gtech Community Stadium, away from most club directors. Every now and again, Benham rolls up to the training ground in a scruffy parka, headphones around his neck, for a social visit and a spot of lunch.

 

‘How you know, not who you know’

Looking relaxed before Sunday’s home fixture against Chelsea, Giles said Brentford’s philosophy remains much the same as when he was appointed almost a decade ago. “We had a blank sheet of paper, which must have been unheard of in football clubs,” Giles says. “It was about relying on how you know, not who you know, and seeing how you can do things differently. So, we sat and scribbled it all down.”

Last September, in what was perceived as the latest example of their innovation, Brentford used the kick-off to score within 40 seconds in consecutive Premier League games against Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham, a sequence unmatched, according to Smartodds data, in more than 1 million games.

 

But Giles strips away some overthinking about Brentford’s “Moneyball” approach, saying the club’s strategy is based more on progressive thinking than data geekery, which he describes as only a tool to pursue smart objectives.

Much of what they do is more mundane: making sure players sleep and eat well and remain motivated. Deep research goes into analysing the character of each signing to make sure they have a collaborative mindset.

Two years ago, Benham approved the hiring of seven PhD sports science students from Cardiff Metropolitan University, and a new cohort will be hired this summer. The students, who are based at the training ground, sift through data from the players. While there is a mass of player tracking data available to all Premier League clubs, the amount of physiological and biological data is relatively sparse. Brentford’s PhD students, who receive a £20,780 annual stipend and £5,500 of tuition fees covered, are trying to find insights.

“Can we collect some information that starts to benchmark players?” Giles says. For example, “can this player step into the Premier League and play at the physical intensity that the Premier League demands?”

One key area of their research is high-intensity sprints, which some have linked to Premier League injury rates. In March last year, Brentford were without seven injured first-team players, dropping to 16th in the table. The full backs Rico Henry and Aaron Hickey have been sidelined for the best part of 18 months. So far, the PhD students have published nine academic studies, many of which are inconclusive; it’s fair to assume that Brentford are keeping the most revealing pieces of research to themselves.

 

Over the past 15 years, Benham has spent barely £100million on transforming Brentford. Chelsea’s expenditure over the same period is north of £3billion.

Varney, the chief executive, says the club is in good financial shape having paid for their move from Griffin Park to the 17,250-seat Gtech Community Stadium in 2020 and invested close to £50million in upgrading the training ground at Osterley, near Heathrow Airport.

 

The new ground, not to mention the appeal of the Premier League, has tweaked the demographic of the fan base, attracting more young fans, affluent west London middle classes from Ealing, Chiswick and Richmond. There are huddles of fans from Denmark and South Korea, among other countries, at home games.

All told, it is a remarkable turnaround of a club that is now looking enviously across town for some of Chelsea’s money and showbusiness flashiness. That won’t come from Benham, who shuns smart clothes and conspicuous consumption.

His privileges as owner include occasionally choosing the half-time music at home games. Instead of picking barnstorming songs to gee up fans, he goes for Bob Dylan tunes such as The Man in Me that may suit his introspective mood, but which are, according to Varney, far too gloomy.

 

Alex Duff is the author of Smart Money: The Fall and Rise of Brentford FC (Constable, 2024)

 

[compo 7,983]

Very interesting article