Modern sports are sometimes unfair to smaller teams with little financial muscle as the formula nowadays, to compete in sports, is simple - you have to spend money.
It’s like David vs Goliath but David can’t compete with Goliath if he uses the same weapon as Goliath. So David has to use a different weapon and the weapon in modern sports might be the use of analytics and sabermetrics.
The use of Analytics and Sabermetrics in sports was popularised by Billy Beane and his Oakland A’s team in Major League Baseball when he invented the concept commonly referred to as ‘Moneyball.’
Billy Beane and the MLB franchise utilised analytics and a sabermetric approach to construct their organisation and compete with the top-spending teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.
The same approach but with a pinch of his creativity was put into play by an Oxford graduate Matthew Benham and his Brentford FC.
Matthew Benham was a professional gambler and he earned millions of dollars from it. From that money, he set up his betting syndicate — Smartodds, soon. Smartodds became a massive success.
With financial freedom, Benham was able to pursue his other passion — Brentford FC. Attending his first game at 11 years old, Matthew Benham has been a lifelong fan of Brentford FC.
So when the club faced financial trouble in 2007, Benham stepped up. He provided a USD 700,000 loan so that Brentford supporters could purchase the team. When Benham provided the loan, he had the option to purchase the club should the fans choose not to repay the loan.
In 2012, the fans declined and Benham became the owner of his childhood team.
Now, under his leadership, Brentford decided to play Moneyball. Benham spent almost USD 10 million on a smaller club in Denmark, FC Midtjylland, to test his analytical concepts.
The ideas that worked, he used at Brentford FC. He did a complete overhaul of Brentford and brought more analytically-minded people into the club. The club also stopped caring about wins and losses. Instead, they developed a set of key performance indicators that determined if they were making progress or not.
For example, Brentford started to look closely at ‘expected goals’ rather than how many goals a player scored. The theory was, in a low-scoring match of randomness and luck, the quality and quantity of chances created during a match mattered more.
Brentford also scrapped their youth team and academy completely instead they brought a unique model of their own in which they relied on a ‘B team’ of 17 to 20-year-olds that were rendered useless by other clubs.
Brentford’s theory was simple as they believed you had to give a young player at least 35 games before determining his value.
This allowed them to find undervalued players or market inefficiencies, that could come in, help the club win and be sold for record profits like Said Benrahma, Ollie Watkins, Neal Maupay - all came through this process.
While the results weren’t immediate, Brentford soon progressed from a fourth division club to a premier league club in just eight years under Benham’s ownership.
The club is now valued at 400 million dollars from a mere 700,000 dollars investment by Benham.
The future of the club under Thomas Frank is looking bright as they don’t look out of place in the premier league at all and are now establishing themselves as a key contender for a mid-table finish this season.
Players like Toney, Mbuemo, Rico, Canos, Raya are proving to be a solid core, and judging by the looks of this Brentford side, we can say that they are here to stay in the premier league.
