10 years ago Brentford Encore were playing in England's third division, and five years earlier the club was on the brink of bankruptcy until a longtime fan stepped in and invested the funds needed to rebuild the club. That man is Matthew Benham and this is the story of how Benham used statistical analysis to turn a €700,000 loan into over €400 million today. Matthew Benham was born in 1968 and graduated from Oxford University in 1989 with a degree in physics. He then spent the next 12 years working in various roles in investment banking and insurance before becoming a Vice President at Bank of America in the late 1990s.
After leaving Premier Bet, Benham made millions of euros playing in betting shops. It didn't take him long to start his own sports betting business called Smartodds in 2004 to compete with Bloom's new business. The idea was simple: Benham advised clients using the same algorithms, statistics and data research that had made him a successful sports betting player. Analytics, sports predictions, and everything related to sports sr events at 777score, epl scores. Smartodds became a huge success and by 2011 was earning €10 million a year when Mr. Benham also acquired Matchbook, a popular sports betting operator . Thanks to the success of Smartodds and Matchbook, Mr. Benham went from the chairman of a major international bank to a key figure in the emerging sports betting industry, all in less than a decade.
It's certainly not one of England's most glamorous soccer teams. It is a small club located in West London, which was founded in 1889 , but in its long history has not achieved much success and has not been among the elite of English soccer since 1947. When Brentford began to have difficulties in the early 2000s and in 2007 was on the verge of bankruptcy, Benham decided to step in . He arranged a €700,000 loan that allowed Brentford fans to buy the team, becoming the first fan-owned professional club in London. In 2012 Benham became the owner of his childhood team , as the fans refused to repay the loan . Unlike other rich men who have bought lower level English clubs, Benham chose not to invest in players, staff and resources to win. Indeed, he had a different idea; he wanted to use statistical analysis of data and bring the concept of "maniball" to English soccer. "Moneyball" is a reference to Michael Lewinsky's best-selling book. Michael Lewis' best-selling novel and its film adaptation starring Brad Pitt about Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, who used unconventional statistical analysis and a limited team budget to turn the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball (MLB) into a championship baseball team.
To find players who were underrated, Benham wanted to use what he had learned from the data analysis he had done over his career, but he didn't want to risk everything for his club . "Middjylland is a Danish Super League club for 10 million euros in 2014 . The plan was simple: the ideas that worked at Middtjylland he took to Brentford, the ideas that didn't work he threw in the trash. The data that was useful he used in Brentford and the data that was useless he ignored. This allowed him to develop his own set of metrics and indicators that could better predict the performance of individual players and teams . These figures provided the basis for what was to come.
