STRYKZ special: They Had No Chance, But Still Won The League — The Brentford FC Story
Football has the potential to write the most incredible stories. This one here was written by stats, performance metrics, data. Not on a small level. Not just on a match-by-match basis. This was big data at its finest.
Football hosts and clubs have been using data for a very long time, but it has always been about the broader picture: How many shots on goal? How much ball possession? How much defense? How much offense? But Brentford FC changed the game by looking at data from a different angle, taking them from being underdogs to becoming a winning team.
When you think about smaller football clubs (the ones that don’t play in the Premier League and Champions League; the little guys) they all share one problem: Money.
It’s not too difficult for management to figure out the kind of player that would benefit their team as a new arrival. But it is much harder for scouts to find the right person for the right price. The toughest market these days is, without a doubt, England and the UK, because most of the big clubs are now in the hands of billionaire investors.
For small teams like Brentford FC, it’s not easy to keep up. They’ve lost multiple finals, including those important games that would’ve moved them up the league ladder. Interestingly, it was an investor who saved Brentford FC. But not with a giant budget. Instead, he used a new approach to analytics.
Matthew Benham: How An Investor Saved Brentford Without Spending A Fortune
Manchester United, Liverpool FC and Manchester City are all in the hands of investors. In fact, 11 out of 20 Premier League teams are now in the hands of billionaires like Roman Abramovich, the Russian Oligarch who bought Chelsea for £140 million. Of course, that’s just the initial investment. They also need to continually invest hundreds of millions into large transfers.
Matthew Benham is not a billionaire, but made his millions with sports betting. He used a formula based on metrics that are different to what most teams operate on. For example, he noticed that goals are not necessarily the best indicator of a team’s performance, unless they have a very high chance of scoring exceptionally late in games. That’s the way Real Madrid won the Champions League, against Bayern Munich as well as Liverpool FC: they managed to score goals after the 80-minute mark which is strategically smart. This puts the opponent under massive pressure, meaning that they are more likely to make mistakes. This was a key metric Benham used in his betting, and later as main investor for Brentford FC.
From Barely Able To Survive To Football League Champion
A brilliant documentary by Hyundai shows that even long-time fans had very little hope left for their club. These were people who had attended over 700 Brentford matches. Lifelong fans. One of them, a supporter for 50 years.
It’s not like Brentford FC are losers. They had a shot at winning the final of the Football League Championship (the new First Division), five times. But they always lost. In fact, they lost a number of crucial games and played some “rather dreadful football”, as one supporter described the performance of his favorite team.
“There is a lot of inefficiency in football. Not only in the UK but globally. For us it was about time to leverage that”, says Rasmus Ankersen, Co-Director of Football at Brentford FC. He was responsible for introducing Benham to Brentford because he knew that “lot’s of innovation in business and football doesn’t happen at the big corporations, because if you can win by outspending the competition, why would you have to think different.”
He already new Benham from his time as Chairman at Danish club FC Midtjylland. But how were they able to turn things around?
Nothing out of the extraordinary. Just backing up decisions with a lot of data. Everyone knew that Brentford was good at free kicks. That was their biggest strength. So they brought in the best possible free kick coach, Gianni Vio, as well as several other coaches. Benham and Ankersen did something that’s somewhat rare in football: Instead of massive investments into one star, they invested their small budget into acquiring the best possible coaches to help raise every player’s performance levels. This included a specialist for ball possession and even a creative thinker who taught the players strategic thinking, making them mentally strong when odds were against them.
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