The next Premier League will have a club that was not part of the national football elite for 74 years. Brentford gained unprecedented access to the Premier League by winning the playoff game against Swansea, 2-0. “We are Premier League” was the club’s message to its fans on social media.
Founded in 1889, Brentford received a “welcome” from future competitors. Currently, the club belongs to Matthew Benham and is led by the Danish Thomas Frank. On the field, Ivan Toney made the difference by scoring 33 goals in the access campaign. In addition to the team, Norwich and Watford also return to the first division.
Popularly known as “The Bees”, the team will be the 50th different team to be part of the Premier League, since 1993, when the tournament started to use this form of dispute. The journey was long, as Brentford had fought seven times for access in the last decade without success.
Now, the promise of Benham, fan since childhood and current owner, is that this is not just a spell in the Premier League. Owner of a fortune built in the betting market, he decided to acquire the team to place it among the best in English football. Now, the goal is for the team of the heart to consolidate and remain in the elite.
Matthew Benham: President of Brentford and ‘ODDS Master’
Before celebrating his favorite team’s entry into the Premier League, Benham has gained a reputation as an expert in sports betting and analysis. He’s definitely a pretty smart guy and he studied Physics at Oxford University in the 1980s. He then worked as a physicist at Yamaichi International.
After that, he shifted his focus to finance and held positions at places like Bank of America. However, he always had a passion for sports and odds. Benham was especially fond of football and loved the statistical side. In 2001, he got a job at Premier Bet, a leading UK bookmaker.
At the time, he worked with Tony Bloom, who was also a very successful poker player. As far as we know, the owner of Brentford is very focused on statistics, analysis and English football is his great passion.
The bets and the odds
In the late 1990s, an article by Stuart Coles and Mark Dixon entitled Modeling Association Football Scores and Inefficiencies in the Football Betting Market was published. The newspaper became one of the first to advocate statistical analysis to predict the outcome of football matches.
Matthew Benham began to adopt the paper’s ideas and build his own models. In 2004, Benham successfully implemented this quantitative approach to betting. Soon after, he formed his betting organization, SmartOdds.
However, SmartOdds has become much more than a sports betting institution. After all, it has become a global reference sports betting research center, providing forecasts, data and analysis for professional gamblers and others involved in the betting industry. Currently, the company evaluates football from all over the planet, as well as basketball, baseball, tennis, hockey and American football.
Matthew Benham the Businessman
As such, SmartOdds was a big hit by Matthew Benham and his wealth continued to grow. In 2011, he invested in the Matchbook betting exchange, which today is one of the leading in the world. At the same time, Benham also began to use his mathematical ability to develop and manage professional football teams in the UK and Europe.
However, the connection with Brentford has existed since his childhood. When he learned that the club was going into crisis, Benham offered resources to normalize the situation anonymously. Over time, he took control and invested significant money to improve the club’s structure and make it competitive again.
Today, he owns Brentford and Midtjylland in Denmark. Unlike other sporting organization owners, he takes a statistical approach to his role. Benham adopts numbers, data and statistics to assess potential reinforcements and match strategy. As far as anyone knows, he has a number of analytics companies to help with this process.
This, in turn, helped Brentford FC compete with the bigger budget clubs. There is no doubt that Brenham has an incredibly talented mathematical mind and that he has built an incredible career in both business and sports.
He will likely go down in history as the man who managed to save and revolutionize Brentford FC. But for punters, the way Benham made his fortune relying on statistical analysis of football is what will really stand out.
