From studying physics at Oxford University to owning a Premier League club, here is the story of Matthew Benham. Starting his professional career as a physicist initially, Benham slowly migrated to the finance sector, where he worked his way up to becoming the Vice President of the Bank of America. However, his trajectory took an unexpected turn when he entered the world of gambling. Matthew established Smartodds, a company that sells statistical research and sports modelling to professional gamblers. Subsequently, he ventured further by acquiring the sports betting exchange Matchbook. Interestingly, Benham is a childhood fan of Brentford Football Club. Seeing the Bees in financial crisis and languishing in the third tier, Benham took over his beloved club in 2012. He used his expertise in sports analytics and implemented Moneyball in football. In the next nine years, he propelled the Bees into the Premier League while making over €108 million in profits from player transfers. Astounding! Isn't?

The story of Brentford Football Club owner Matthew Benham in detail

Brentford owner, Matthew Benham, is once again at the centre of headlines as Brentford FC has been revealed to be put up for sale at a valuation of £400 Million. This is, if it materialises, not going to be the first time that the Physics Graduate from Oxford will be making a business decision that involves building a business from scratch and turning it into a highly profitable venture.

The former banker is known for being part of the revolution of the betting industry, responsible for the creation of statistical models for placing bets. With his now-estranged friend Tony Bloom, Matthew Benham went from being a banker to the betting industry, eventually building Smartodds and his own net worth of $300 Million now.

The Statistical Revolution of Benham

While he started out at Starlizard, he left the organisation in 2004 to set up his own organisation in Smartodds. Here, he continued to build mathematical models to further enhance the accuracy of probabilities to improve their stakes and while the market started to catch up to their initial method, they kept a step ahead by including more metrics and further refining their technologies.

It was a result of this method that led to the rise of newer metrics for judging the quality of chances created, expanding beyond the metric of xG (expected Goals) and even taking into account the distance travelled by teams and weather into the prediction of probabilities. This made his betting exchange highly profitable and turned him from a regular banker into a multi-millionaire behemoth in the betting industry. In 2011, he was a part of the group of investors called Triplebet Limited who took over the struggling Matchbooks betting exchange and transformed it into a player with improving prospects, rivalling the market share of Betfair and over time, becoming marginally larger than its two other main competitors within the UK market.

However, Benham, a man with little actual interest in gambling, soon decided to take his methods from mere prediction to the game of football itself. In 2007, he gave out a loan of £700,000 to the fans of Brentford FC, the club he supported as a child, on the condition that they pay it back or he takes over. They did not and he became the owner of the club in 2012. Since then, he has been responsible for the club’s meteoric rise to the Premier League from the 3rd division of the English footballing pyramid.

Expanding ambitions

His empire was not to stop at just one club. In 2014, he bought the Danish Superliga side FC Midtjylland for £6.2 million and implemented his policy of using data analytics to hire younger players and develop them, as opposed to the more expensive established players. This soon bore fruit as the club won their first league title in 2015, largely attributed to Benham’s influence.

The success for both Brentford and Midtjylland hasn’t stopped since then, with the former still being a solid mid-table Premier League and the latter winning at least three Danish Superliga titles since 2015. However, Mathew Benham sold his take in FC Midtjylland in 2023 and it is expected that the £300 net-worth Betting genius might completely end his active involvement in the footballing business with the sale of Brentford FC, for which it is rumoured that he has also hired the Rothschild to advise on matters. It is also speculated that he might remain a minority stakeholder even after the sale, to be a part of the club he has supported since childhood.

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