Smart Money

This book will introduce the little-known story of one of London's smallest clubs to fans of the Premier League.

For decades, Brentford idled in English soccer's third and fourth divisions, bumbling along until 2005 when, fed up with trying to make a profit from a club with an ageing stadium in an unfashionable suburb, owner Ron Noades agreed to hand over the business to supporters.
 
One of the fans, an Oxford University physics graduate called Matthew Benham, was making millions of pounds from professional gambling. As a sort of academic challenge, he began figuring out if he could employ the mathematics which he used in beating the bookmakers to improve the club's performance on the pitch.

Smart Money is the story of how a scientist with an inquiring mind was set loose in a backwater of professional football, and how he turned a modest, underachieving team into a competitor in one of the world's most-watched sports leagues.
 
Drawing on Duff's deep personal insight and interviews with insiders, this book is the definitive story of the fall and rise of Brentford FC.

Alex Duff is a distinguished sports business reporter, having worked for Bloomberg News for fifteen years in London and Madrid. His first book Football's Secret Trade (Wiley & Sons, 2017) about the football transfer market was excerpted in the New York Times and Guardian. His second book Le Fric: Family, Power and Money: The Business of the Tour de France (Constable, 2022) was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and named as one of the `Best Summer Reads' of 2022 by the Financial Times.