The statistical approach to football adopted by Brentford’s inspirational owner Matthew Benham came in for criticism after the bizarre departure of Mark Warburton and failure of his replacement. But will he get the last laugh?
From the outside, the departure of Mark Warburton from Brentford looked, at best, odd and, at worst, a bit of a mess.
The investment banker turned football coach, who’d worked with the likes of Brendan Rodgers and Malky Mackay during their successful spells at Watford before coming into the notoriously well-run Brentford set up under Matthew Benham as sporting director, seemed to be working a minor miracle at Griffin Park midway through last season when news broke that he’d be leaving at the end of the campaign.
Brentford - newly promoted, playing in a dilapidated, tiny old ground, with a smaller budget than most - were on a very promising charge straight through the division into the play-off places. With former manager Uwe Rosler struggling badly at Wigan, it started to feel like Warburton had been the brains of the operation all along when the German was winning plaudits for the Bees’ success in League One.
The story goes that owner Benham, Oxford educated and a successful professional gambler before launching his own betting firm which has helped to finance Brentford’s meteoric rise, believed Warburton’s team was fortunate to be as high as it was. This was based on a statistical model which Benham wanted the club to pay more attention to. He offered to finance January signings to push the club on towards the Premier League but Warburton said no, fearing expensive new imports would upset the group dynamic. Benham said the club would be run differently, more along his model, in 2015/16 and Warburton, who’d already had a sniff at the Norwich job over Christmas, decided to be on his way.
Given that Warburton is now top of the Scottish Championship with Glasgow Rangers with 11 wins from 11 games played, while Brentford have struggled without him, this looked like another case of a megalomaniac owner shoving his nose into a sport he didn’t understand. It certainly hasn’t helped that Brighton, having abandoned a similar statistics-based approach that failed under Sami Hyypia, are flying at the top of the league this season under a more traditional model with Chris Hughton.
But let’s not be so hasty. After all, Brentford did as Benham had predicted last season, enduring a tougher second half to the season that ended with them being overwhelmed by Middlesbrough in the play-offs. You could say the weird situation where everybody knew the manager was leaving for several months before he did didn’t help. But then you could also say that doing well in the second tier of Scottish football with the resources Rangers have at their disposal is like the second season of Hunted trying to find Rik Waller.
Benham hasn’t done much wrong at Brentford so far. Having initially bailed them out of a £500,000 black hole, he’s put anything up to £90m in so far, building a renowned youth academy and scouting set up, and buying the land for a new 20,000 seater stadium new Kew Bridge outright. In 18 months time this Championship Brentford will be unrecognisable from the club he took over. His model, often described as a football version of Billy Beane’s Moneyball in baseball — not a comparison Benham likes — has also worked at his Danish club Midtjylland which has won the Danish league and played in the Champions League for the first time in its history since he got involved.
He may disagree with the Moneyball line, but this quote could easily come from Brad Pitt’s script:"It is a phenomenon I see again and again in football. If I want to know how good a player is I want to speak to a person who has seen that player play one hundred times in all conditions. What tends to happen is so many people in football will see that player for forty minutes and decide they are the oracle.”
He did, however, make a mistake, by his own admission, when replacing Warburton with Marinus Dijkhuizen this summer. The Dutchman’s stats in his homeland were impeccable, fitting the model himself, but it was clear to Benham that something was wrong with his methods very early on and the decision to remove him was reached long before it was actually carried out after a 2-1 home defeat by Sheff Wed which, actually, they were unlucky to lose having dominated the second half with ten men only to be sucker punched in injury time after a defensive slip.
That wasn’t the only piece of bad luck to befall Brentford early doors. A newly laid pitch failed to take at Griffin Park, leaving the playing surface for the opening few matches outright dangerous. A home game with Birmingham was cancelled while it was torn up and relaid, but not before record £2m signing Andreas Bjelland (stop it) had ruptured his knee ligaments and been ruled out for the season.
Nevertheless Benham told The Guardian: "We just didn’t get it right whatsoever in appointing a head coach. We did a lot of research, looked at his record, and got a lot of references. And one of the big mistakes we made is we got far down the line, and we were pretty confident that this guy was going to be our man, and then we got a very bad reference. But because it was from an agent of someone who was a sub in his team we immediately discounted it. It was a mistake I have made many, many, times in betting. It didn’t agree with our views so we just ignored it.”
Lee Carsley was promoted from the club’s youth and reserve structures to take over, adding stability in theory. The move seemed to be against Carsley’s wishes — he openly admitted he had no managerial ambitions and didn’t want the job permanently or temporarily as it took him away from the coaching he loved and did want to do. Not exactly inspiring, and two quick fire defeats looked ominous, but Brentford have won three on the spin now including consecutive away wins scoring five and conceding none in the process.
Make it four in a row against bitter local rivals QPR on Friday, and it’ll start to look very much like another of Benham’s gambles has already started to pay returns.
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