700,000 loan for 300 Million Profit in Sports Betting – Matthew Benham
Who is Matthew Benham
This is Matthew Benham! A betting professional and highly analytical, he managed to turn a loan of $700,000 into $300 million in profits, thanks to his childhood passion for Brentford Football Club. He is also the founder of Smartodds and the owner of the Matchbook, but how he did it and whether it can be repeated, since every success usually leaves clues, you will find out by reading our entire article.
The start
Matthew Benham was born in 1968, attending his first football game 11 years later in 1979 was the beginning of his love affair with Brentford Football Club.
From 1986 to 1989, he attended Oxford University and received a bachelor’s degree in physics before embarking on a career in finance.
Twelve years later, he has risen to the top, becoming vice president of Bank of America.
Gambling connection
But for Benham, that achievement was not enough, and in 2001 he left the finances to work for the infamous professional gambler Tony Bloom in the newly formed Premier Bet, probably seeing a great opportunity with great potential.
His job was to create and develop models for betting predictions using analytical data and quantitative analysis. After several years of work, he leaves in 2003.
There were rumors of a clash between him and Tony Bloom, although neither of them had ever talked about it since, but that was not the end of Benham’s bets because he had already acquired gambling expertise and had no intention of returns to finance.
Creating his own betting union (SmartOdds) and buying the Matchbook exchange
Thus, in 2004, he founded the betting union SmartOdds, a major competitor of StarLizard, Bloom’s company, and generated an impressive 12 million annual revenues.
The same style with statistical analysis that allowed him to create SmartOdds helped him provide massive liquidity to bets on a number of exchanges, and so in 2011, he became the owner of Matchbook.
Some believe that the move to buy Matchbook was tactical, allowing it to make bigger bets.
The connection with Brentford
His official financial situation and exactly how much he made from betting are not available, although what he did in 2007 gives us an idea, namely the loan he offered to Brentford of 700,000 to help them, as the team was in difficult times, but on the condition that if the money is not returned, he will be able to buy the club.
And so in 2012 he got the opportunity and became the owner of Brentford.
But his biggest trick was just beginning to earn him the nickname Moneyball for life, which is a comparison to Brad Pitt’s movie. Benham says he doesn’t like the comparison, although if you’ve watched the movie, you can understand why, and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it.
Buying Midtjylland for model testing
Matthew Moneyball Benham also bought the Midtjylland team to test his analytical modeling models in July 2014.
He transferred the ideas that worked to Brentford, while the ideas that were not successful ceased to be used.
Simply put, he developed his own set of indicators, based on analytical data that has been shown to work, ignoring traditional decision-making methods that relied on human opinion.
This was most evident when he fired Mark Warburton and his assistant manager in 2015 after the Brentford Bees were promoted to the Championship.
They have been replaced by analytical minds that focus on data. The team’s individual wins and losses were considered less important and definable indicators such as xG and average goal time were preferred.
How statistics beat football
For example, Brentford began to take a closer look at the “expected goals” – based on the quality and quantity of chances created during a match – instead of how many goals a player actually scored.
A quote from Rasmus Ankerson in the Garden newspaper gives us a unique idea of how the model works. When he asked Benham if they were likely to be promoted from the Premier League, Benham replied that they had a 42.3% chance.
The key indicators that Ben models have a strong correlation with the historical data of a team, and not with the individual talent of the players or the subjective opinion.
The most controversial move came in 2016 when Brentford abolished its youth academies to rely only on reserve players who were considered useless for other clubs.
Benham’s model needed 35 games per player to be able to assign accurate statistical data. This is because smaller samples give less accurate results, just as in betting.
Underrated players = High winnings
Smaller clubs had the flexibility and freedom to experiment. Something that bigger and richer clubs would not allow, and this flexibility played a big advantage, as flexibility meant that they could find and test underrated players without overdoing it.
For example, Ollie Watkins was bought for $2.3 million and sold for $36 million, and Neil Maupay was bought for $2.1 million and sold for $26 million. This is a hell of a big progress in the price.
The result of statistics and analyzes
And of course, the results of Benham’s models were not instantaneous, but as all good bettors know, when you catch high-value odds in your favor, in the long run, you will win. And Matthew Benham did so as Brentford won the Premier League playoffs last year.
This made him and the club much richer as the team currently costs $300 million and if they last two years it will become $400 million. The longer they stay, the more the value of the team grows.
After all, Matthew Benham believed that analysis provided a unique advantage in a low-scoring sport that had historically been distorted by chance and luck. With his promotion to the Premier League, he was right. It will be interesting to see how Brentford’s success potentially displaces the long-held notion that analytically based equations cannot determine future success in professional football.
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