Punting Star: Matthew Benham

Matthew Benham owns an English Football team, a betting company and he also happens to be one of the most revered gamblers in the world.

Sound familiar? Yes, Matthew Benham’s life does have some parallels with fellow Punting Star, Tony Bloom.

Benham is a Football fan, a Brentford FC tragic, an Oxford University alumni and an analytics-based gambler that has a tremendous influence on global betting markets.

Such is his love for Brentford FC it was revealed years later that Benham was the mystery investor who bailed Brentford out of a 500,000-pound financial hole.

More on how much he loves ‘The Bees’ later.

Matthew Benham the punter

At the core of Benham is the punter who loves the challenge of assessing and mastering markets. He relies heavily on statistical data and modeling.

His success in wagering has enabled him to do some tremendous things and support some of his passions and interests.

As is often the case with high profile gamblers, information is not readily available about their exploits! Thankfully both Benham and his rival Bloom have pursuits outside of betting that has enabled the punting world to get to know them better.

Benham also owns Matchbook.com one of the best betting exchanges in the world. He is immersed in the industry and understands both sides of the fence as a result.

Man City travel to Wembley tonight to face Tottenham in the #premierleague.

City will win the league if they can defeat Tottenham and Man Utd lose to West Brom tomorrow.

📺 – Sky Main Event at 19:45

Markets: https://t.co/ifjwOtdLPA pic.twitter.com/QPuC59aygT

— Matchbook (@TeamMatchbook) April 14, 2018

And you better believe it, Benham preaches betting theory in his new Football based projects.

This one, all about sample size!

“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.” Benham said in a profile piece produced by Daniel Welling

and this time in regards to looking beyond wins and losses something that is obviously important in a volatile game like Football where a team can dominant possession for most of the game only to lose 1-0 to a late minute goal against the run of play.

“I am not just talking about whether a team wins or loses or scores or not because there is a huge amount of what we call noise in that statistic. I want to look at the number and quality of the chances they created. If I am looking at a striker I absolutely do not care about his goalscoring record. For me, the only thing that is interesting is how the team do collectively, offensively and defensively within the context of an individual’s performance.” 

Matthew Benham and Smart Odds

Smart Odds is the statistical based entity owned by Matthew Benham, in the same way, Tony Bloom and associates work with Star Lizard, the London based Smart Odds provides statistical modeling services for its clients – of which, Benham is one.

According to their website, Smartodds is a privately owned company providing statistical research and sports modeling services to customers, including professional gamblers. Our employees are based in North London with a number of consultants based globally.

Founded in 2004, Smartodds has a proven record of providing exceptional services to its clients. We are a growing company and work in an exciting and fast-paced industry of which we are a market leader.

Scott Longley reported that Smart Odds revenue for the 2017 financial year hit £12m with EBITDA rising 9 percent to £1.5m, with revenue from clients based in the UK declining slightly to £8.6m from £9m, and overseas revenue rising to £3.5m from £2.3m.

Longley did note also that Bloom’s Star Lizard posted company results with Companies House in June 2016 the company achieved revenues of £17m – slightly higher than that of Benham’s Smart Odds but there is no doubt both parties also earn a considerable amount through their wagering activities.

You can visit the Smart Odds website here.

Matthew Benham, the Football owner

Benham, like Tony Bloom, also has dabbled in Football team ownership. This started in 2012 when Benham purchased the West London Club of Brentford.

He attended his first Brentford game as an 11-year-old in 1979 against Colchester and has been a lifelong fan ever since.

Since he bought into the club, he is said to have sunk almost 100m pounds into improving everything from the training facilities to the analytics and sports science departments.

“With a lot of businesses that are successful, the first few years it is just you spending money. And then success comes a few years down the line. I am completely relaxed about that. My company, Matchbook.com, had a similar concept. The first few years you put money in, grow it up, and then after a while, it pays for itself.” he said

The success he has had as an owner has been met with adoration from the Brentford fans. The song “There’s only one Matthew Benham” often heard in the bleachers doesn’t impress Benham that much, though.

“I’m not a great fan of fans chanting the name of owners,” he says. “It is not a great concept for me, a bit like music after goals. There’s no need to do it. There’s no need to sing a song for me when they don’t have one for someone like our full-back Jake Bidwell. ” Benham said in an article posted on The Standard

While he has publicly stated he doesn’t like the Moneyball comparisons, there is no doubt that Benham has taken a much more analytical approach to his ownership, than the majority of franchise owners around the world.

In fact, when Brentford were promoted to the 2nd Tier he famously fired his Manager, Assistant Manager and Sporting Director.

“The table is notoriously inaccurate because there’s just way more randomness than people understand,” Benham explained in a SI article back in 2015

“One of the best examples is over halfway through the season in Germany, Dortmund were bottom of the league. We actually still made them the second-best team in Germany. They were just horrifically unlucky.

Usually the way the fans and especially the media look at it, randomness is quite an unsatisfactory explanation, so they like to look for stories and a narrative. But very often randomness is the main explanation.”

“One lesson I’ve learned is if you go to a manager and say you’ve been unlucky and you actually deserve to be higher, that’s actually quite an easy message to give to a manager, naturally enough,” Benham said

“But if you say to a manager, ‘You’ve been lucky, you deserve to be lower,’ that’s actually an incredibly difficult message for the manager to swallow.”

Benham also has an interest in Danish League club Midtjylland.

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Thanks for reading!