Matthew Benham

Early life and education

Benham grew up in a family of cricket supporters in Eton, where his parents were teachers. A longtime fan of Brentford, Benham attended his first match in 1979 at the age of eleven. He attended Slough Grammar School, and enjoyed mathematics. In December 1982, at the age of 14, he skipped school with a friend to watch Brentford play an away game against Nottingham Forest. In 1989, he graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in physics.

Career

Banking and finance

In the 1990s, Benham worked for twelve years in the financial sector in the City of London, with stints as a hedge fund manager, a derivatives trader for Deutsche Bank, and as a vice president at the Bank of America.

Gambling

He entered the gambling industry in 2001, when Tony Bloom, who later became the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion, hired him to work at Premier Bet. Benham made a significant sum of money in the Asian betting market, using a statistical model developed by Stuart Coles and Mark Dixon at Lancaster University, which was able to predict the probabilities of football scores more accurately than the bookies. After falling out with Bloom, he founded Smartodds in 2004, and hired Coles. Based in Kentish Town in London, Smartodds focuses on statistical research and sports modelling, which it sells to professional gamblers. In 2011, he was part of a group of investors called Triplebet Limited, who became owners of sports betting exchange Matchbook.

Football

Benham first made contact with his boyhood football club when he read a 2005 article in The Independent saying that supporters' trust Bees United, which had taken over running Brentford, were "desperately seeking a few wealthy supporters to invest", so they could buy out previous owner Ron Noades. He initially participated as an anonymous "mystery investor".

As Brentford continued to struggle financially, in 2007, Benham took the unusual move of paying out nearly £3 million to take over its loans, agreeing to hold them interest-free for five years. In 2009, Benham agreed to invest an additional £1 million a year for five years, in return for preference shares in the club. Bees United would then have the option to repay the loans to Benham and buy back his shares, while Benham held the option to take over the club as a majority owner.

In June 2012, Bees United voted to transfer full control of Brentford to Benham, when the club was in the English third tier. Ten days after becoming the club's new owner, Benham purchased a parcel of land near Kew Bridge railway station, where he pledged to build a new stadium, close to its existing stadium at Griffin Park. In 2013, Benham promoted Mark Warburton, another former City trader, as manager. By the 2014–2015 season, Brentford had been promoted to the EFL Championship, for the first time in 21 years.

In July 2014, Benham became the majority shareholder of FC Midtjylland (FCM), a club in the top-flight Danish Superliga, investing £6.2 million. From the start, Midtjylland fully embraced Benham's mandate for an analytics-driven approach to decision-making, using data analytics to identify promising yet undervalued transfers, improve team performance in set pieces, and optimize individual player fitness. According to Midtjylland chairman Rasmus Ankersen, Midtjylland also used analytics to understand "dangerous situations", and to inform coaches about performance against key performance indicators (KPIs), so they could speak more effectively to the players at half-time and to the media after matches. Benham first became interested in Ankersen after reading his book, The Gold Mine Effect, in which he admitted having failed to predict the success of Simon Kjær, when he was a young footballer at the academy Ankersen had helped to set up. Midtjylland went on to win their first league title in 2015, largely attributed to Benham's influence. On 15 August 2023, Midtjylland announced that Matthew Benham had sold his shares in the club.