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Smart Money

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What to expect

In 1978, when Alex Duff first went to watch Brentford, players would go on midweek pub crawls near the Griffin Park stadium. Sometimes, in no fit state to go home, they would crash out in a terraced home where one of them lived opposite the stadium gates. The next morning, they clambered into a white van which one of them would drive to training, stopping on the way for a bacon sandwich and cup of tea at a greasy spoon café.

Brentford had once played in the top-flight but now, idling in the third division, were a second home for players and supporters, but there was neither the ambition nor money to revive their best days. They bumbled along until in 2005, fed up with trying to make a profit from a club with an ageing stadium in an unfashionable west London suburb, owner Ron Noades agreed to hand over the business to supporters on the condition they take over responsibility for their £5.5 million overdraft.

One of the fans, an Oxford University physics graduate called Matthew Benham, was making millions of pounds from professional gambling and threw in a £500,000 lifeline to help keep the club afloat. Initially, 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, little-known team into a competitor in one of the world's most-watched sports leagues.

Critics Review

Alex Duff uncovers the history of Brentford FC with the fastidious care that has come from his own time supporting the club
Financial Times
Like Moneyball (2003), Michael Lewis's hit book about the use of statistics in baseball, Smart Money is both informative and entertaining
Economist
Smart Money, Alex Duff's history of the club, ranges nimbly from the town's sulphurous, Victorian peak, to bookmaker dens in Bangkok, to Sam Allardyce gulping down energy drinks in sweltering Florida
New Statesman
Engrossing . . . more than two decades after (Moneyball was published in 2003), Duff has finally brought football's equivalent to the bookshelves
Off the Pitch
For a long time, Brentford have essentially understood football better than other clubs . . . Smart Money provides insight into how they did it
De Correspondent
Author Alex Duff
Narrator Chris Naylor
Duration 7 hours and 29 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781408719466
Format x-book®
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Genre Association football (Soccer)
Availability AU, GB, IE, US

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