Playing to win

A few months ago, a friend – who is a regular reader of this website – gave me a book: Smart Money (2024), by Alex Duff, is an account of the history of Brentford Football Club, and in particular their recent rise from the mediocrity of the lower divisions up into the top half of the most prestigious league in English football.   It is a good story and well told, describing the club’s founding in a thriving West London suburb in 1889, and their gradual rise into Division One in the 1930s, when they finished in the top six for three successive seasons.  In the post-war years, the local area fell into decline as wealth and industry moved elsewhere, and Brentford FC sank slowly into the oblivion of Division Four.   However since 2005, when a boyhood fan, who was making himself wealthy running a gambling company, decided to start investing in the club, eventually becoming its owner, Brentford FC’s progress has been impressive.  They were promoted into League One in 2009, into the Championship in 2014, and into the Premier League in 2021.  In the season that has just ended they finished 10th, one place above West London rivals Fulham, and one place below their 2023 ranking, which was their best league performance for 85 years.

The book is not just about the connection between money and success in football, but also about the role of data.  Brentford FC’s new owner – a physics graduate from Oxford – had worked in finance for a while, but then set up his own data analytics company, which gathers and organises vast amounts of information in order to make predictions about sports results.  The company makes most of its income through placing large stakes in the Asian betting markets.  Some of these profits have gone to fund the development of Brentford FC, but just as  importantly, the data gathered and analysed is also used to help the club achieve more with less: staff at the betting firm advise staff at the football club on how to spend money wisely on players, and how to optimise the club’s style of play to achieve the best results possible for a team of modest financial resources.  The club is both funded by data and managed through data.

The Brentford FC story is reminiscent of the famous tale of Oakland A, the US baseball team that made use of novel statistical methods to achieve great success on a modest budget.  The book Moneyball (2003), by Michael Lewis, describes how coach Billy Beane gave up on the “wisdom” of seasoned coaches and scouts, and relied instead on a young data-literate baseball fan to build a team that was cheap to assemble but hard to beat.  The book was turned into a movie in 2011, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.  Back in 2005, when I worked in the financial services industry, Billie Beane spoke at my firm’s annual Managing Director’s conference.  Many of my colleagues were interested to discover how his data analytic approach might help them to improve stock selection for their asset portfolios.  I was more interested in whether it would help the firm systematically hire better staff for lower costs.  I later realised that was the wrong question to ask in that context: overpaid and underperforming managing directors tend not to want to apply data analysis to themselves.

The use of data analysis to improve the performance of a sports club is here to stay: it allows managers to acquire players who, despite their skills and performance statistics, are for some reason undervalued in the transfer market; it also allows managers to optimise the skills of their team during matches, making the best of the assets they have at their disposal.  All this costs money – having better data than the competition, and analysing it more effectively, now requires considerable investment – although the richest clubs are not always the smartest, since they can afford to overpay for talent.  Another way of making this point is that today, good data and plenty of money are both necessary conditions for football success, but neither are sufficient, whether separate or combined.  It is possible to have the best data, but lack the money to implement; and it is possible to have the most money, but to spend it unwisely; it is also possible to have both data and money, but not make them work together effectively.

At this point it seems relevant to ask, what does success mean for a football team.  In recent years Brentford FC have done well to move up three divisions and, in the past four years, to finish twice in the top half of the table.  For some clubs, especially those that carry the burden of high expectations, this would not be good enough: I have friends who think coming second in the Premier League, three years in succession, is a source of disappointment.  My team – Tottenham Hotspur – despite a miserable season in the league, managed to win the second most prestigious European cup competition last month.  The final itself was a rather dull game, but when your team has not won anything for many years that does not matter at all.  It was a great night to be a Spurs fan.  My nephew – a regular at Crystal Palace – was at Wembley last month to watch his team win their first ever major trophy.  He and I both know that winning something once in a while is a better outcome than doing consistently well without ever claiming a prize.

One major puzzle about the recently completed English football season is this: how did Tottenham, a club with such poor league form, manage to win a major European competition, and how did Palace, a club that had never won anything, manage to win the biggest domestic cup competition.  Since all the major clubs now have access to expensive and sophisticated data analytics, why don’t the clubs with the most money make use of the data to embed their dominance.  Crystal Palace finished 12th in the Premier League this season, one place below Fulham, who they beat in the quarter-final, while they were six places below Aston Villa, who they beat in the semi-final, and nine places below Manchester City, who they beat in the final.  Why this incoherence in performance rankings: does the data work differently in league and cup formats? 

Football would become very dull if analytics were able to predict all the outcomes.  Data is suggestive and any club that ignores it will suffer the consequences, but it is not determinate of success.  Many other factors – which cannot easily be measured, which cannot easily be integrated into the algorithms – count for a great deal: motivation, luck, team spirit, the level of fan support, the quality of the officials, the weather, and the swerve of an atom.  None of these can be easily foreseen.  It is the partially arbitrary nature of sport’s results  – the fact that the biggest, the richest, the smartest don’t always win – that keeps the fans enthralled.  And too the local connections to a team, the traditions, the loyalties acquired in early life that survive for decades, the camaraderie with fellow fans, the sense of history that sports clubs encourage, all these things keep us loyal and optimistic for the forthcoming season despite plentiful evidence to the contrary. 

One final thought: while data is now being used extensively to measure the performance of players and teams, and consequently to assess the performance of managers and coaches, the owners and directors of football clubs are notoriously unaccountable for their performance.  Spending vast sums on huge new stadiums which drain the club of funds for players, designing overseas tours out of season that exhaust the team simply in order to sell more merchandise, and insisting on buying trophy-players who are over-valued or past their prime or who do not fit the playing style of the team – these are the frequent and characteristic errors of owners and directors, who never lose their jobs when their foolish decisions backfire.  Despite winning their first trophy for seventeen years, my team have just sacked their manager.  Between 2008 and 2023 Tottenham employed 11 managers (or joint managers), several on an interim basis, who between them won nothing, and yet, having now found someone who knows how to win, they have fired him.  You don’t need a PhD in statistics to figure out that the person who appoints the managers is not very good at their job.      

Meanwhile, alongside the men’s beautiful game, women’s football is also flourishing in England, with a growing fan base and a competitive league.  My daughter is a keen fan and, unlike the men’s team at her club, the women’s team reached the final of the European Women’s Champions League and won the trophy.  This weekend she and I will celebrate our joint success over Vietnamese food at a local restaurant.  A careful analysis of past data suggests that we will eat well, have a good time, and that I will pay the bill.  All in all, a good result.