Smart Money - by Alex Duff (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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. 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. One of the fans, an Oxford University physics graduate called Matthew Benham, was making millions of pounds from professional gambling and threw in a PS500,000 lifeline to help keep the club afloat. 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"--Google Books.

Book Synopsis

This book will introduce the little-known story of one of London's smallest clubs to fans of the Premier League. In 2021, Brentford entered the world's most-watched sports league broadcast to 800 million homes creating unprecedented exposure. Almost immediately, the demographic of the club's fanbase has become younger and more affluent, with thousands of new fans ABC1-category fans buying season tickets in a new 17,000-seat stadium.

Drawing on the Duff's deep personal insight and interviews with insiders, this book is the definitive story of the fall and rise of Brentford FC.

About the Author

Alex Duff is a distinguished sports business reporter, having worked for Bloomberg News for fifteen years. His first book Football's Secret Trade (Wiley & Sons, 2017) about the football transfer market was serialized in the New York Times and Guardian, and featured in the Daily Mail. His second book Le Fric: Family, Power and Money: The Business of the Tour de France (Constable, 2022) was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and named as one of the `Best Summer Reads' of 2022 by the Financial Times. It was praised in the Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement.