Brentford owner Matthew Benham has been explaining how the Bees identify new players and the balance between data and scouting.
In their rise through the divisions to subsequent consolidation in the Premier League, Brentford have had extraordinary success with finding players, and Benham says that does not happen by acident.
“We have an open exchange of views,” he told the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference 2026, external. “It is a mixture of the data models and good old-fashioned scouting.
“If you were to go through our players we have signed, some are more scouting based and others more maths based.
“For instance, models are not great for young players as we simply do not have the data. It is not like in American sport where they have high school and college data.
“Bryan Mbeumo was 19 years old when we spotted him and playing in the French second division. The model was ‘meh’ on him but the fact our scouts, and especially the technical director Lee Dykes, were so positive outweighed the data.
“If you have a player in their mid-20s who has played a couple of hundred games, the model better like him or we are not going to sign him.”