Matthew Benham has admitted that Brentford made a mistake appointing Marinus Dijkhuizen, and revealed the club overlooked a negative reference.
The Bees sacked the Dutchman after just eight league games and two wins; citing the training methods deployed by his team.
And Benham admitted it was a mistake to ignore a reference, just because it didn't agree with the views of the club.
“We just didn’t get it right whatsoever in appointing a head coach,” he said at a Matchbook Traders' Conference. “We did a lot of research, looked at his record, and got a lot of references.
“And one of the big mistakes we made is we got far down the line, and we were pretty confident that this guy was going to be our man, and then we got a very bad reference.
“But because it was from an agent of someone who was a sub in his team we immediately discounted it.
“It was a mistake I have made many, many, times in betting. It didn’t agree with our views so we just ignored it.”
Brentford were referred to as the Moneyball club at the conference in the introduction, a description still rankles with Benham.
He explained: “Thanks for the kind introduction, but I hate it. It’s much misunderstood - people say ‘oh Moneyball’ - these guys came along and applied stats to baseball. But of course baseball has been incredibly obsessed with stats for 100-plus years.
“Moneyball’s idea wasn’t about using any old statistics, but statistics as an academic and scientific exercise to see what stats actually helped predicted things.
“The Moneyball label can be confusing because people think it is using any stats rather than trying to use them in a scientific way.”
What Billy Beane did with the low-budget Oakland A's was to find the best value of a player by breaking the sport down to the easiest question; how did runs score?
Once the main determinants were achieved they sought the players they could afford to give them enough victories to reach the play-offs after a 162 game season as they believed their methods couldn't work in best of five, and best of seven series due to the small sample size.
This led to the signing of relief pitcher Chad Bradford. While, to the human eye, he didn't look like a major league pitcher, he had an ability to get batters out so efficiently and not give up many home runs.
Statistics are one element of Brentford's recruitment policy but Benham insists they only go so far in the recruitment process.
“I used to be very sceptical about using individual stats for players,” he explained. “I am now slightly more open to them. There are pluses and minuses.
“The good things is that sometimes a player might be very good at tackles and interceptions but you don’t really realise it because some players who make a lot of tackles by getting in quickly don’t tend to stick in the mind as much as a Stuart Pearce-type player.
“On the other hand, is a player making a lot of tackles because he is badly positioned in the first place? So these can have a lot of use but they always need context.”
