In 2016, Smith became the chief soccer correspondent of The New York Times and is a former journalist forThe Times, Independent,and Daily Telegraph. The former poker professional has been commended for his running of the south coast club in recent years, his own background in data helping propel Brighton to a consolidatory position in the Premier League. Brighton, an unglamorous mid-table Premier League side, has punched above its weight and become mainstays in the league in large part because of how the way they used data in the transfer market.

The interest from this individual story was in the characters he met and the extent to which football ownership is quite opaque, as it's often unclear who actually has some power and inflence.Once the data were there then analysts started to use the data to work find players who were likely to be stars and how the game could be better played. Its/meaning resistance is explained by the fact that data comes along and it’s a different way of interpreting football.

This is just simple basic stuff that even the most junior of managers is aware of in business (or should be) and yet in football it has taken decades to even acknowledge data may help. Midtjylland - and Brentford - run on data; everything is checked and assessed and verified according to the data: the players they sign, the way they play, the decisions they make. So of course, the merging of Data, Football, and a favourite journalist, was something that really appealed to me. Over the last couple of years, I have developed a disdain for the suffusion of data ino the sport, primarily born out of my inability to understand or appreciate the changing lexicon of footballing discourse. One chapter of the book is devoted to xG’s role in soccer scouting and the example of Brentford, owned by Smart-odds founder Matthew Benham.While the value of data and data analytics is unquestionable, I am doubtful that these tools give someone a big advantage.