UP538 Ted Knutson on Brentford, Betting and Benham. And how AI will change football data

Ted Knutson's career tracks a remarkable arc: professional gambler at Pinnacle, architect of Brentford's analytics-driven recruitment model, founder of StatsBomb — built from a blog written during cancer recovery into a global data company sold to Hudl in 2024 — and now Strategic Director of Football at Crux, Bex Smith's women's multi-club platform, while running The Transfer Flow newsletter and podcast. This is a conversation about what data actually means when real money is on the line, and what happens when you try to port a proven model into entirely new territory.

In this episode:

• Why the football media's early hostility to analytics was really about power, not methodology
• The betting-to-football pipeline: transfers are just bets on humans with a longer cycle
• What StatsBomb's sale to Hudl reveals about consolidation risk in sports data
• Why professionalising operations matters more than data sophistication in women's football right now
• The three layers of data application in sport — and where the real edge lives next
• Transfers as hope: why fan demand for transfer content is really about optimism

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Transcript

Ted Knutson 0:00

I think Thomas is a pretty good coach, to be honest with you, but Spurs are a pretty weird vortex of anti football right now. And injuries like just incessant injuries. That's a tough thing for coaches to overcome, but you have to build a, a coherent squad and that's not what's happened at Spurs over the last kind of three, four years.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 0:17

Hi there, Richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner, the Sports Business podcast. Today's guest is Ted Knutson, whose career begins not in football, but in professional betting. He's American by birth. Spent years at Pinnacle, one of the world's largest sports books and. He served as head of Premier League trading. This gave him a fluency and predictive modeling market pricing, it also brought him into contact with Matthew Benham, the owner of both Brentford FC who were then in the championship in England, and FC Mitchell land in the Danish League who made a fortune himself in football betting markets. That relationship became the bridge for Knutson interprofessional football. He left gambling to become head of player analytics at Brentford and Mitchell, and simultaneously he was part of the team that won the Danish Super Leaguer title in 20 14 15. The club's first ever championship. At B Brentford. The data led approach has become a sort of institutional philosophy and a. Football industry legend. The club has built a recruitment model that identifies undervalued talent in lower profile leagues, brought cheaply developed and sold at significant profit. Doing a Brentford is an industry shorthand we talk about in the Unofficial Partner newsletter last week, and we mentioned that because it was called the Ted Knutson question. So the origin story of Stats bomb is quite remarkable. It's In early 2013, Knutson was recovering from chemotherapy for testicular cancer. Unable to work. He began writing about football statistics as a distraction. That writing appeared first on a Man city fan site. Then on a blog he founded called Stats Bomb. In the summer of 2013, it became a hub. For the emerging football analytics community, stats bomb evolved from a blog to a consultancy and then to a data company. The pivotal moment came in 2018 when Knutson acquired Ham fc, a data collection operation in Cairo in Egypt, and began producing stats bomb's own event data. Fast forward to 2024, he sold the business to huddle. US-based cloud video and data platform serving 230,000 sports teams. So that's the background and it's a fascinating conversation. I hope you really enjoy it. I've been wanting to get Ted on for a long time. As I mentioned at the beginning, cue the music. So make sure it all works. You've got your own podcast, so you know, all this, the glamor of setting up all the mics and all that nonsense.

Ted Knutson 2:47

I have people for that. No. Uh, No. I have somebody that does our production, but I, my, obviously my office is at my home but yes, you're catching me on the.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 2:55

As you know, I, um, interviewed Becks Smith last week and your name came up and then I just thought it was a thread that I'd love to pull. I've been talking about trying to get you on for ages actually,

Ted Knutson 3:07

Why.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 3:09

Just because there's a short answer to that, which is I know Simon Bannu quite well and I've always been badgering him about, coming on at various points. The longer answer I think is that I think you sort of represent something and I just wanted just to get into that a bit. And so a podcast like this, we talk about data, football, data performance. Engagement, all of these things, and I think it loses its meaning. And I think it'll be interesting to sort of get a sense of, from someone who's built businesses in this space, to just have a chat about what it is that actually is at the center of that. Business 'cause we're going, again, there's lots of people with lots of money who are looking at sort of data related, or it might be termed AI stuff now or whatever it is. It's driving so many bits of the, uh, sports industry. Can we just sort of go back to. The beginning because again, one of the stories that someone like me projects onto you is the betting markets and your start pinnacle. What were you doing there? Because I want to just talk about that because I think there's such an, an obvious link to get to where we are now.

Ted Knutson 4:20

Yeah, so just before Pinnacle like the year before I started doing data work and some, some programming work for some friends of mine that were magically gathering players, which, uh, sounds incredibly nerdy even now, even though the games like 32 years old. Um, and, um. 33. And basically they had had some success in gambling independently on American sports. So they had, because of that, they're like, oh, we could start to do more data work. We wanna be able to, you know, scrape the lines and figure out what the right money line is for this handicap and this total and sort of like equivalencies of, of. Numbers. So they were doing maths and they wanted somebody to help them out with some of that. Then the US gambling market completely changed in 2006. There was a thing called UGA that hit and we basically couldn't independently do what we were doing anymore. We happened to know the owners of or managing director of Pinnacle and he's we've got space for you and we need to rebuild our product suite completely. From a US focused to an international focus now. I hadn't done any of this and, and neither had my partner. So it was a case where we went to work for somebody with, zero real experience, but they were willing to take a bet that we could figure this stuff out. And the first year that I worked at Pinnacle, we lost $6 million as a company. Having previously made, usually between 50 and a hundred I think, per year. But then by the time that I left eight years. After that, and they cut off 70% of their business in 2007, which is why they lost so much money. Time I left eight years after that the company was bigger than ever, and back to making sort of 50 to a hundred million a year despite not being that run and that well managed. Um, so that kind of gives you my pinnacle start, but I think the, the story of my career is not having any experience in a lot of different areas, but. People trusting me to figure things out endlessly and somehow in a very forced gum way, probably doing that repeatedly in a, in a successful manner sometimes completely unexpectedly.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 6:26

okay, so I'm not gonna let you off the hook on that, so what are, what are people seeing in you if that's been the thread? what do you think looking through their eyes, what is it that they're seeing? Because people don't make bets on anyone.

Ted Knutson 6:37

Yeah, I found, I found that surprising because it happened to me a lot. Um, but a willingness to, to take. Chances. but also to do it in a systematic way, allegedly, I'm pretty smart. That's, relative across lots of different tests, but then it's relative across the market. And then you, you read these things as CEO and you're like, oh, you should learn to delegate stuff to other people. Let hire smart people and just let them do things. But when it's your company, usually that's wrong. And, and, and that advice ends up being something that comes back to you and, and haunts you at times because you're like, oh. I'm uniquely good at a couple of these things that other people are simply not. And I didn't expect that to be the case. And it took, experience to learn that that was true. So I think with sports and data, I am very good at figuring stuff out. Not least because I'm, I'm one of the unusual people that are able to really combine understanding of the sport with a math C perspective.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 7:35

So there's a sort of realization that it is quite a useful realization, I think, to actually understand what you are really good at, isn't it?

Ted Knutson 7:42

Yeah. For everybody and, and, and hopefully what you're really good at also matches up with things that you're passionate about and that make you money. Like that's, that's like the real gold mine and personal advancement in your career.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 7:54

That whole, um, follow your passion thing has been evolved to No, don't do that. Find out what you're good at and then do more of that, and actually the passion will come. Subsequently, that's there's been a, a sense of a shift. 'cause it used to, the cliche used to be, to kids follow your passion, find what you love, and you'll, never work a day in your life. All of that actually, people are now saying yeah, no, don't do that. Work out what you're good at. It sounds like you did quite early.

Ted Knutson 8:23

I'm not sure that's true. I, I went from place to place. I end up in eight to 10 year stints of giant projects. And so Pinnacle, pinnacle was an eight year stint, probably would've been longer, but I got testicular cancer and kind of realized that working every weekend when I had young kids was a particularly bad idea or was informed by my ex-wife, which is. Also very important, should listen. Um, and then, stats bomb was another kind of eight to 10 year stint, and now I'm in whatever's next.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 8:51

So stats bomb. again, it's one of those, and you, you, I'll point people and I have already to your you wrote your own sort of origin story on your blog, which I absolutely loved by the way, and the, the sort of creation of stats bomb and people can go to that. But again, looking at it from, what you might call the Brentford experiment. Your role and stats bomb's role within that and there's been books written about it. I'm sure there's people doing PhDs about, the BRENTFORD method. All of these things that are within that. But just talk, let's just talk about stats Bomb. So you started STAs Bomb, what was it and what was there a moment where it became. Something more than you anticipated it. It grew.

Ted Knutson 9:34

Originally it was a blog, like back when we had blogs and,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 9:38

I miss blogs. Don't you miss blogs?

Ted Knutson 9:40

I have new newsletters now, which are blogs that end up in people's email, and you don't have to drag them to your blog every day. You just put things in front of them. So it's, it's the same but different. As you know, you have a, a very busy, popular newsletters. In fact, you titled the newsletter, the Ted Knutson question, which I think is only slightly better than the Ted Knutson problem. Which, which is what I read it as first, but it could be both. Um, anyway, back to dad's bum. It's weird when people write about you without having interacted with you. That's a particularly strange space, but I guess if

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 10:10

I was very conscious of that, by the way. And I thought I, I was really uming and ing about doing that, but I thought, no, let's be specific. 'cause you, you were, again, you were in the story in the podcast last week. Again, it's you, but it's also what you represent. But we'll talk about that in a minute. Sorry, I interrupted you.

Ted Knutson 10:27

No, not at all. No, I think it's, it's good. I think this is a meta discussion around like the strangeness of having impacts on things when like you're slightly peripheral at the same time. Um, and, and stats Mom was a little bit of that. It was it was a place to just publish writing and then it was trying to aggregate smart people into a place to make it more popular because I felt like this was something I was incredibly passionate about. In fact, years before. Many years before Stats Bomb was founded, I was like toodling away in the mid two thousands about collecting soccer data. 'cause I was, I loved the sport. I became a fan in 1998, which was very late. We didn't have soccer where I grew up in the United States, which tells you how much that's changed. Um, and then, yeah, I became a, a place where smart people could write about football analytics and a little bit of cricket analytics and a little bit of basketball analytics. And then eventually it just became. Football all the time. And that was a platform for me getting hired by some representatives of SK Fabricas to do some analysis when he was coming back to England as to, how could they help better sell him into the market again, 'cause he was still really good. And then that turned into a meeting with a guy named Matthew Benni who I'm sure you have talked about many times. Um, but it was about how do we view the game from a more analytical perspective, because this had happened in baseball and it was happening in basketball. How do we find talent in a way that is repeatable but more objective than simple scouting reports and, and worldwide talent? Then how do we quantify what's happening on a football pitch and make it so that we can all talk from the same page as opposed to someone else being a guru here and then this guru over here. And can we find ways to like really raise our understanding of what's happening on the pitch, but then also make it so that everyone can have an informed conversation from the coaches to the scouts, to the owners, to whomever.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 12:17

I was talking to someone who was I talking to? So Ed Smith, the cricketer, you know, It's 20 years. I think Moneyball was published in the UK and Ed wrote the, the forward to that initial thing and we were talking about what's, what's happened. But I Ima I imagine that the early sort of reception to. The data story was very framed by Moneyball. Was it? Was that I can imagine headlines, this is doing a Moneyball was one of the things that pe you don't hear that quite as much anymore 'cause it's I guess it's 20 years old.

Ted Knutson 12:50

Yeah, it's, it's phased a little bit. I've been lucky enough to, to meet the, the subject of that book and he like things in there that he said were, were very true. Many of the, the stories that seemed like they're impossible or simply things that came out of his mouth. So that was pretty awesome. But, um. What was interesting about the reception in the uk, especially when I just started writing and was not affiliated with the teams, was like the media fucking hated it. Like they, the people who were involved in the media, they're just like, this is ridiculous. You don't have any, any background in this. This is dumb. And I'm like, man, I, I watch more football than anybody. Like when I was trading. The sport, like watching seven games a week is nuts. And you're in your, your mom's basement you've never met a girl. It's I got three kids and my wife beautiful and whatever. But it's, it's just a constant thing, right? And, I'm six foot two and was a pretty decent athlete and like none of these people would say the shit to my face. Or, or if they are like, those are pretty scary people you wouldn't wanna meet in the first place. But going back to it, like a lot of the media just hated the idea that an outsider could come in with useful, interesting ideas. Continually state, predictable and testable hypotheses. Then plenty of times they'd be wrong, but an awful lot of times they were right and, and right in ways that were unexpected. And I think that that at first met mass rejection and then eventually had to be absorbed into the media landscape because the football team started doing it because they want better information. And the, the decisions they were making went from, 2 million to 10 million to 50 million. When you're betting 50 million on a player, working out like you need to have all of the information you possibly can, and that's really what sports data is.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 14:35

Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a sort of, I can absolutely remember and conceit, and I think it still happens now. There's a, there's a prejudice against. Again, data is a word that has almost lost its meaning, isn't it? But there's a binary there that people want to frame it in terms of artists versus engineers or art, these science. And there there's a sort of the promise of certainty. And one of the things I find interesting about when it then transposes into a sort of investment question at a, at a more macro level in terms of buying companies and whatever, there is still that. Element. Trying to, trying to work out what the intangible is and trying to identify can you measure it, can you not? Does it matter? Those, those types of questions are really quite embedded, but if you're picking a constituency of people who were gonna be against your story, then the football media in the UK are gonna be a pretty good, a pretty good set I would've thought.

Ted Knutson 15:29

And I, I found this out after I left Brentford. I was at Brentford for a couple of seasons and the, the project installed a little bit and I wanted to continue on because I felt like I hadn't nearly tapped the end of what could be done. So I, somebody got in touch with me and I had a radio interview on five live with, jermaine Genus and, and Darren Fletcher, and I was like, oh, this is great. They've got some success about the story. The Brentford thing looks good, and they just vilified me and, and picked me to bit. And I was like, wow, this was okay. I, I guess we're still here. And, and oh, and, and the other thing is I, I huge respect for Michael Calvin. Like big fan of Michael Calvin's work. And and he wrote a book, um. That I ended up in and I was really excited. I, I like literally was ready to buy this on, on on release day and one of the lawyers for Matthew at, at Brentford was like, Hey, have you looked at Michael Calvin's books? Not yet, but I'm super excited about it. And he's be careful 'cause you're in there and I think that it might be not in the light that you're expecting. And I was like, okay, this is unusual. Had again, never been contacted about this. And it was something like, he was leaning on a goalpost at training at Brentford, which is the equivalent, the footballing equivalent of Mooning the Queen. And I was like, wow. Like first of all, I'm not big on the royalty thing, but that feels like a, a pretty important I don't know the etiquette in this country, but second of all, like I was watching set peace training, which is one of my jobs. And, and I was looking at, were we doing the, the goal were we, were we covering the keepers eyesight very well or not? It was literally part of it. And this turns into something that becomes a, a, a thing that, label and yeah, tar and feather me. So that's, it's been an interesting ride. Thankfully in my case, I guess things worked out pretty well, but you have to build a very thick skin very quickly if you come to the notice of the media. Um, and media doesn't talk to me very often, which is again, unusual 'cause I'm very present and I'm almost certain that I'm literally the person in the world that has talked the most about his thoughts about football. And I've written it. I've got like probably a million words of writing about my thoughts on football plus the podcast plus everything else. And no one else that runs football teams has that level of. Of sort of information that they've divulged about how they think about the game, um, which is really freakish. And maybe that's why they don't feel they need to talk to me about it. They could just talk about it.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 18:03

Oh, I think, I think as a journalist, I think that's a badge of honor because I think what it's saying is that they don't want you when you sit down, most of the time, I think people want to control the conversation. They want to know what you are gonna say, and they want to be able to have to response to it. There's a, and this is a complete tangent, but there was a really interesting bit of research with by, um, the BBC's coverage of economics during the sort of financial crisis, and one of the big standout conclusions was that Journalists move a conversation away from the specific detail. 'cause it's complicated into territory that is easier and that, that is normally politics. So you then politicize economics in a way. And so it's quite a, and you then start, when you see that, you start to say, okay, yeah, that's, I think really there's a truth there. And then the implication of that is that you leave the data question, you leave the, the, the hard bit. To one side and you start to get into sort of culture war, binary, foreign against, you can turn anything into a sort of foreign against question. And I think that's a inherent problem in journalism. So I, that's a very long way of saying, I think the problem is there's not yours and it, it's, it's interesting that it's still happens. I think, um, football is like a, is a weird world football people, I love that phrase. It's, you're inside or you're not.

Ted Knutson 19:25

I think, I think these days I have to be considered a, a proper football man. I've been around too long,

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 19:31

Yeah.

Ted Knutson 19:31

but Matthew Matthew's sort of that way too. Matthew's been around for ages, very successful. Always gonna be an outsider. Like partly 'cause he likes it that way. And, and people, person we're talking about is Matthew Benham, who's the owner of, of B Brentford. Um, and he's very quotable. He doesn't generally get up and do many quotes, but when he does, he's fascinating and funny and, and obviously he was very early to this stuff and has been quite successful in what he's done.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 19:55

There is also, both him and Tony. I live in Brighton and I've said, many times that my mates real Brighton fans, their pub, pub chat has gone downhill, since the Tony Blue era. They've just talk about data, but um. Both of them. You've got, and yourself, you've got that betting hinterland, which people don't know much about beyond, a top line. And so they, they think that and suspect that you have deeper knowledge and there is something in your betting background that is revealed truths that are now being played out. I don't know whether that's true, but I think that's the story that associates. With yourself. Benham Bloom. I think there's, and you can tell me whether there's any truth in it or not.

Ted Knutson 20:43

So I think when I came back outta Stats bomb, um, I, I started writing the transfer flow and attached to the transfer flow is a thing called variance bedding. Um. And people are like, why would you cover betting? That's horrible. And I was like, first of all, 'cause I've been doing it for a long time. But second of all, 'cause I find it an interesting experiment that you can test your hypothesis against, test your, test your ideas about, and then get very quick, turnarounds around it because, there's 38 matches in, in a season. And. Then they're like okay, isn't that a bad thing? And I was like, first of all, I wanted to help teach people how to bet smarter, which I think actually is a good thing. And as like in Stats bomb, we wanted to make people smarter about their understanding about football. So like it's not actually very far apart from each other. And I like the education part of it. I like the testing of ideas. So that's the exact same thing as what these gentlemen have. And it's the same thing you have in in the financial markets as well. I have a theory, I wanna test that theory. How do I test that theory? What are the different ways that we can test that theory? Like which bets might we make? So there's a war going on in the Middle East right now, which ways might we profit on this? Given that the United States closed off the state of the Strait of ous and it's the exact same concept. So you're like, okay, I don't believe that this coach is very good, or I believe this coach is much better than everybody else seems to think. And I think that he is gonna get them playing in a style that is, is very useful for helping to win football matches. And, I can bet on that as long as the odds are better than, than I'm, anticipating them to be.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 22:09

Hmm.

Ted Knutson 22:09

So we did that. And transfers are the same thing. They're just with humans and they have a longer cycle. So transfers are bets on whether or not this player is better or worse than the market expects them to be. Whether we can improve them in ways that you might not expect or have available to you at other clubs. And then if we sell them on, great. If they do great at our club, great, but sometimes they're not gonna work out. But if they're working out at a 60 or 70% rate as opposed to a 50 or 45% rate, like you have a big advantage in the market. And that's what, what happened pretty consistently in the football space.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 22:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned, you did, but Billy Bean obviously was the subject of, of money, but I interviewed him, around, I can't remember when it was two th in the two thousands. And we've talked about betting, but there's the sort of financialization, he talked about arbitrage a lot, and it was a sort of, that as a concept being applied to sport and to human beings and all of that. And again, he was, that was the pushback initially on, on Moneyball. But one of the. One of the questions around the sort of poly market we're in this prediction markets moment, is that collision, isn't it? Between the financialization of everything with. Whatever bit of life we choose to put into the market, whether it's football, whether it's, and again, transfers. You can see it's analogous with all of this stuff in terms of your thinking in bets and your thinking in, in percentages. Um, which again is a sort of, it's a really interesting way of thinking. Most people don't want to think that way. They want to. Not have to go and do they think it's about maths, so they don't wanna start to think of their lives in that way.

Ted Knutson 23:54

We're constantly making those calculations. Constantly making the, can I make this train? Is it safe to cross the road right now? If I were to cross the road, even though there's no, green man there, is it gonna be dangerous for me or am I gonna be fine? You're doing this all the time, whether you realize it or not, like this is just a systematized way of doing it. And some people hate it and I get that, but it's a really useful way to think about things.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 24:17

It is, do you think that the ability to think in that way or talking that way is useful in conversations with. In a business context. So you've got this, you know, this is a sports business conversation and quite often those two words conflict and people, you get, you go into tribes, so I think there's a sort of, there's a layer and a group of people who probably are able to articulate what we're talking about to the business side in a language they want to hear. They They want to listen. To someone who has analyzed sport in that way. It's quite, and that's the sports side don't want that. It mixed up in that is tradition and romance and what sport's for and the soul of sport. And I've seen, people write books about this, but there's a whole bit in the middle. I think there's a sort of people who are able to articulate both.

Ted Knutson 25:08

In the early days of sports analytics, the translator role was constantly something that was mentioned. And, and some people are very incapable of doing this. Like you get academics who come over and they don't understand sport well enough, but they're like, this is what the data says. And you're like, Ooh you're gonna get us in trouble like this. This is not credible. And also this is a bad way to go about it. Um, and it actually is super valuable. And it's not just in sport, but like that's, that's the most common thing that we're talking about right now. But being able to translate complex ideas like mathematics and why we think this into ways that are easily digestible is incredibly valuable no matter what arena that you happen to be in. And in sport in particular, like people who've been in a sport for 30 years and it's their life and you can't tell me. That you understand this better than I do. Like they have a real chip about them. And you would understand that because if it weren't sport, if you were, in marketing or in journalism or in politics, you'd be like, look, you're just some random outsider and I understand that this might be useful, but like I have a lot of knowledge too, and you're not trying to discredit their knowledge. And although sometimes you will, sometimes you'd be like. Actually what you think is wrong, and we need to have an honest conversation about this for why that's true. But what you're trying to do is give them better information to make better decisions, and that's really what it's about. And once your decisions get to a certain level, you are, you're making pretty dramatic mistakes. If you don't incorporate all available information that is useful to you. The filtering of that information is really important as well. And sometimes people are bad at filtering, oh, this coach says that he really likes him, so we we're gonna take a look at him and maybe we'll hire him. What credibility is that whatsoever? Like they might've just played on the same team. They might've gone through their license together. Who knows? Coach hiring was one of the. Worst things that I ever saw and, and that that was actually a thing that we did regularly at Stats Bomb was one of the few consulting things that we would do. We'd be like, Hey, tell us what type of coach you want, and then we'll go out into the market and research this and we understand tactics and we can find those styles. But that was pretty disastrous, and that's an area that definitely intersects business with sport and takes the coach element out of it. It's what type of coach are you looking for? Because if you get this wrong and you have to change your whole squad over. That's a huge bill that you have to pay or you have to pay off the coach and find a new coach, which also has a pretty big bill.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 27:24

And labels get attached to coaches. Coaches carry the story now, don't they? Managers carry the story of this in rugby, actually, Steve Wick is, is a data, he makes data led decisions and, and that's an accusation. It's not a compliment. People are saying he's,, he's inflexible. So the binary is a, again, you get to a engineer, artist type binary, and the manager in football carries that story a lot of the time. I think you've got the club. So Brentford is a a great example where I'm a Spurs fan, Thomas Frank comes to Spurs and we are saying okay, unpick this and it's not worked. And one of the conclusions was, no, Brentford is a machine. And Frank was just part of that machine, which was built over time and now it's still, Brentford is still doing well despite Frank leaving. So there's a, a question there, which I don't. I dunno the answer to, but it, I can see myself being sucked into a narrative.

Ted Knutson 28:22

I think Thomas is a pretty good coach, to be honest with you, but Spurs are a pretty weird vortex of anti football right now. And injuries like just incessant injuries. That's a tough thing for coaches to overcome, but you have to build a, a coherent squad and that's not what's happened at Spurs over the last kind of three, four years. So inheriting, that's a tough one, but, presumably he got paid for, for his, his mistake in going to Spurs. 'cause it's not just been Thomas Frank that didn't succeed. It's been a lot of people that are not succeeding. And, and so you're like, is it, is it a one person problem or is it a, a system that they're part of? And that's not to say that they haven't done better at trying to hire smarter people to be involved in it, but it takes a long time to turn over a football team, and that's where you have to be really careful about making big mistakes. And if you can avoid those on a regular basis, like you'll be ahead of most of the, the sport.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 29:11

So what we, I think we get now to the, what I call the Ted Knutson story, and it is. How portable these systems are. So again, it worked here. Can it work there? then There's the women's question, which is the crux question, which I talked to Beck, um, about last week, which is, is that approach portable into that world? Is there enough data in the women's game to be able to apply what do we call it, a brentford type approach?

Ted Knutson 29:42

I think that, there is data my company that I founded and then sold collected a lot of it. And so dating and women's sport exists and it's, it's the same quality as the men's sport, football as football. Um. So that's useful. But I think the bigger question about women's football is simply professionalizing it. So many people in the women's game are there because they were told by the men's side like, Hey, go over there, run the women's side and don't cause any problems. That's, and, and this is your budget. Don't screw it up. But if you screw it up, we'll fire you. We'll get somebody else. But the, the level of quality in that versus men's football is like a huge gulf right now, despite the fact that the product on the pitch is not, the product on the pitch is better than it's ever been. It looks really good. Um, and so I, I find that intriguing at least at the very top levels, right? Um, so simply by. Putting better quality management in place from the commercial side, from the marketing side, from the ticketing side, and then from hopefully the coaching and, and the, the football side. Like you're gonna have a very large gap across most of the women's football industry right now. And so you get an early mover. Benefit from doing that. So the data is an ancillary question and really secondary to simply professionalizing what is running that team or those teams. Um, and, and that's what Becks has created in Crux. I've been a long time fan of women's football since 1999. The Women's World Cup in the United States. I watched more Women's United States matches than I did men's from the period that I became a football fan. 'cause they were better. And because they were winning more, so they were in more like long-term quality matches in tournaments. And then at Stats Bomb, we started giving away women's data very early. We gave it away to all of the big leagues for free to each of the teams inside of those not thinking that it was a something that would grow into a profitable business, which it eventually did, but much more. So this is the right thing to do, and women's football has been left behind for many, many years. We want to help push that forward, and so that's what we did at Sasone.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 31:48

So the, my question is completely wrong then in terms of the, the actual, we talked about arbitrage. There is more in the WSL or European leagues in women's football. There would be in men's football, there is, there is a greater both need for a more, what do you call it, scientific approach. And it all comes back to investment, doesn't it, in the end? And whether people think that there's a return on investment in the women's game. So the skepticism around women's football is it's more about actually, am I gonna get a return

Ted Knutson 32:20

Sure. I, I think that's really important. And when, when you look at what has happened. In the U AFA revenues and the F-A-W-S-L revenues and the NWSL revenues, what you can see is a very dramatic sort of curve that's sloping upwards that has not existed in men's football for a long time. If you got early in a primary league team, you were able to. Obtain it then, and you're able to stick around, you would've gotten those returns, right? You, you could go from something that you got for, 200 million or 500 million into something that, was bought into for, two, five, 6 billion, right? Or spurs for what they've got. And, and at women's football you were at the tiniest start of that curve. But we know that looking at the other parts that have had success so far. It is possible and there is a lot of interest. And we had a, we had a player at Montpelier who just came back from pregnancy and we didn't get to take over that team until October 1st, so we didn't get to involved in any of the transfer window up until this the winter window. So we have been inherited and doing our best with it. But she's been a legend of that club and she's very impressive. Um, we were talking about the kind of commercial opportunities that she could have. I said, imagine one of the men's players that are legends inside of a club, being out there advertising for nappies. It, it would never happen. It's an impossibility. No one would ever do that, even if he was like very excited to be a dad and wanted to be, a front runner and football dads. But as someone who is a legend inside the women's game, like you can have a baby, you can come back and potentially play again at a high level. And then you can also have all of these campaigns that advertisers would love to be involved in, but have never had the opportunity to do

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 33:59

yeah. Yeah. We had um, a guy who was the head of Unilever's. It's Rex Owner shore and we're talking about the World Cup. This was last week. You've got the World Cup there and they have spent, a hundred million maybe. but the Women's World Cup is a central part of it, but it was quite interesting listening to one of the biggest spenders in marketing in the world, and how bullish they are about women's football. And I think you look at the, sort of the roster of brands that are gathering around the WSL. Even, you, you, you're talking top of the shop, nike, Mercedes-Benz, so it's like a, it is a really big opportunity and again, it talks to that, what is it? And it's a market. Is it a marketing return? Is it a marketing investment return initially, at least compared to the men's game, which is always driven by media rights. And that's what the story has been. So it's, again, it's,

Ted Knutson 34:44

that's a big portion of it. But think of, think about the disparity in who shows up, right? Like a Women's England team. Versus a Men's England team, entirely different crowd, like totally, totally different. Their family's there. It looks much more like the US demographics, which is what everybody wants to have, right? You want lush, sort of family oriented sport. You want the young people there that you know English men's football is desperately worried about their fans aging out. And there's so much competition, but if you're able to bring a family to the stadium, like that's really exciting and that's where women's football is right now. And it's at the nascent stage, but that's like the best time to invest in something. As long as, you can, you can wait for the, the returns and the success to come and you see the smoke, which is what we have seen in other spaces. So that's why I was really excited to, to be part of it. It is the right thing to do, but it's also the right place to invest right now.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 35:35

And just finally on it, that that trading model, the player trading model. Buy low, find, valuable young players. Trade them up, sell them. Does that model work I was talking to Becks about the sort of potential fragility of squads and how Rosen Guard are. up and down in the league, and it might be about the sale of one or two players in their team compared to a sort bigger squads, deeper benches in, in men's football. Can you see that as a, as a challenge or man trying to manage that as a challenge?

Ted Knutson 36:07

I think that we're still learning, and I'm still very ignorant and dumb in that space, so it's hard for me to, to put a, a stake down and say, this is definitely how it's gonna work. I think looking at the Swedish teams, um, Rosen Guard didn't finish well last year after having been like, I think they set the points record the, the year before, which is dramatic. Um, but every single time that the Swedish teams do really well, like they get rated from outside because the richer teams look at it, all the Swedes speak, speak English. They're also, tend to be very fit. They have a long, successful, proud history of women's football. In that league you can expect that that cycle's probably gonna continue because there are really good reasons why, um, teams outside of Sweden are happy to buy the best players and then you have to restock. But what that does is that also promotes investment in young players in Sweden because you know that those will eventually be sold on. And so it, it is a pretty virtuous cycle as long as women's football continues to grow and, and the money continues to improve.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 37:02

Okay. Let's talk about you've built and sold a successful data business you know, so that's bomb. Sold it to Hule. There's a few questions there. What did you learn in that process? What did, there's a, there's a question that runs through this podcast is what does the money want? And it's, a lot of it is gathering and looking at sport. Some of it wants to buy teams, got private equity groups wanting to buy teams or invest in, product new ip. But then there's a lot of money going into your world or agencies, consultancies, but also they like certain stories. What did you learn from the whole process of building a business and then selling it?

Ted Knutson 37:39

Timing is always hard and, and we've seen this many different times. I would, I would say Stat DNA is the company that's bought by Arsenal. They're broadly bought for quite a small amount. They existed and they were ahead of us by, by a lot in what they did privately inside of Arsenal. And Jason Rosenwald tells stories about how. They were taking like most of the overnight bandwidth in the early internet in Cambodia to get video to then be able to code up those games and, and send it back to Arsenal. Not that they s not that Arsenal successfully used it. 'cause Vanger was there at the time and like the, the revolution hadn't happened there like it would have with Liverpool. When, when Edwards and, and Graham were sitting over the top of that. Um. So we were successful because we had the right timing. I came out of brentford, started Stats Bomb, basically the end of 2016. Start of 2017. And we had early success. I think we sold our front end to six teams in the first year, which is okay. It's not great. And, and we, we bootstrapped all of that. And then we started to go after the data market because we thought that it could be done better and we were told that we were insane. And, and maybe we were, um, but in the football space, um, the soccer football space, it worked out really well. The exact same thing with a much better product happened in American football for us. And the year that we sold to huddle, we didn't really get credit for any of our American football revenue. We almost spun it out, sold it off to somebody else, and we had six teams that were taking the American football data. We, we had, and I will do, I'll present this at our, our transfer flow conference on May 22nd, but. We had the most awesome product that I think I've ever seen in the space. And I say this as somebody who's very experienced in the space, not just because I'm proud of it, because like we really, really did create something special. You get frame by frame data references for, speed acceleration. Like you can actually attach all of that to frame precise bits in the tracking data with, this player released the ball at this moment, so then we can create this other layered set of data that couldn't possibly exist elsewhere. And we were gonna do that for soccer, but we were one year early. One year wrong because we had six in the first year. Then huddle took a slightly worse product with basically the same thing, and they had 67 of 70 of the top teams one year after it was sold. Now, part of that's a distribution product. Problem. But part of it is if you just wait long enough, you are gonna crack that. And, and we did. We just didn't have the time and the grace to do it, if you're a startup founder and an entrepreneur, timing is incredibly hard. And it's never really in your favor unless you get lucky. And so we got lucky with the soccer side of it. And then we did not get lucky with the American football side.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 40:13

so it's a company like Huddle has now bought several other companies as well. Um, do I, I wondering what happens to the market, what consolidation does in that particular. Bit of the market. 'cause normally it's not a boon to innovation. It's a, it's actually the opposite. There's tends to be a coming together, a ju a move to the middle because just organizationally that's easier to do. Is that, do you see that happening? And like all markets there are gonna be. People on the sidelines or on the on the margins who are, who are gonna make the next big play.

Ted Knutson 40:48

Huddle. you've got Huddle, you've got teamworks, and you have Catapult as like the three main aggregators of businesses Catapult less. So I think because they probably have less money behind them. Teamworks have also scooped up a bunch of very good companies that they're making into like full sport products. And then they want to be across the whole of the sport landscape when many of these small companies are sports specific initially. So that's what you're seeing and, and in some cases it feels like the teams are allowing themselves to slowly be boiled in that they're making decisions around video rights that are not conducive to their future. Cash flows. Yes, we want video rights money right now and we wanna protect it, and we don't want anybody else to be able to do X, Y, Z, so we're gonna do this. But then you need the innovation because otherwise the people that capture the video rights and the SaaS and the data rights, they just continue to raise prices until suddenly you've paid two or three times what you could, if there was comp competition inside of that market. But the teams and, and the leagues are the ones that control those rights. So it's a, it's a pretty interesting problem. And in some cases I think that they're making decisions that are not good for their future selves, but their current money looks fine and somebody else gets to keep their job 'cause of it. Um, the aggregation, as you say, is always a problem inside of certain markets, but also who knows what it looks like post ai, like things are changing so fast right now and AI used to be a snake oil word that was garbage because the people selling it weren't actually AI and it was often bad machine learning black boxes, but they can sell to people that don't understand what's going on now. AI helps you do a lot of your work and probably can create a lot of automation inside of it as long with clarity as to what's actually going on, which I think is a, a very different space than it would've been five, seven years ago.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 42:32

Does it change the product or does it make it more efficient and cost effective and, and all those things, but is there something, will it do anything fundamental to that?

Ted Knutson 42:42

You, you can collect a lot more data and you can save a lot of the, the boring stuff to be automated by ai. It makes, so every company can also spin up their front end with some level of. Quickness, but things will break on you that you don't expect, and that's always a little bit harder. It's the gap between I can create something custom pretty quickly and it's okay. Versus I need this to be nine nines of, or five nines of reliability and it needs to be here exactly the moment that my coach needs it for me. And that's a very different space. If you have to have thing on his desk at 9:00 AM. The next day or two days later, and you can't miss that. And you continually have reasons why that gets screwed up. Maybe you don't want that level of stress in your life. So there's still a need for these types of companies, and AI will simply power both new data, but then also allow them to have potentially cost savings or just human savings.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 43:34

And the, and again, the question you've, I'm sure been asked lots of times, but from the outside it's trying to work out where the, when everyone's got the same data, when everyone is doing the same thing, the story, the Moneyball story is all about difference, wasn't it? And differentiation in the market. As that smooths, I, I'm trying to work out what actually the air, where the edge is and where the, the points of competition are. I'd be much richer if I could answer this question, but do, do, is that still a valid question?

Ted Knutson 44:02

There are always market inefficiencies. Basically the initial market inefficiency that's been found in the the Premier League is they used to play old players a bunch, and now they pay a bunch to young players. But those young players have uncertain futures and so now they're paying big amounts of money. Risk for, hopefully they get a couple of spikes for world class players. So that's shifted. If you had older players, you could get on cheaper contracts and more flexible contracts then that becomes the new Moneyball arbitrage. But the big thing that happens, so there's three layers in sports data sort of application and changing of a sport. The first layer is always, can we find better players for less? That one because. Player salaries and transfer fees make up so much of any budget in any sport. That's the first area of arbitrage, as you say, or, or just searching for efficiency. The second one is, can we find better ways to play this sport? And that is baseball. Can we create pitchers that throw harder? Can we hit more home runs in basketball? Three points dunks. Can we find styles that are more efficient? Can we find coaches that are able to coach these more efficient styles Right now in, in football. Despite the fact that it's taken 10 years of my, my work, um, and some other people's work as well, to crack the set pieces that this is really useful and important. It finally happened and people are complaining about that, but they used to complain about tiki talka being boring too, so they'll just complain about whatever the new thing is. The last layer of thing you're talking about, I think, which is can we create better players with science and technology and. Can we take the players we currently have once the market becomes efficient and then improve them? And that's really just back to coaching. It's just coaching. Using better tools and better logic and better data.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 45:42

we had a, an AI event. Just before Christmas, again, one of the issues there was what are people buying and selling now? And they probably don't quite know what they're giving away. Some of it in sport is always bundled into a sponsorship relationship. So Google and Microsoft and, will do Premier League type deals. And, and within that you start to see, okay, they're gonna use copilot and they're essentially devolving the function of the, the tech bit to the. Third parties for a generation, and, we can then argue the toss about whether that's a good or bad thing. Now, one of the, one of the issues is what ai, what, what a deal in includes now and what, what is the value proposition of a business? So you think, for example, football club, it could be just one use case. Could be a sort of, it's a lovely robotics. Baseline for AI to learn about how, fit. Human beings run around and then you start to, so there's no way of pricing that partic potentially, but you can start to see. I'm wondering if that just the AI moment creates a real inability to work out or to value what a business is now because so much of it is. Future value about where its its relationship to whatever AI evolves into to becoming.

Ted Knutson 47:00

Correct, and I think that's where distribution becomes the most important factor. If you have distribution or you can build good distribution, that's something that has returns forever. Like in the thing that sport has. Is it has great distribution. So I think that when you're looking at, at valuations and things around the businesses, it's confusing 'cause you don't know what's gonna be automated. I'm the type of person that's optimistic about this stuff. I think that humans with tools do better than any other time and, and there are leaps of logic and, and insight that humans. Generally have when using the tools that they wouldn't have otherwise. And I, I have a long history of doing this in the gambling space and then now in the football space. So I'm optimistic and not pessimistic about the influence that this will have. I could turn out to be wrong, but what's the point in being pessimistic anyway? Because if it's all gonna go to shit you've just had another 3, 4, 5 years of thinking it's gonna go to shit before it actually did. Why would you do that to yourself? I, I'm quite optimistic about it, but. Distribution remains the most important thing that you can get if you want to sell things. And sport has great distribution and it has loyal fans and has passionate people. Now, finding the connection between those two is probably the really interesting space. I always thought Power BI or um. Or Tableau should have gotten really in touch with like full football leagues and done great visualizations that is Hey, you can make your business visualizations look like these awesome sport visualizations and we'll teach you how to do it and it's gonna, and your, your owners or your boss is gonna be impressed because you're providing beautiful things for them to then analyze stuff X, Y, Z. But I couldn't quite get Microsoft to listen to that, so it didn't happen.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 48:38

Just a, I mean you mentioned a conference there 'cause I'm now I'm, I find it really interesting you've, you've gone full circle to back to content. Is that, am I, I'm just reading what you know, the transfer flow is. So you've got a newsletter, you've got a podcast, and you mentioned a, an upcoming conference. Let's talk, talk to me about that. What's the, where are you now and is this just something you've wanted to do for a while and you, you've got the opportunity to do it?

Ted Knutson 49:02

So I founded the Stats Bone Conference at, at the. Hmm. The disagreement amongst my, my managing team, I was like, no, we should do this. It's a big deal. And then it ended up being the best day of, of the calendar year where we got a bunch of people in the room that were our customers, but also like really smart people doing talks on stage. And it was a, a great networking event and it was something that was like really important or required, but we would, we would leave it open to tickets so that people who were interested in the space from the outside could also just come and be part of it. And then my company was acquired. And so I wasn't really that comfortable in that space or welcome in that space anymore. Um, and. The transfer flow is a different thing. So we, we built something for fans knowing that transfers are the most valuable kind of interesting content that you can do. But no one has the credibility that we do. Like my, my main co-writer, Kim and I have both worked inside of football and so we've been talking about the football space for a couple years and haven't done this actual job. Um, then it became. Alright, so how can I combine these two interesting things? And so we have this, this weird platypus of a conference, I would say, but it could be great. Which is that, which is that the first half of the day? Like we're doing it starting at 1230 so everybody gets their own lunch. 'cause we're doing it on, on, on, on the cheap. But 1230 to to five 30. We're doing an industry conference. So it's a half day of industry conference. We're gonna have really. It talks about business of football, but also talks about the future of football. I'm gonna give one of my own conversations. Hendrick Elta, who is one of the architects of ac Milan's sort of comeback title will be there. He's got a long history inside of football as well. So we've got, five hours of that and a little bit of networking time and people can show up. And then we've got an evening session, and the evening session is, is, is cheaper and it's for fans and it's basically show up. Patrick and I are gonna do two of our most successful. Pieces of content, which is we're gonna rebuild two of the big teams in the evening live podcasts on stage effectively. And then we're gonna do goofy stuff that we enjoy doing. I might read my, my favorite children's book and a funny, funny voice because that came up some point as an idea that we could do on stage. And, and I think that we're actually gonna do it. Um. You have the freedom to goof around and have fun, and that's like selling your business as painful as it might be, buys you a bit of freedom and a bit of ability to do fun stuff like that. So that's why the conference exists partly to network and, and fill this need for something that I wanted to, to have happen, um, partly to, to fill this space for somebody that I love being on stage or on microphone with, that we do it on a weekly basis and now we're just gonna do it in person.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 51:37

And where's it gonna be?

Ted Knutson 51:38

Central London May 22nd.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 51:40

Okay. Um, it's weird that the transfer, we had David Arnstein on and I talked to him about this, but also, you got the Fabio there. You've, you've got, it's a tr transfers are a really, the way in which that's become such a media platform is, I suppose it makes sense, but I'm just trying to think what it's about. What are we. What's the need there? It's about hope. Is it

Ted Knutson 52:03

It's about hope and optimism. Absolutely hope and optimism, and that things might be better in the future.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 52:09

Yeah. Yeah.

Ted Knutson 52:10

And I think that's, that's a, a key underlying thing for, for the world, no matter what time period you're in, but particularly now. And so football fans need something to be optimistic about and when their team is terrible, that's especially true.

Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner 52:23

Whatcha talking to a Spurs fan? I'm, I'm, I'm lapping this up. Okay. Listen. Ted, thanks so much for your time. Really enjoyed talking to you, and as I say, I, it was something I've been long wanting to do for a long time, so I'm really pleased we we got to do it. But good luck with the with the event and I'll point people in your direction.

Ted Knutson 52:41

Thank you for, for the, the interview and the time, and I've been reading your newsletter off and on for quite a long time, so nice to, nice to show up.