Try free for 30 days
-
Smart Money
- The Fall and Rise of Brentford FC
- Narrated by: Chris Naylor
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $21.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Expected Goals
- The Story of How Data Conquered Football and Changed the Game Forever
- By: Rory Smith
- Narrated by: Simon Darwen
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Football has always measured success by what you win, but only in the last twenty years have clubs started to think about how you win. Data has now suffused almost every aspect of how football is played, coached, scouted and consumed. But it’s not the algorithms or new metrics that have made this change, it’s the people behind them. This is the story of modern football’s great data revolution and the group of curious, entrepreneurial personalities who zealously believed in its potential to transform the game.
-
-
Awesome book
- By Anonymous User on 04-05-2023
-
Football Is a Numbers Game
- Pro Football Focus and How a Data-Driven Approach Shook Up the Sport
- By: Matthew Coller
- Narrated by: Matthew Coller
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 1980s, Neil Hornsby was one of very few National Football League fans in England. Never one to do anything casually, he began keeping hand-written score sheets of every game using his own tracking system. Soon he'd enlisted some fellow British super fans in his mission to take football information an extra layer deeper. This was the beginning of Pro Football Focus, an analytics company that now supplies data to all 32 NFL teams and every major broadcasting corporation. In Football Is a Numbers Game, Matthew Coller chronicles this improbable start-up tale with unprecedented access.
-
Billionaires' Row
- Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
- By: Katherine Clarke
- Narrated by: Kristen DiMercurio
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To look south and skyward from Central Park these days is to gaze upon a physical manifestation of tens of billions of dollars in global wealth: a series of soaring spires stretching from Park Avenue to Broadway. Known as Billionaires’ Row, this set of slender high-rise residences has transformed the skyline of New York City, thanks to developer-friendly policies and a seemingly endless gush of cash from tech, finance, and foreign oligarchs. And chances are most of us will never be invited to step inside.
-
Money Men
- A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth
- By: Dan McCrum
- Narrated by: Dan McCrum
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When investigative journalist Dan McCrum first came across Wirecard, the hot new tech company that looked poised to challenge Silicon Valley, it all looked a little too good to be true: offices were sprouting up all over the world, and they were reporting runaway growth. In the space of a few short years, the company had come from nowhere to overtake industry giants like Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank on the stock market. As McCrum began to dig deeper, he encountered a story stranger and more compelling than he could have imagined.
-
-
Great story, difficult narration
- By Anonymous User on 02-10-2023
-
The True Believer
- Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
- By: Eric Hoffer
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.
-
-
Excellently written
- By Siren on 04-01-2024
-
Winner Sells All
- Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets
- By: Jason Del Rey
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For years, Walmart and Amazon operated in separate spheres—one a massive brick-and-mortar retailer, the other an online giant. But in 2016, Walmart aggressively moved into the world of e-commerce, while Amazon made big bets in physical retail. The resulting rivalry is a bare-knuckle power struggle as each titan tries to outmaneuver the other to become the biggest omnichannel retailer in the world. As the two megacorporations have consolidated power, troubling consequences have also emerged.
-
Expected Goals
- The Story of How Data Conquered Football and Changed the Game Forever
- By: Rory Smith
- Narrated by: Simon Darwen
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Football has always measured success by what you win, but only in the last twenty years have clubs started to think about how you win. Data has now suffused almost every aspect of how football is played, coached, scouted and consumed. But it’s not the algorithms or new metrics that have made this change, it’s the people behind them. This is the story of modern football’s great data revolution and the group of curious, entrepreneurial personalities who zealously believed in its potential to transform the game.
-
-
Awesome book
- By Anonymous User on 04-05-2023
-
Football Is a Numbers Game
- Pro Football Focus and How a Data-Driven Approach Shook Up the Sport
- By: Matthew Coller
- Narrated by: Matthew Coller
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 1980s, Neil Hornsby was one of very few National Football League fans in England. Never one to do anything casually, he began keeping hand-written score sheets of every game using his own tracking system. Soon he'd enlisted some fellow British super fans in his mission to take football information an extra layer deeper. This was the beginning of Pro Football Focus, an analytics company that now supplies data to all 32 NFL teams and every major broadcasting corporation. In Football Is a Numbers Game, Matthew Coller chronicles this improbable start-up tale with unprecedented access.
-
Billionaires' Row
- Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
- By: Katherine Clarke
- Narrated by: Kristen DiMercurio
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To look south and skyward from Central Park these days is to gaze upon a physical manifestation of tens of billions of dollars in global wealth: a series of soaring spires stretching from Park Avenue to Broadway. Known as Billionaires’ Row, this set of slender high-rise residences has transformed the skyline of New York City, thanks to developer-friendly policies and a seemingly endless gush of cash from tech, finance, and foreign oligarchs. And chances are most of us will never be invited to step inside.
-
Money Men
- A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth
- By: Dan McCrum
- Narrated by: Dan McCrum
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When investigative journalist Dan McCrum first came across Wirecard, the hot new tech company that looked poised to challenge Silicon Valley, it all looked a little too good to be true: offices were sprouting up all over the world, and they were reporting runaway growth. In the space of a few short years, the company had come from nowhere to overtake industry giants like Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank on the stock market. As McCrum began to dig deeper, he encountered a story stranger and more compelling than he could have imagined.
-
-
Great story, difficult narration
- By Anonymous User on 02-10-2023
-
The True Believer
- Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
- By: Eric Hoffer
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.
-
-
Excellently written
- By Siren on 04-01-2024
-
Winner Sells All
- Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets
- By: Jason Del Rey
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For years, Walmart and Amazon operated in separate spheres—one a massive brick-and-mortar retailer, the other an online giant. But in 2016, Walmart aggressively moved into the world of e-commerce, while Amazon made big bets in physical retail. The resulting rivalry is a bare-knuckle power struggle as each titan tries to outmaneuver the other to become the biggest omnichannel retailer in the world. As the two megacorporations have consolidated power, troubling consequences have also emerged.
Publisher's Summary
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. The next morning, they clambered into a white van which one of them would drive to training, stopping on the way for a bacon sandwich and cup of tea at a greasy spoon café.
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. They bumbled along until in 2005, fed up with trying to make a profit from a club with an ageing stadium in an unfashionable west London suburb, owner Ron Noades agreed to hand over the business to supporters on the condition they take over responsibility for their £5.5 million overdraft.
One of the fans, an Oxford University physics graduate called Matthew Benham, was making millions of pounds from professional gambling and threw in a £500,000 lifeline to help keep the club afloat. Initially, as a sort of academic challenge, he began figuring out if he could employ the mathematics which he used in beating the bookmakers to improve the club's performance on the pitch.
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.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.