The Brentford owner, Matthew Benham, whose club has been a pioneer in the use of analytics in football, says that he hates the term Moneyball being applied to his team because it is so often misused and misunderstood.

Benham also denied that he was obsessed with data – insisting that it was only one part of the package in running a football club – but acknowledged he felt the kicking he got from some sections of the media after sacking Marinus Dijkhuizen as manager may have been partly justified.

“We just didn’t get it right whatsoever in appointing a head coach,” Benham said. “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.”

Benham pointed out that Brentford’s lowly position of 20th in the Championship hadn’t been helped by having 10 first-team players out, five with long-term injuries, and he noted that his Danish club, Midtjylland, had won their first ever Superliga title in May and had won their first two Europa League games. But he admitted that while Brentford had been unlucky, Midtjylland had benefited from some luck too.

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“It would be very tempting to say that Midtjylland has gone well because of our genius but we have to be honest and say we have been quite lucky in some respects,” he added. “Most of the signings of the past 16 months have worked out and usually no matter how much research you do you get a couple of duff ones.

“We beat Southampton to qualify for the Europa League but we were pretty lucky there as well, even though we played a good game. When Ronald Koeman came out and said ‘the better team over the two legs lost’ everyone said, what a sore loser, but to be honest he was probably correct.”

In a wide-ranging and nuanced speech at the Matchbook Traders Conference at the Emirates Stadium, Benham also explained why he disliked the Moneyball term and addressed the limits of using data in football. After Brentford were introduced as a Moneyball club he said: “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.”

Benham said that statistics could be helpful when recruiting players – and explained why he would be wary of signing a striker who had scored 20 goals in a season from only 40 attempts on goal because they would be unlikely to sustain such a high conversion rate. But he stressed that context was always key.

“I used to be very sceptical about using individual stats for players,” he added. “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.”

Benham also joked that the media criticism of him in recent weeks maybe have been partly down to “karma” because of his strong views on certain journalists in the past. “To an extent I felt it had it coming,” he said. “In about 2008 I gave a presentation to a lot of staff at [his company] Smart Odds basically saying: ‘Don’t listen to football journalists they all talk shit.’ I used one journalist as a specific example. He wrote an article saying all these so-called-experts are saying this European player is really good, but I just saw him for the first time and actually he missed loads of chances and he’s shit. The player he was talking about was Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

“We all had a good laugh at this journalist’s expense. And to be fair he did a big article monstering me, saying I had blind faith in statistics and was proved to have been wrong of that. Part of me thinks: ‘Fuck you,’ but the other part of me thinks: ‘Fair enough.’

“And there’s one journalist who interviewed me for a book about four years ago, and in the book I talk at length about the unreliability of any maths model – and how I also believed in scouting with the eyes. And that same journalist said a few months ago that I have total faith in maths models and I don’t believe in the human element whatsoever. There’s not much you can do about that.”