Sleep coaches and a ‘table of justice’: Why high-flying Brentford are buzzing again
HAPPY CAMP: Brentford players celebrate after their League Cup penalty shoot-out win over West Bromwich Albion.
Brentford fans can look to history and a 1989 FA Cup quarter-final at Liverpool for inspiration as their side face Leicester City in the Fourth Round on Sunday, but it’s the fact the club is looking to make history by being modern which is really catching the eye of neutrals.
The late 80s was the era of terrace inflatables, a trend which randomly began with blow-up bananas at Manchester City but which was enthusiastically taken up by 7,000 Brentford fans as they held up inflatable bees at Anfield, having beaten City and Blackburn on their route to the last eight.
A Liverpool team inspired by Peter Beardsley and John Barnes, and with five Irishmen in the line-up, eventually won 4-0 despite a bright first half from the visitors and an agonising early miss from striker Richard Cadette.
Sadly, those Third Division inflatable bees have long since lost air, in truth most of them didn’t even make the journey home, but the ambition shown that day has been re-inflated.
The new more durable Bees face Leicester at their newly built Brentford Community Stadium on Sunday sitting third in the Championship and with a growing reputation as one of the best-run clubs in the game.
The fact they reached the play-off final last season, losing narrowly to Fulham, and their remarkable recruitment programme, which has seen players such as Ollie Watkins, Said Benrahma and Neal Maupay sold for huge profits, has marked them out as real contenders.
They also reached the semi-finals of the League Cup for the first time this season before losing to Spurs, and even turned a profit last year. Not bad for a club which needed fans to collect money in buckets outside Griffin Park in the early 2000s.
Since the arrival of current owner Matthew Benham, who made his fortune through innovative mathematical modelling in his sports gambling businesses, it is the club’s reputation as football disruptor which is most intriguing.
Throw-in coaches, sleep coaches and Benham’s ‘table of justice’ which purports to show what the Championship table should look like based on performance only – taking fortune out of the equation – are examples.
The club also takes a different view to appointing managers, choosing someone who will buy into their ethos rather than handing him power to make sweeping changes. This has prevented the kind of situation clubs such as Sheffield Wednesday and Birmingham have fallen into over the years – hiring a progressive manager one year and then a long-ball dinosaur the next and wondering why neither system ever works.
Co-director of football Rasmus Ankersen famously summed up Brentford’s approach by saying: “If David wants to beat Goliath, you can’t do that by using the same weapons.”
It’s an ethos which has driven innovation, allowing little Brentford to beat Premier League sides Southampton, Fulham, West Brom and Newcastle in cup competitions already this season.
Their methods don’t always win friends. A heavy use of data in their recruitment programme led people to call them the Moneyball club, something Benham baulks at. And when this weekend’s opponents Leicester won the Premier League, Ankersen was quick to point out it was a blip.
“Most models showed them as only the fifth best team in the league, “he said. “They had a 5% chance of winning the title but converted chances at an unsustainable rate in the first half of the season when Vardy and Mahrez did so well. That figure slowed down to the norm eventually – but at the same time in the second half of the season the defensive performance of their rivals dropped. So, they got lucky twice.”
That doesn’t mean Brentford don’t have respect for Leicester, however. Quite the opposite. Beating the odds and finding ways to overcome richer rivals is what both clubs are about; and despite the coldness of Ankersen’s logic, the truth is Brentford is built on valuing people as much as stats.
In fact, the real reason for the club’s remarkable record of buying low and selling big is not the fact they spotted the players – but that they improved them.
Anyone who saw Neal Maupay’s first six months in a Brentford shirt will tell you he worked his socks off but with no real understanding of what he wanted to achieve. His transformation over the next 18 months was remarkable, scoring 41 goals.
When Benrahma arrived from Nice, he was exciting but didn’t track back or score enough. By the time he moved to West Ham for €30m he was the hardest working winger in the division.
Ivan Toney, the striker who has scored 16 goals since signing from Peterborough as Watkins’ replacement, could be next off the rank, although he is suspended this weekend along with midfielder Josh Dasilva, transformed since arriving from Arsenal.
That provides an opportunity for Brentford’s other great initiative: the B team.
Having seen a string of players from their youth academy snatched by Premier League clubs before signing a contract (a regular tactic which leaves the developing club with little compensation) Brentford decided to ditch the project and set up a B team of under-contract 18-24-year-olds instead.
Young technical director Robert Rowan, who tragically died in 2018 aged 28, was the inspiration and his legacy has been remarkable.
The Robert Rowan Debut Board at Brentford’s training ground lists all the B team players who go on to make a first team bow – and it will soon pass the 20 mark in just the project’s fifth year. Former B teamer Marcus Forss, who recently scored for Finland against France on his international debut, could be Leicester’s main tormentor.
Add in the talents of likeable manager Thomas Frank, who has insisted he would turn down Premier League opportunities because he believes so much in the Brentford project, and there’s a freshness about the Bees which is enticing.
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