The lad from the Liberties: 'They live a six-star life, and three years later, five out of six of them don't have a career in the game'
BUSY BEES: Barnet boss Dean Brennan at the League Two match with Fleetwood Town at The Hive. Pic: Richard Pelham/Getty Images
Dean Brennan, 16 years into a coaching career that began aged 29 at Hemel Hempstead Town, has settled quickly in League football after leading Barnet out of seven years of hell in the National League.
Yet this straight-shooter from Dublin's inner city, who went viral last season after taking aim at the north London club’s supporters because they were getting on the backs of his players too willingly, has quite the list of gripes.
Dealing with a transfer window for the first time this summer heightened his sense of the professional game being cut further and further adrift from the sport he fell in love with as the boy at Lourdes Celtic who shone brightly enough to join Sheffield Wednesday’s academy. “I love the game, I don't love the business,” he says. “The higher you go, the more ruthless it is. There's more money involved, there are more sharks.”
Otherwise known as agents. The pushy offering of players who do not fit what his club wants, the quoting of increasingly ludicrous fees and the curiously opaque language used – it all rubs him up the wrong way.
“One of my best friends is an agent, I have an agent, an ex-team-mate of mine is my agent and I understand why they are in the game but …”
The scourge of intermediaries who only see pound signs and not the people they wheel and deal as if products off a shelf is a topic he circles back to on several occasions during this hour-long chat after a midweek training session.
Barnet have one of the EFL’s youngest squads, many of them rejected by cut-throat top-tier academies where all the big talk of aftercare masks a brutal reality of kids cosseted from a young age suddenly being made to fend for themselves. It hurts Brennan to see so many broken boys cast aside, although he has a more than decent knack for picking out those capable of thriving lower down the slope. He allows them to dream that they can climb back up again.
Loosely related, Brennan thinks it is an insult for managers to have their title and responsibilities downgraded to head coach and wonders why it remains so rare for directors of football to be the fall guys when things fall apart – a question he feels entitled to ask having also served in that role at Barnet a few years back.
Relying entirely upon data rather than intuition to make decisions riles him up, too, and he wonders if a couple of Premier League clubs with tightly-guarded analysis systems should be barred from using their formulas and databases. “Although I’m yet to see a computer game win a match,” he says, both deadly serious and with an air of knowing mischievousness.
It does not take long to be endeared by Brennan’s directness and this apparent absence of worrying about what people outside his circle think has served him really well. As he sets the industry to rights it is easy to draw parallels with Roddy Collins, whom he briefly worked for at Bohemians in a playing career that took in 18 clubs from Sheffield Wednesday all the way down to Barton Rovers.
The initial coaching break arrived in 2009 when he was still a player at Hemel Hempstead, who are owned by Clondalkin-born pub owner Dave Boggins. A caretaker spot appeared out of the blue, he stepped up and quickly became immersed in the responsibility and ability to shape a team to his mould. “I was very lucky Dave gave me that chance,” he says. “I grabbed it with both hands. I took the club from the bottom of the Southern League to the top, I got them promoted.”
In 2018 he joined Billericay Town, bankrolled by the Essex-businessman Glenn Tamplin, who was last in the news while on the run from police two years ago in connection with drug charges. Brennan has previously described his decision to go there as “a mistake” because it was motivated by money. Hot-headed and prone to wild shifts in attitude, Tamplin decided to make a change after five months. From there Brennan ended up at Kingstonian but lasted five games because of a dispute behind the scenes, before he enjoyed a more fruitful spell at Wealdstone.
Well, for a time. There was eventually a falling out with the ownership and his long-time assistant, Stuart Maynard, ended up replacing him as top man. Just as he was contemplating a career away from football, Barnet’s Cypriot owner Tony Kleanthous asked him to become director of football at the same time Harry Kewell landed as head coach.
When Kewell was shunted aside seven winless games later, Brennan returned to the dugout and has gradually rebuilt a club on the fringes of the capital into an EFL fixture for the first time since 2017-18.
So what has he learned from taking such a circuitous route?
“Just wisdom,” he says. “I love the game. I'm a student of the game. Every day is a school day in football, let me tell you that now. Every day. I've gone a bit grayer over the years but I'm very lucky. I love what I do. I'm blessed to be doing it as long as I have and long may it continue.”
Of the 92 League clubs only seven managers have been in position longer than his four years and, more than a coincidence, three of the septet have brought their sides out of non-League.
He celebrated the anniversary late last month with an assured 3-0 win against Grimsby, which was followed up by a draw away to Oldham and another victory versus Accrington Stanley at home.
Before the season got underway Brennan sat his players down and gave them an exact points pledge, an approach out of step with the cliche of taking each game as it comes.
Last season he did the same, naming an aim of 100 points that was initially met with furrowed brows. They ended up with 102. Thanks to the recent uptick in results they are tracking closely to this season’s target despite a sluggish start and, before this weekend’s visit to Tranmere, sit a single point outside the play-offs.
“We always go back to our pledge,” he says. “We just remind the players of that every now and again. If you're around your points per game target, it gives you a good indication if you're going to have a successful season or not. When we get there, we ask, ‘Can we step up again? Can we go above that?’”
Brennan is also quick to tweak on the pitch – “I like to solve problems tactically” – and the feeling of beating Grimsby so convincingly last month, not long after they vanquished Manchester United, was sweet because he changed his formation to exploit what he spotted as a weakness in the opposition.
Which also brings him to a comparison with Ruben Amorim, a head coach on the opposite end of the spectrum whose unwillingness to change strategy has meant the Old Trafford hotseat remains scolding.
“I adapt,” Brennan says. “And I expect the players to be able to adapt. I’m not pig-headed like that. I actually think it's good management, good coaching. When you're younger, your manager will say, ‘Don’t put your hand in the fire.’ So don't put your hand in the fire. It's stupid.
“For me, I find flaws in the opposition. Everyone's got a weakness all the way up to the top. Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool. There are weaknesses in every team and everyone wants to improve.
“If you watch the greatest manager I've ever seen, Pep Guardiola, he’s changed his approach recently hasn’t he? To me, that's brilliant management.
“When you look at Grimsby beating Man United, and Man United not changing for Grimsby, it's crazy. It's a miracle victory when you actually think of the resources of Man United and the resources of Grimsby. Dave Artell (Grimsby’s manager) should be knighted for what he did there.
“Look, I'm not here to criticise anybody. That's down to that manager (Amorim). Everyone's different. They've got different personalities. It's obviously gotten him the Man United job. Is he being successful in that job at the minute? No, because of the resources they have. It's not the Man United I grew up watching.”
Above football intelligence he demands full transparency from his squad and promises the same in return. Last season two unnamed players had unexpected childcare issues on a Friday morning and, rather than make an excuse out of fear they would be dropped the following afternoon, they called Brennan up to explain their predicaments. He gave them a day off with the message that family comes first. Both, Brennan says, went on to play starring roles a day later.
“I don't mix my words. Whether it's subtle or whether it can be a little bit on the front foot, I'm just honest with them,” he adds. “I remember a manager lying to me years ago. I won't say who it was but he blatantly lied to my face. I've vowed that I've never lied to a player. I think if you're just honest with the players they know where they stand. And then I know where I stand.”
He is on a roll at this point, leaning into why tradition still trumps innovation when it comes to running a club that does not have the same financial might as many opponents. “I like the old school, I love all the old stories,” he says. “I think it's much simpler that way. But the problem with football now is there are so many different departments and the finances are incredible.
“It's the richest division in the world, the Premier League. Obviously, that filters down into our division. It's flawed financially. The kids are overpaid and they're given too much too easily. They live a six-star life, and five out of six of them, three years after leaving an academy, don't have a career in the game.
“That's what they don't tell you about. It's OK when you have the Sanchos and the Rashfords and all them coming through. They're the elite of the elite. But think about the guys that are paid an extortionate amount of money, million-pound contracts when they're 16, 17, 18. By the time they're 23, 24, they're not in the game no more. How do they survive after that? That's my biggest issue.
“They talk about player aftercare. There's no player aftercare. There's loads of different challenges for players. I try to explain that to them all the time.”
He has one foolproof way of keeping them grounded – persistent reminders of how they got to this position in the first place. Brennan is proud of his upbringing in the Liberties, leaving him battle-hardened from a young age and with a simple appreciation that hard work is the most important ingredient for a rewarding outcome.
Growing up in a single-parent family, there was plenty of envy as he stood out in the Dublin and District Schoolboys' League with no one standing on the sidelines to cheer him on. It served as motivation too, of course, but his message to the players is to remember the who rather than the why.
“We want everybody to represent their family,” he says. “I'll say, how did you get to football when you were 11, 12 years old? Who took you to football? They'd usually say their parents or their grandad. I say, ‘Well, think about that. Don't think about the life you're living now. Don't think about the nice car you have and the nice property and all the nice women and so on, the jewellery. Think about how you got to football and how it started.’
“For me, it was cycling up to Sundrive Park to train every day from the Liberties by myself, no parents to help me. I would always explain that to them. I used to always have a little bit of jealousy when I saw everyone's parents at the game and I didn't because I grew up with a single mother.
“I would always explain that to the players. Think about how you got here, how your mother and father helped you or maybe your sister, your auntie, your uncle, whoever. I think that brings them back down to earth.”
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