Newly promoted Brentford have already shown the Premier League that they will be tough
opponents.
Thomas Frank’s high-energy, high-pressing football aside, Brentford are known for their
intelligent and progressive approach to recruitment.
So, what do Brentford do that gives them an edge?
Brentford’s journey began when Matthew Benham took over the club in 2012.
Benham made significant money in gambling with his firms SmartOdds and Matchbook, using
data to give him greater insight into football, applying statistical analysis to find fine
margins.
It made him wealthy, but it also gave him the sense that these tools could be applied
to running football clubs.
With Brentford and its sister club FC Midtjylland, where Benham trialled many of his ideas, this
approach has led to sustained footballing success and a series of shrewd player acquisitions
that have fired Brentford into the Premier League for the first time in their history.
The short-hand for this approach is ‘Moneyball’, which has become a byword for data use in
sports, especially in recruitment.
It’s a bit more complicated than that: in essence, as Billy Beane first applied it,
Moneyball means overlooking traditional, received wisdom around player scouting and using data
instead to, crucially, find what the market undervalues.
So how does this work in football?
A basic example, one that Benham and his co-directors of football Rasmus Anksersen and Phil Giles
will certainly have used, is looking at strikers using expected goals.
Imagine we have two strikers, Joe and Seb, both 25, both playing in the Championship,
alike in almost every way.
They’ve both played 20 games and taken 50 shots.
But one has scored 15 goals and the other has scored five.
Automatically you’d assume that the 15-goal striker, Joe, is better and you’d certainly
be right that they would be more expensive.
But if you then take expected goals into account, the picture might change.
Joe has scored his 15 goals from an xG of 10, while Seb has scored his five goals from
an xG of 12.
That tells us several things: Joe might just have got lucky or faced poor goalkeepers;
you cannot guarantee that he will continue to perform at that level.
Seb is likely to score many more goals, probably even more than Joe, if he starts performing
to his expected level.
And, crucially, in terms of Moneyball, Seb will be a relative bargain because his actual
goals tally currently causes him to be undervalued.
So: buy Seb, because not only will you probably get a better player, but you’ll pay less
than you should.
There are two other crucial aspects to this kind of Moneyball approach that Brentford
have explored, as explained in an Athletic interview with their director of player recruitment
Lee Dykes, who fulfils the same role at Midtjylland.
The first is that teams’ compositions need to be thought about.
In Moneyball, Beane realises that he can trade one player and recreate their output with
three lesser, cheaper players.
Now this is much harder in football, but what you can do, and how Dykes thinks about squad
composition, is realise that players need to suit each other to maximise their outputs.
For example, there’s no point having aerially dominant strikers if you don’t have someone
who can cross the ball.
There’s no point having someone who can cross the ball if you don’t have a centre
back who can hit a long diagonal to find them.
And so on.
That’s not the same exactly, but it’s close to how Beane thought about his squad
composition.
The other similarity is development.
If you have two young centre backs who are very good, bring in an older one who can give
experience, knowledge, and shepherd them through games.
Brentford did exactly this with Pontus Jansson.
And such an approach can help turn two prospects into much more valuable players, either on
the pitch or via their sale to other clubs.
This all sounds simple, but Brentford have made it work.
This summer’s transfer window is the first since 2013/14 in which Brentford have not
had a positive net spend, that is, made more money selling players than they have spent.
And they have had notable successes in recruiting.
Andre Gray was bought from Luton for 620k and sold to Burnley the following season for
12.4m.
Ollie Watkins was signed for 7.2m from Exeter and then sold to Aston Villa for 34m.
Neal Maupay: bought for 2m, sold for 22.2m.
Ezri Konsa: signed for 2.85m from Charlton, and then bought by Aston Villa for 13.3.
They also made a 21.4m profit on Said Benrahma and earned 13.6m from the sale
of Chris Mepham, who had been developed by Brentford B.
And there are players still there who have already proved their worth: Ethan Pinnock
and Bryan Mbeumo came in the same window for a combined 9.85m, while Ivan Toney was a mere
5.6m from Peterborough and Vitaly Janelt cost 600k from Bochum.
This window, Brentford have spent more, recruiting Kristoff Ajer, Frank Oneyka, and Yoane Wissa
for a combined 35.7m.
But there’s every chance that these players will help keep Brentford in the league and
end up being sold for a profit.
But it’s not just in recruitment where Brentford are ahead of the game.
Under Technical Director Robert Rowan, who tragically passed away in 2018, Brentford
reshaped their approach to youth football.
Eschewing the traditional academy model, Brentford instead opted under Rowan’s expert direction
to set up a B team.
Brentford B houses the club’s elite 17–21-year-old players but crucially it sits outside the
FA’s Elite Player Performance Plan structure and means that the B team is exempt from the
normal rules that would allow other clubs to poach players for a nominal, tribunal-set
fee.
In a fiercely competitive catchment area and lacking financial muscle, Brentford suffered
from this: Ian Poveda’s departure to Manchester City was a good example.
But now the B team system allows them to gel those players better with the first team,
play friendlies against U23 sides or lower league clubs’ first teams, and protects
the club’s assets at a lower yearly cost than an academy.
Brentford have also thought intelligently about their back-room team.
They have a Tactical Statistician, Bernardo Cueva, who could be seen giving Thomas Frank
updates towards the end of the Arsenal game, providing real-time data-based analysis of
the match to affect tactical decisions.
They have a Consultant Sleep Coach, Anna West, who works with players to maximise their performance
through personally adjusted sleep programming.
And they have always taken set-pieces seriously, with a succession of gifted specialist coaches.
Gianni Vio, who worked with Italy at Euro 2020, was an early Brentford hire.
Andreas Georgson left Brentford to join Arsenal in 2020 having achieved success in south London.
It’s an area that Brentford and Midtjylland especially see as providing a margin in games.
The Danish club scored 39% of their goals from set-pieces as they won their first SuperLiga
title in 2014/15.
It was also superbly exploited in Brentford’s opening day victory against Arsenal with a
finely worked long throw routine that had been practiced repeatedly, with Cueva instrumental
in its design.
It describes the creative and innovating thinking that has brought Brentford to the Premier
League.
Now they’ve arrived, it might just keep them there too.