Brentford FC ..................smarter than the rest !
Brentford have bought and sold so shrewdly and profitably that they have become a template club. Benham’s focus on data, and creating and curating your own, not relying on others, has given Brentford an edge in recruitment and a profile as young, fresh and inventive.
Buying Neal Maupay, Ollie Watkins and Said Benrahma for a combined £9.8 million and selling them for £77 million raises eyebrows of appreciation in recruitment circles. Deciding to work without an academy and to instead use a B team is another illustration of a club that thinks and behaves differently.
Brentford were looking for a head of recruitment. They advertised the role, because they do it that way.
“It was a perfect match — I knew about the structure of clubs, I had a coaching background, I’d built an algorithm. Those were major box-ticks for them. There were bigger and better people than me in for the role but Brentford understood the complexity of the situations I’d been in and the relative success from those, the ability to work on a budget.
“They’re a strategy-driven club, which was geared towards achieving promotion to the Premier League. That was the basic aim — it was a lot more detailed than that. These men have a plan, which is different from others I’ve met who think they have a plan. Rasmus and Phil are two unbelievable people — with a plan. They don’t deviate from it and they trust people.
When Dykes arrived in May 2019, Brentford had just finished 11th in the Championship, their fifth season in the division following 2014’s promotion under Mark Warburton. It was acceptable, if not thrilling, but as Dykes says, those at the top: “Saw a real opportunity.
“They’d sold players like Ezri Konsa and Chris Mepham. Because of the financial constraints on so many other Championship clubs, they saw a two-to-three season chance to go to the Premier League. That was what really pulled me in. When Phil and Rasmus first met me they said they weren’t restricted by financial fair play, (that) they could invest. ‘If the recruitment is good and the coaching is good, then we can get there’.
Raising overall quality to lift individual valuations sounds like a simple equation. Pulling it off requires thought and nous.
“It was something we discussed before I took the role,” Dykes explains. “How do we get there? It can’t just be: ‘Sign better players’. The season before I arrived they had Maupay, Watkins, Benrahma — all Premier League players. They had the players but finished 11th. They also had Romaine Sawyers. So what was missing?
“What was missing was experience. Experience is invaluable. It’s all well and good coaching players, but what are they saying in the changing room when nobody’s there? Are they talking about a nightclub or promotion? That’s the thing.
“In 2019, we signed Pontus Jansson from Leeds, which surprised everybody; Ethan Pinnock, who was 26 and the best defender in League One; and David Raya out of Blackburn. Rico Henry we already had. We’d signed Christian Norgaard from Fiorentina when he was 25. People were saying to me, ‘This ain’t Brentford’.
“But we were thinking about promotion. There’s a real togetherness. If you lose three in a row, which can happen, there’s confidence — ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get out of this’. There’s a massive thing about building a squad rather than a group of individuals. When we lost Said and Ollie, people were concerned. We brought in Ivan Toney, Vitaly Janelt from (the second division in) Germany, Charlie Goode from Northampton. They slotted in seamlessly because of the experience around them, all this know-how.”
As Dykes says, it is all experience and it has given him alternative perspectives on recruitment. He, for example, operates on 16 positions on a pitch.
“When I came in I had to bring something to the table, because Brentford were very good at recruitment,” he says. “Part of the remit was aligning thinking across structure and process. I had to get everyone thinking the same and I do believe there are 16 positions on the pitch. For example, there’s an 11 and an 11A. It’s a left winger — the 11 is Ryan Giggs, outside, left-footed; the 11A is Cristiano Ronaldo when he was on the left, coming inside and playing almost like a striker.
“I built this system because it’s too easy for scouts to say, ‘There’s the top three wide players’. No, because in the past two seasons and the one before, Brentford have changed formation at critical points. The 16 positions mean we’re never caught out. So all of what we do is tailored towards that. If I click on South America, we have the best players in all 16 positions, if we switch to Germany or Asia, it’s all there. Right down to the Isthmian League. There are roughly 765 players in that league and we can tell at any time how they are doing.”
This, he stresses, is just the identification stage. Scouts will then be assigned. And along with the usual information, another telling question will be asked: “Is this player ready to be a professional footballer?”
“Biological age is something we take into account of course,” Dykes says. “But there is an assessment to be made in terms of maturity. Let’s leave the physical aside and ask: ‘Is this player ready to be a professional footballer?’. It’s a question people don’t ask but it’s key. Is a player ready to play away at Elland Road? It’s part of football, a massive part. We defend zonally, so if it’s a defender we’re looking at, we’re asking if they can take that on board. People underestimate how hard it is to be a professional footballer.
“At Brentford, we have logistics people to help players settle. Our motto is happy off the pitch, happy on it.
Preparing for and reacting to Brexit has also occupied Benham’s management team and if there are recruitment trends caused by the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, one will be a new emphasis on domestic signings, another will be a growth in South America’s presence in the Premier League. Benham also owns FC Midtjylland in Denmark. Dykes is their head of recruitment too. It means he is fully aware of differing regulations.
“It’s been huge,” he says of Brexit. “But we were prepared for it. Fin Stevens and Aaron Pressley, players we recruited for the B team, might have been Europeans or Scandinavians before, but there’s been a shift with GBE — Governing Body Endorsement. A lot of under-valued markets have been closed off by GBE. In the last few weeks, they’ve relaxed it a bit with under-21s.
“But as the EU closes, we can go to South America and Asia. There’s an opportunity and we’ve seen players in Uruguay. You’ve just seen Yerson Mosquera join Wolves for £4.5 million. Twelve months ago, we could have only considered them for Midtjylland. Now he can go to England. Moises Caicedo, another one, has gone to Brighton. They’re from Colombia and Ecuador, Midtjylland have just signed Brazilian midfielder Charles from Ceara in Fortaleza."
Co Director of Football Phil Giles gave a recent interview to the main supporters forum (Griffin Park Grapevine), it was very long (4 hours) and the final transcript (not very well done TBH edit: I meant parts of the transcript by this, not the interview as a whole, which was a great read) ran to over 18,000 words. There was a lot of interesting stuff , some of which we have discussed before or above and a few bits which would only mean something to a Brentford supporter, but the full transcript is on the forum and can be accessed by all should you wish to read it. I should point out that the interview was given in very early season. I have picked out a few lines which I think you should read ............
The Brentford Model
Q: When other clubs say they can adopt the Brentford model, like it is a very straightforward thing to do. How easy or difficult is it in fact for them to do that? In fact, what is the Brentford model?
Phil: Well exactly; what is the Brentford model? If the model is playing predominantly young players and accepting that they may not excel all the time, but that is okay, we will just develop them and develop ourselves slowly. That is not that hard to do. Just say, “We will not buy anyone over 24, and we will play all the young players.” That is straightforward.
Phil: If it is using all sorts of different information to try and buy players, some stats, that is not also that difficult. Obviously, one thing that we have got the advantage of is Smartodds. There’s some information – I don’t want to overblow exactly how much, but there is some information that is out there that we make use of and no-one else has access to it. Other clubs might have access to different things that we do not have access to. But, obviously, that is a unique bit.
Q: Are the metrics you have got access to proprietary, as in, you do not tell people what they are, or people cannot get them? The ones that just Brentford has access to, are they a secret sauce that no one even knows what you are looking at?
Phil: Yes.
Tactics
Q: What are the tactics against Chelsea and Liverpool?
Phil: Arsenal are a better team than us, really, in terms of possession on the ball, so that is why Arsenal had more of the ball. Chelsea will have more of the ball, so we have just got to be, in my opinion, with those teams who are better than us, is defend how we defend, you know, tight, compact, good distances, move them away.
When we get the ball, we need to attack much more quickly. You cannot settle on it and go, “Oh, a nice pass there, a nice pass there,” you have got to go bang, bang, bang and be away. You have got to react so quickly to the half a chance that they might be out of position, because if you just take your time on it, they will be back in position, and you will not have any chance of scoring.
Q: You said that in your post transfer window video that pace and power in the Premier League is clearly ramped up. Is that something that you have seen just anecdotally with your eyes, or is there something that you have got, analytically, behind that to say, “Pace and power is so critical?”
Phil: Analytical. You can see the physical metrics that we took playing Premier League teams last year, when we have played them, was at another level compared to the Championship.
League Chances
Q: What’s the percentage chance of getting relegated, I was reading 538, it’s about 20%, is that correct ?
Phil: Honestly, I’ve not really looked at it. I think I would guess 20 to 30%, I would guess. You might think “how do you not know this? you should know this!”. It doesn’t affect my life whatsoever because it doesn’t really matter what our relegated chances are, it’s not that we’re going to go, “What’s the chance, 30%? sh*t 30%, Matt, give us £20m.” It doesn’t work like that anyway. It might help us guide decision making in January, but we’ll see what the percentages are then.
Q: Is finishing one place above relegation, having a decent cup run, getting the financials stable… Is that really key this year?
Phil: I mean, it is pretty important to stay up, but I would not say “Oh my God, if we get relegated this will be a disaster.” There is only so much I can control about that. There is a probability we might go down, and it is not zero. So I can only manage it a little bit, but we might just get unlucky and like it might just happen.
Q: How can we get to keep improving in the Premier League, because you have to churn a few players for that?
Phil: Yes, evolve the team, develop the players, some players will come in and just keep getting better, sometimes we will just buy some better players. Bryan Mbeumo, for example, is a player who can just keep improving. Then there are other players, like Kris Ajer, who has come in. We broke it down into various targets this year, in terms of how we want to do it this year. So a few targets, key targets, in terms of, “If we want to improve, what do we need to do?” We need to be physically better, stronger. We need to have more pace in the team. We need to be better at set pieces. And we need to retain our zonal defensive principles, because we do that very well, we have been very strong last few years. If you are going to do that, make sure you recruit someone like Kris Ajer, who knows how to defend with zonal principles, coming from a Scandinavian background like he does. He has slotted in seamlessly, so we keep doing the same things but do them better, as opposed to bringing in different types of defenders and changing completely the way we play. That would be a massive gamble.