There’s a running joke among Brentford’s medical team that the first question they ask when a new signing arrives is how many anterior cruciate ligament injuries they’ve got on their CV.
At a club where risk more often than not equals reward, recruitment tends to follow that path and it sometimes means making the club’s doctors sweat a bit.
Last summer they pressed ahead with the signing of Lorient forward Yoane Wissa just a few weeks after he’d been the victim of an acid attack. In January there was Christian Eriksen and the most complicated medical in Premier League history.
This summer was no different. “There’s always one that’s not dead straightforward and (Mikkel) Damsgaard was the one this year,” Phil Giles, Brentford’s director of football tells i.
Damsgaard was hot property when he excelled as Denmark swept into the last four at the Euros last summer, but his momentum was checked when he missed most of Sampdoria’s 2021-22 season with a virus that triggered an arthritic knee condition.
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“We have a bigger plan but we try to be opportunistic as well, which we were with Eriksen too.”
Welcome to Brentford where, in Giles’ words, “taking risks is what we do”.
It is a policy that is serving them well. They take on Premier League leaders Arsenal sitting in eighth place, level on points with Liverpool and toasting Ivan Toney’s England call-up, the first Brentford player in the national team squad since 1939.
It is a club that draws admiring glances for not just living with English football’s heavyweights but often out-thinking and outplaying them. Most of those who visit their corner of West London looking for inspiration come armed with one simple question: how?
“We try not to just buy into pre-existing ways of thinking. We don’t subscribe to the idea that this is the way it’s always been done and there’s no other way of doing it,” Giles explains.
“Our training ground is about training and developing. Most people don’t see that, they just see the results on a Saturday.”
One example is set-piece coaches. Brentford had zeroed in on that area as one where they could extract real benefit seven years ago, and appointed Gianni Vio (now at Spurs) to lead on that area. When he left, they went for Nicolas Jover, now earning rave reviews at Arsenal.
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“Some of those things we did all those years ago are now standard practice. We had a set-piece coach in the Championship,” he said.
Giles himself is an example of Brentford’s commitment to thinking differently. A self-confessed “football geek” he had a PhD in maths and statistics from Newcastle University but no background in professional football before he entered the Brentford boardroom.
The opportunity arrived because Giles worked for Matthew Benham’s company Smartodds and in 2015, along with Rasmus Ankersen, he was appointed a joint director of football.
Their task was simple: Benham wanted to run the club along a set of principles that no-one else was following in football and it was up to Giles and Ankersen to make it work.
So Giles zig-zagged Europe, undertaking a tour of clubs and people who they felt were doing the right things. One meeting was with Thomas Tuchel, who was blazing a trail in the Bundesliga with Mainz at the time. It led to a document that became a blueprint for Brentford’s DNA.
There’s a tendency now to paint the club’s progress as linear and inevitable but the first season was stacked with turbulence, including an early call to sack head coach Marinus Djikzhuzen.
Belief in the principles they had identified was key. Ignoring the outside pressure to revert back to tried and tested methods endures to this day and has served them well. They are all in on “brilliant” head coach Thomas Frank and promotion in 2020 was followed by a comfortable season of consolidation last year.
“When you get into the Premier League you can accelerate it a bit, because you’ve got the finance, brand power and the reputation. And it’s where players want to be,” Giles says of the momentum generated since promotion.
It was their commitment to innovation that saw Brentford appoint Ben Ryan, best known for coaching Fiji to a gold medal in rugby sevens in the 2016 Olympics, as their head of elite performance this summer.
“We needed some fresh thinking. There’s a little bit of an arms race in football at the moment to find the latest new idea, to implement it and get the benefit from it,” Giles says.
“The thinking was if we just take someone who has been in football their whole lives, the likelihood is we’ll just be recycling what we already knew about. If we took someone who had been across different sports, there may be some innovation there. Ben ticked all the boxes.”
Ryan’s eye for detail led to him weighing the team’s kits after games to see if they’re retaining too much sweat. “It’s not something I’d ever thought of doing,” Giles admits.
Recruitment has been consistently good. Perhaps their most high-profile success, though, has been Toney – signed from Peterborough for around £5m.
Brentford had fallen short in the play-offs and sold main goalscorer Ollie Watkins to Aston Villa soon after. The management thought they were too “nice” and they identified Toney as the man to give them an “edge”. Among other things, their scouting reports noted how effectively he “managed” referees during games.
“Ivan’s done really well, he’s got a brilliant mentality and incredible self-belief,” Giles says.
“You can see that when he takes his penalties, he’s absolutely nerveless. He hasn’t missed one and hasn’t even been close to missing one for us.
“People underestimate him. They think he’s a big physical presence who is difficult to play against, which he is, but he’s also technically a lot better than a lot of people realise from the outside.
“If you look at the fourth goal against Man United, the assist for that, he plays a first time half volley of perfect weight. It’s an unbelievable quality pass. Then the chip against Leeds, I know he has an open goal, but it’s not the quality that people associate with him. His technical level is very, very high.”
There was interest expressed through intermediaries in Toney this summer, but – surprisingly – no bids. Any suitors would have been wasting their time.
“We didn’t have to worry. I never worry about getting interest in players or players leaving, it’s when you don’t have interest in players that you worry because then they’re not good enough!” Giles says.
“We didn’t have a thought about selling him or any of our top players this summer. We wanted to keep it together and build on it. I’m not sure how we replace Ivan, his level is so good. There was never a doubt.”
There are no worries about “second season syndrome”, which Giles thinks applies to teams over-achieving in their first year and “regressing” to their level. Brentford aren’t that, he says.
The ambition remains simple. “We’re not an established Premier League club yet – it would be stupid to say we are. The job is to keep being better, year on year and see where we can go.”
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