Why promotion to the Premier League for Brentford would be a landmark moment for modern football

When Rasmus Ankersen met Matthew Benham in 2013, Brentford were third in League One with a few games remaining. Ankersen, who would become the Bees’ co-director of football, asked Benham, the club’s owner, whether he thought they would go up. Getty – Contributor Meet Rasmus Ankersen, one of the men at the forefront of football’s data revolution The reply? They had a 42.3 per cent chance. Fast-forward seven years, and the bookies make them favourites to reach the top-flight of English football for the first time in 73 years. Brentford are probably the smartest and best-run football club in Britain. If they beat Fulham in the play-off final on Tuesday night – live on talkSPORT – it will be because they out-thought, rather than out-spent the opposition. In the best possible way, Brentford are tiny. A new stadium might be on the way, but until now, there has been no billionaire owner, no hospitality section at Griffin Park – just a bunch of geniuses obsessed with stats. Getty Images – Getty Brentford have made their status as a small club work to their advantage One of those guys, Ankersen, told talkSPORT.com back in January that Brentford have to generate £15m profit in the transfer market every year just to function as a profitable business. But the Bees don’t just function. They had the fourth-lowest playing budget in the Championship this season, and finished third in the table. So how does a tiny club like Brentford generate £120m on transfers over the last five years,  but still maintain one of the most talented squads in the Championship? Simple. Flip the script and stage a data revolution. “If David wants to beat Goliath, you can’t do that by using the same weapons,” Ankersen told talkSPORT.com. Their weapon of choice is football analytics, which helps them scour the globe for under-performing individuals with high potential, but no-one knows it yet. Rex Features Brentford’s incredible front three barely cost them anything Brentford owner Benham, an Oxford physics graduate, has spent decades becoming a football scientist, removing outcome bias and other wrong judgements we make without even realising. Even in 2008, his mathematical methods of evaluating performance were more sophisticated than the current algorithm used for expected goals (xG). He made his millions through a company called Smartodds: a team of whizz-kid statisticians who calculate the outcome of football matches to gain an edge over bookmakers. So when he became majority shareholder of his boyhood club in 2012, he already had the perfect model to guide them from the third tier of English football to the edge of the Premier League, with the help of Ankersen, fellow co-director Phil Giles and technical director Robert Rowan, who tragically died aged 28 in 2018. Getty – Contributor Benham is probably one of the smartest men in football Benham’s tools compare the relative quality of clubs around the world, helping Brentford find your classic Football Manager wonderkids, usually on the Continent, where the player market is less inflated than England. “It’s not that data tells you who to pick, data can tell you where to look,” Ankersen added. “Using data and using models to compare the strength of different teams and different leagues, we’ve been able to identify some of the markets or some of the leagues that have a higher level than people think. “This is what Matthew has been doing for the last 25 years – finding inefficiencies in the market and exploiting them.” There’s no better example than Neal Maupay. Brentford picked him up from the second tier of French football for £1.6m just three years ago. There were rumours Napoli were willing to pay £40m for him earlier this year. Getty Images – Getty Brentford transformed Maupay’s career and he’s already thriving at Brighton “If players were fully developed, Brentford wouldn’t be able to buy them. You get an unfinished package, and you need to make it better,” Ankersen said. Maupay, sold for £19.8m, was comfortably Brentford’s best player last season, and for most clubs, losing such a star on deadline day would signal trouble. But departures at Brentford only pave the way for the next big thing. For example, Ollie Watkins and Said Benrahma are among the most highly-rated players in the Championship. Neither of them cost Brentford more than £2m, both are now worth eight figures. Ankersen said: “You try and find a stock that is undervalued, right? It’s cheaper than it should be, then you get the upside. Brentford’s player trading profits (selected) Neal Maupay to Brighton – £18.2m (bought for £1.6m, sold for £19.8m) Chris Mepham to Bournemouth – £12.2m (B team product, sold for £12.2m) Andre Gray to Burnley – £10.65m(Bought for £550k, sold for £11.1m) Ezri Konsa to Aston Villa – £9.5m(Bought for £2.5m, sold for £12m) Scott Hogan to Aston Villa – £8.7m (Bought for £750k, sold for £9.5m) Ryan Woods to Stoke – £5.5m(Bought for £1m, sold for £6.5m) Jota to Birmingham – £4.5m (Bought for £1.2m, sold for £5.7m) “The key is being able to identify undervalued talent in the market, develop them, and then sell them on for profit, gradually building more value into the squad and gradually increasing the level of the squad. “Now we come to a place where we have a huge amount of value in the squad and we’re good enough to compete at the top of the league.” The Bees were widely scrutinised for scrapping their academy in place of a B-team in 2012, but that has proved another masterstroke. After spending £2m a year and failing to produce enough first-team players or make profit, they decided to start picking up rejects from big clubs around them in London, giving them another chance. Since that decision, Brentford have had 15 debuts in the first team, and sold Chris Mepham [a B team product rejected by Chelsea] to Bournemouth for £12.2m. Will Brentford be playing Premier League football in their new ground? The average age of their squad this season is 24 years and 336 days, which is the second-youngest in the Championship behind Barnsley. It’s just one of the many ways the Bees have totally flipped the script and revolutionised the way small clubs should operate. With a shiny, new, 17,000-seater stadium opening next season, their transformation into a force of English football could be complete if they beat Fulham in football’s richest game tonight, marking a watershed moment for small clubs across the country. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the timing of it all was something Ankersen and Benham planned at that fateful meeting in 2013.,
TalkSport