🕵️‍♂️ Football League Focus: Brentford | OneFootball

Welcome to our latest series here at OneFootball where we’re shining a light on one Football League club each week.

It’s our chance to go in-depth on sides that don’t normally attract our attention and hold up a magnifying glass to the plethora of brilliant stories outside the Premier League.

So far we have looked at:

Cardiff City, Derby County, Sunderland, Nottingham Forest, Huddersfield, Stoke, Birmingham, Sheffield Wednesday, Norwich, Bristol City, Portsmouth, Watford, QPR and Middlesbrough.

This week it’s the turn of west London’s least fashionable side – more White City Westfield than the King’s Road – and Moneyball’s British Football Emissary, it’s Brentford.

Can you tell me a bit about the club?

As with all great things, Brentford started life in a pub. The Oxford and Cambridge Pub near Kew Bridge, to be precise. Members of the Brentford Rowing and Cricket Club elected to use their facilities for the playing of association football in the summer of 1889, and Brentford FC were born.

The Bees bounced around west London for the first decade of their existence before settling at the famous Griffin Park.

One of English football’s most evocative stadia, Griffin Park was nestled amongst the heart of the community in Hounslow and was famously the only stadium in the country to have a pub on each corner.

Being able to call upon a beer at will was one of the few positives to watching Brentford though, as the club struggled in the lower reaches of the football pyramid for decades.

That, however, changed in 2006 with the arrival of visionary Matthew Benham.

Any great moments from their history?

After bouncing around the London and then Southern Leagues, Brentford were granted access to the expanded Football League in 1920 and initially struggled to put Hounslow on the map.

The hiring of Harry Curtis as manager in 1926 however, changed their fortunes. ‘The Guvnor’, as he came to be known, would almost single-handedly turn the west London outfit into a force in the capital.

In just nine years, Curtis took the club from the old Third Division to the First Division, and in 1937 led Brentford to their highest ever finish – fifth in the top flight.

The 1937/38 season would prove to be their peak though, as the Bees led the top flight for 17 consecutive weeks before falling after Christmas and finishing a highly respectable sixth.

That same season, Brentford would reach the sixth round of the FA Cup – still the furthest in their history – before losing to eventual champions Preston.

The outbreak of the Second World War would put an end to their glory period though as debts began to rise and players quit the game.

Eventually, Curtis left in 1949 with the club in the Second Division, but he remains their longest-serving and most successful manager.

The rest of the century was peppered with only a few highs but the team’s fortunes changed in 2006 when professional gambler and Brentford supporter Matthew Benham agreed to take on the club’s rising debts.

Benham has since transformed the Bees into one of the most progressive clubs in the entire country, adopting a ‘Moneyball’ approach to player recruitment and hiring coaches from outside the usual lower league merry-go-round.

And it’s worked.

In the 15 years that he’s been in associated with Brentford, Benham has taken them from League Two to top of the Championship and helped build a brand new 20,000-seater stadium in the process.

And surely there must be some lows as well?

That period between Harry Curtis’s tenure and the arrival of Benham in the first decade of the 21st century was a precarious one for Brentford.

Having tasted success in the First Division pre-war, it wasn’t long before they were back down among the lower reaches of the English football pyramid.

Problems on the pitch were exacerbated by astonishing levels of debt off it, with the club coming back from financial ruin not once, but twice.

In 1967, Brentford’s hated rivals Queens Park Rangers offered to buy Griffin Park and wipe out the club’s eye-watering arrears, however it would mean the Bees ceasing to exist and moving to the outer-reaches of London to become the amateur ‘Brentford Borough FC’

Amazingly, they were saved at the 11th-hour by former secretary Walter Wheatley, who gifted the club £69,000.

Somehow things were even more precarious in 2002 though, as the collapse of ITV Digital plunged Brentford into a crisis that was eventually averted by saviour Benham.

Who are the club legends?

Jim Towers is Brentford’s leading goalscorer with 153 in the Football League and was voted their greatest ever player in 2013.

Ken Coote was a no-nonsense full-back who played over 500 times for the club in the 1950s and 60s.

Kevin O’Connor was a one-club man who represented the Bees for 16 years and helped guide them back to League One in 2010.

What about the current squad? Any players to look out for?

Ivan Toney isn’t just the best player in this Brentford squad, he might be the best in the entire Championship.

A goalscorer extraordinaire, Toney signed from Peterborough in the summer with the sole objective of firing the Bees into the Premier League. So far, he’s been as good as his word and netted 23 goals in 28 appearances so far. What a talent.

Toney can’t do it all on his own though, and this term he’s had an unnatural amount of help from a Spanish kid who is causing enormous waves in west London.

Sergio Canòs is a former Barcelona graduate who has taken to the lower leagues of English football like a duck to water. A brilliant, technical footballer, Canós has emerged as one of the stand-out talents in the Championship this season.

Is the manager any good?

Brentford have a recent history of picking slightly left-field coaches – those on the margins of the game who are looking for their big chance.

Mark Warburton made his name at Griffin Park in the last decade while current Aston Villa boss Dean Smith was in charge for three years between 2015 and 2018.

But for the past three years it’s been Danish coach Thomas Frank in the hot seat, continuing the fantastic work done by Smith and taking the club to previously unseen heights.

He’s continued the club’s fine tradition of falling at the final hurdle but perhaps this season can be something a little different.

Finally, how are things looking this season?

Alongside Norwich and Swansea, Brentford are one of the favourites for automatic promotion this term and seemed to have brushed off last season’s play-off heartbreak.

About as well-balanced a side as you’ll see, the Bees are top of the table at the time of writing, and look well set to make it to the Premier League for the first time in their history.