🦁 Premier League Player of the Week: Bryanstorm | OneFootball

The first round of Premier League matches for 2025 offered up a classic at Anfield, controversy at the Amex and a mauling at Molineux.

But our Player of the Week is ...

Bryan Mbeumo (Brentford)

📸 Dan Istitene - 2025 Getty Images

It's not often that we give flowers to Brentford in this column. As ever with these things, the "big" clubs can often hog the limelight and players from those supposed lesser sides are relegated to also-rans.

Of course, we try our best to give everyone a fair shake but when it comes to a team like the Bees, the fact that they've been so consistently well-run since their promotion in 2021 can often work against them in the media ecosystem.

This weekend though, it was simply impossible to ignore the west London outfit.

Despite a classic at Anfield and impressive wins for Manchester City and Bournemouth, matchweek 20 belonged to Thomas Frank's men.

Admittedly their opponents, Southampton, have been bordering on abysmal this season but before Saturday's clash, there was an argument to be made that the south coast club were starting to work out their issues.

New boss Ivan Jurić was hired over Christmas and despite losing to West Ham and Crystal Palace, there were definite signs of improvement.

All that was completely blown out of the water at full time against Brentford, however.

It was a performance so good that coach Thomas Frank was almost lost for words at the final whistle.

"The away win is nice," said boss Thomas Frank. "But when we look at the performance, I think it's one of my biggest moments with this Brentford team

"To come down here, against Southampton, a team fighting to stay in the league with a new manager, is always difficult.

"To win in the way we did with complete control and dominance, giving nothing away, scoring five goals, I'm very pleased and proud of that."

It was a five-star performance from the whole squad but one man stood head and shoulders above the rest, as he has since the start of the campaign.

Bryan Mbeumo, with two goals and an assist, was at the heart of everything Brentford did well at St Mary's and, alongside Mohamed Salah, is one of the players of the season so far.

In fact, only Salah and Erling Haaland have outscored the 25-year-old this term with Mbeumo having netted 18 in his last 22 top-flight appearances.

His goalscoring output has been so good in fact, that Ivan Toney's exit over the summer has been almost entirely ignored.

With the likes of Arsenal and Newcastle believed to be keen on his services however, this could very well be one of the final times we see Mbeumo linking up with his old mate Yoann Wissa and terrorising Premier League defences.

So it's about time we gave them their flowers.

📸 Dan Istitene - 2025 Getty Images