Lee Dykes: Brentford’s seven stages of recruitment | OneFootball

Brentford technical director Lee Dykes’ office at the Robert Rowan Performance Centre is exactly what you’d expect it to be.

A view that looks directly on to the training pitches, a television screen with sport on for however long Dykes is in there - which at this time of the year is indefinitely - and, perhaps most interestingly, a tactics board with every Bees player lined up, staring back at him.

And with the January transfer window looming, Dykes hints that he may be adding to the current crop of magnetic heads that adorn the wall, adjacent to his desk.

“I think there could be a few interesting opportunities for us to do some business,” he reveals.

“We have had a few injuries, as people know. Rico [Henry] is unfortunately going to be out for a long time, so we may look at that position as a position of interest, as an example.

“But then you have got to think about the fact that Rico will be coming back - what’s the plan, what’s the pathway for that player?

“So, there may be new opportunities. There normally is because you will always have injuries; you will always have interest in new players; you may have to take a player now as opposed to the summer because they will have a spike in their performances that you didn’t anticipate.

“We might have to rush through a signing because we think that if we wait another six months then this could go beyond our reach.

“I would say, as a whole, I think that January is a seller’s market, not a buyer’s market, and a market that we don’t tend to want to work in too much. We don’t believe that the valuations that are placed on players are as realistic as in the summer.

“But we always need to be active in the market, and sometimes you need to do something because you have an injury, or a particular situation has cropped up.”

This is Dykes’ fourth transfer window in his current role, and his 10th at the club, since he moved to west London from his former club Bury in 2019.

Bury won promotion from League Two in his only season at the helm, before they were expelled from the Football League due to long-standing financial problems - something which Dykes was forced to work around during his time at Gigg Lane.

He first took the job as head of recruitment in west London, as co-directors of football Phil Giles and Rasmus Ankersen liked his coaching background (which involved spells as a youth coach at Rotherham United and assistant manager at Carlisle United earlier in his career), as well as the fact he had developed his own algorithm to identify players - finding a solution with numbers will always get you the seal of approval here.

Being chucked in the deep end is something Dykes is familiar with when you consider what he had to do during his time at Bury (his only summer transfer window at the club saw him sign 23 players), but his first summer with the Bees was going to really test his buoyancy.

“Matthew [Benham], Phil and Rasmus were saying, ‘Look, there’s a 24-month window here where we will have an opportunity to get in the Premier League. If we spend wisely and get the right players in, we should be in a really good position’,” Dykes recalls.

“We’d already had some really positive discussions about the fact that the whole squad couldn’t be young players, there had to be some real solidarity around the squad with some experience, and then the young players will come through.

“In that summer of 2019, we had bids in for Sergi Canós, a bid in for Neal Maupay, bids in for Saïd Benrahma, bids in for Ollie Watkins, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, okay! How are we going to replace all of these?’

“But we signed Pontus Jansson, David Raya, Ethan Pinnock, Mathias Jensen and Christian Nørgaard in that window and then, as well as already having Rico Henry and Henrik Dalsgaard, that allowed the attacking players to go and flourish because they had all that experience behind them.

“I felt big pressure because I walked into a function where I was trying to take forward some of the good work that had already been done.

“Coming into Brentford, I’d never really spent a lot of money. I’d always worked at League One and League Two level.

“The most I’d spent was £50,000 on a player, and then six weeks later we are paying €5 million for Bryan Mbeumo.

“So obviously you start to think, ‘Wow, this is big money.’ But, at the end of the day, it’s just different money, same process.”

As well as the transfer fee, there was another part in that process to sign Mbeumo that Dykes wasn’t too familiar with, as he planned a trip to France to negotiate with the player, club and agent, which he tees up superbly: “If you speak to Rasmus Ankersen and say, ‘What’s the funniest moment you’ve had with Lee Dykes?’, he’ll tell you this…"

Read the rest of this interview in Sunday's match programme; available online and around Gtech Community Stadium for £3

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