Brentford FC: The Moneyball Story in Football
On 5th August 2020, Brentford stepped onto the turf of Wembley Stadium to take on Fulham in the richest game of football. It was the closest they had come to the top flight of English football since they dropped out after league resumed post World War II. They lost the game thanks to a brace from Fulham wing back Joe Bryan but it marked the culmination of a process, a process which started five years back when they were promoted to the Championship. What followed since then is a careful piece of planning and execution with lots of reliance on data.
From Promotion Gainers to a Midtable club
The most remarkable aspect of Brentford’s progression in Championship is the fact that they have never been involved in a relegation battle. It is quite common for a promoted side to be in the lower half of the table for the majority of the first couple of seasons since gaining promotion. But barring once, Brentford never dropped into the red zone in the middle stages to latter stages of the league.
Another unique aspect about Brentford is how their progression curve within a season is almost always on the ascent after the initial few gameweeks. Except for 2015–16 where they had a steep decline in the 35–40 gameweeks range, their worm is always on the rise.
To establish the fact that Brentford’s progression is one of a kind, we take a look at how fellow promotion gainers in the 2014–15 and 2015–16 performed in the Championship. Besides a couple of seasons, Brentford finished above them in all of them.
A couple of sides suffered relegation as well in this time span, including one club who suffered relegation, then got promoted and again got relegated. Wolves won the league in 2017–18 however, that was accompanied with a good amount of spending.
Let us have a look Brentford’s spending over the years.
Transfer Activity
Having had a looked at Brentford’s performances in the Championship, one will not be blamed if they thought this had come after some significant spending. Here is a viz. Except for 2014–15 which saw Brentford finish 5th on return to the Championship, Brentford always generated profit through transfer activity.
Three years of careful selling and spending saw the club gain some stability in the league after which they generated a record £31.46 million in 2018–19 of which they used £5.90 million in buying players in the same season. And thus the board thought its time to take a crack at the Premier League! A number of players arrived at Griffin Park for the 2019–20 season. But guess what? They generated some profit even after that spend as well. That is some planning and execution.
The crack at the Premier League return
The top 11 most active footballers of Brentford in the league last season gives you a fair idea about how Thomas Frank likes his team to operate. David Raya has been the undisputed number 1 goalkeeper and quite rightly so. Had it not been for his penalty save at Swansea, Brentford could have bid aideu to the Premier League dream a week earlier.
Frank prefers a traditional back 4 with Pinnock and Jansson forming the defensive pairing which allowed Rico Henry and Henrik Dalsgaard to run down the flanks. Christian Norgaard, Mathias Jensen and Josh daSilva formed the 3-man midfield core.
Said Benrahma, Bryan Mbeumo and Ollie Watkins formed their famed front three about which I will come back to a bit later in this article.
Thomas Frank loves his team to attack and score goals. This viz shows how his front 3 supported each other and racked up the goals. The BMW strike force of Benrahma, Mbuemo and Watkins all figure prominently in the list with significant playing time as well.
The BMW front 3 contributed to almost 60 goals for Brentford in the last season, outnumbering the other sides’ forward lines by quite some mile. This after Brentford sold Neal Maupay, their leading striker in 2018–19 to Brighton earlier in the season. Mbeumo had just arrived at the beginning of the 2019–20 season. Benrahma had arrived a year earlier. The cohesion the front 3 had built in a small period of time was staggering. Data might be the reason why Brentford had bought them in the first place but the data cannot cause partnerships to click, can they?
“I just know one thing — that when we start next season, we will have a very strong side out there again, and we’re ready to push.”
Being a selling club has its troubles but that has been the tried and tested way for Brentford. One will be highly surprised if Brentford manages to keep hold of striker Ollie Watkins and winger Said Benrahma amidst the rumors and links to a host of Premier League clubs. But Brentford’s recent history suggest that Thomas Frank’s words post that 1–2 loss to Fulham in the playoff final is not to be pushed aside.
The data for the majority of this article was collected from fbref.com in collaboration with StatsBomb. The transfer related data was scraped from transfermarkt.co.in using WebHarvy tool. The original data collected was pre-processed in Python before the visualizations were made using Tableau.
Here is the link to the concerned repository: https://github.com/PritamGuha31/Brentford-Analysis
