This American is submitting his application for Brentford FC fandom
If you asked me where Brentford is located prior to this summer I would have been able to guess it was in the UK -- it sounds British to me. But that's all I could tell you.
Nevertheless I am hereby submitting my application to be a Brentford FC fan. Why, you might ask?
Let me explain.
First of all, a quick Google search shows Brentford is a borough located in west London, not necessarily some downtrodden industrial city in the north of England like I imagined.
Second, this team drips underdog vibes. No club has experienced more playoff heartache in the lower divisions of English football than Brentford. Prior to their win in the English Football League championship playoff final in May, the Bees failed in all previous nine attempts to secure promotion into the Premier League; no team has lost more EFL playoff finals than Brentford. And even as recently as 12 years ago they found themselves in League Two (for the Americans reading, that's the fourth division of English football -- somewhat akin to Single A if baseball had a promotion-relegation system).
Their coach is Thomas Frank, a Dane with fantastic hair. With the win in the playoffs he became the first Brentford manager since Harry Curtis in 1934-35 to take the club into England's top-flight competition. In fact, he has the best win percentage of any Brentford manager that has at least 100 matches to his name since 1920-21, when the Bees entered the Football League. Other than that I don't know much about Frank, but he certainly seems like a Ted Lasso character.
The player to know is Ivan Toney. All he did this past season was break the record for most goals in a Championship regular season with 31. Excluding penalties Toney potted home 22 goals on 20.6 Expected Goals, according to Stats Perform, and including the playoffs, he scored 33 in 46 total matches. The former Newcastle United player contributed 42 percent of the Bees’ overall goals last season, none bigger than his first half strike from the penalty spot in the Championship playoff final.
They also have a sparkling new stadium, which will debut with fans in the Premier League season opener against Arsenal on August 13. It should be a sight to see as fans will finally be allowed back in the ground.
But the real reason I want to root for the Premiership debutants is how they've leaned into analytics. They're a smaller budget club about to compete in a league where success is heavily correlated with the size of its pocket book. According to Transfermarkt, they will be fielding the Premier League's youngest team in 2021-22 and the fourth cheapest by market value. Brentford is worth $180M vs. Manchester City's $1.17B for comparison. Chelsea, another Premier League blue blood that Brentford will have to face twice, made a splashy signing on Thursday by breaking the club's all-time transfer record for Romelu Lukaku, which put them in City's stratosphere of $1B+ in total market value.
As an aside, Transfermarkt's Market Value is the expected value of a player in an open market, with numerous factors taken into account to calculate his market demand. It uses aggregated estimates of the site's user community and contemplates a variety of statistics, including age, length of contract and any previous transfer fees to arrive at a number.
Making it to the Premier League is no small feat; it means payday for clubs that get promoted. A Financial Times analysis of Deloitte's Football Money League showed that within the top 15 European teams, English clubs earned more revenues on average in nine of the past 16 seasons -- and given the league's global appeal and huge TV broadcast rights deal, its dominance is only increasing. That means Brentford will be able to better execute on its strategy than ever before with this new cash infusion thanks to promotion.
Speaking of strategy, fellow Championship side Barnsley got quite a bit of attention at the end of last season as football's equivalent of the Moneyball A's due to its link with Billy Beane, but Brentford have their own Beane in club owner Matthew Benham.
Benham is reportedly a childhood fan of the club and really sets the process-first tone the Bees are becoming known for. In a recent The Athletic profile of Brentford's Director of Player Recruitment, this nugget stood out: "Benham wants Brentford to out-think competitors, not out-spend them." They were among the first clubs to employ a separate coach for throw-ins, set-pieces and were even the first to hire a sleep coach, according to The Athletic's reporting. Ted Knutson, co-founder of the football data and analytics site StatsBomb, was also an early hire during the 2014-15 season. While he's no longer associated with the club, it shows Benham's dedication to making his an analytics savvy organization.
By all accounts Brentford are a data-driven club known for thinking differently. Its decision to fold its academy in favor of having a B-team, and shrewd, profitable moves in the transfer market -- like finding talents such as Ollie Watkins and Said Benrahma before selling them for a large profit -- has piqued appreciative interest in its operating model. On the pitch the Bees play with a signature style rooted in solid possession numbers and pressure high up the pitch without the ball. They put emphasis on chance creation and quality when in the attacking third, hallmarks of the ever growing "Expected Goals" philosophy.
According to the Twitter thread above, Benham spent nearly $10 million on another club, FC Midtylland in Denmark, to act as a sort of research lab to test out his strategic concepts. In true Moneyball fashion this allowed the team to find undervalued players, help them flourish and eventually be sold for those record profits.
Tom Worville, also of The Athletic, wrote a few months ago as the team looked poised to reach the next level: "Brentford, then, are a club with all of the pillars in place to succeed at the highest level. There’s the new ground, the now well-trodden talent pathway to first team and a tactical identity which has been honed in recent seasons."
This could be the beginning of a true American underdog story -- across the pond in London. You can consider this Yank Brentford's newest supporter.
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If you're interested in the code for creation of the player age-market value table above you can go to my GitHub to find the R script for that.