It’s not so long ago that some Brentford players were on £120 per week and the team were playing in front of crowds of 5,000 at a decaying Griffin Park.
The main aim for Brentford owner Mathew Benham and club
executives is something that would have seemed fanciful at the time. It is no
longer to avoid relegation into the fourth tier, but to get their global
profile nearer to that of their west London neighbours Chelsea.
While they are thriving amid Benham’s data science
adventure, which involves a cell of PhD students mining the physiological and
biological data of the first-team squad, they are looking for some help to make
the club nicknamed “The Bees”, well, a bit more glamorous.
Their geekery has helped to garner a smattering of new
American fans, taking Brentford’s social media following to about five million,
but that’s still a fraction of Chelsea’s 150 million followers. “When you’re
not one of the top six or seven it’s very difficult to create a positioning,”
the chief executive Jon Varney says.
With a view both to strengthening the squad and “a big
investment around content creation” — there are at present no plans for a Welcome
to Wrexham-style series — Benham’s entourage is more than a year into
various talks with potential investors, many of them from the US and UK.
Apart from a brief spell in the 1930s, Brentford have lived
in the shadow of Chelsea. While Brentford dallied in non-League for the first
three decades of their existence, Chelsea strolled straight into the Football
League: in their first season, 67,000 spectators turned up for a home game
against Manchester United in 1906.
The Mears family who owned Chelsea were
billionaires in today’s money, building Stamford Bridge by a London Underground
station to pull in the crowds that kept on coming. Brentford, meanwhile,
slipped into lower-league obscurity after the war, attendances dipping to
5,000, until Benham arrived.
After graduating with a physics degree from Oxford
University, he took a job in the City of London with Yamaichi Securities, later
moving to Bank of America. As a 22-year-old trader, he overheard an older peer
say that his gut feeling was the market would rebound. Benham considered this
kind of intuitive thinking to be nonsense.
Over the past 15 years, Benham has spent barely £100million
on transforming Brentford. Chelsea’s expenditure over the same period is north
of £3billion. Varney, the chief
executive, says the club is in good financial shape having paid for their move
from Griffin Park to the 17,250-seat Gtech Community Stadium in 2020 and
invested close to £50million in upgrading the training ground at Osterley, near
Heathrow Airport.
The new ground, not to mention the appeal of the Premier
League, has tweaked the demographic of the fan base, attracting more young
fans, affluent west London middle classes from Ealing, Chiswick and Richmond.
There are huddles of fans from Denmark and South Korea, among other countries,
at home games.
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