THERE’S A BUZZ AROUND THE BEES
Pushing for promotion and moving to a gleaming new home, no wonder...
WInD down the window and listen carefully and the buzz might be heard from a drive- by on the M4 flyover.
Inside the boardroom which overlooks the gleaming new stadium the talk is of little else and slogans on the wall promise ‘calculated risks’ and ‘pioneering new methods’. By kick-off against Leicester in the FA Cup today the excitement will be crackling.
Brentford are on the move. Fifth in the Championship with eyes on promotion as they prepare to migrate after 116 years at Griffin Park to a new home less than a mile and yet a world away.
‘ The phrase “the stars are aligned” comes to mind,’ says chairman Cliff Crown as he savours the prospect of throwing open the doors of the Brentford Community Stadium in August for the club’s first top-flight campaign since 1946-47.
He hastily adds: ‘This is football, we’ve got 18 games to go, 54 points up for grabs. We’ll see where we get to but we’re in the mix and that’s as much as we could hope for.’
Plans to leave Griffin Park have been in the air for more than 40 years and before that there was a deeply unpopular plot to merge with Queens Park Rangers. ‘When I was a kid they were talking about moving to the Western International Market near Heathrow,’ says chief executive Jon Varney. ‘Thank goodness that didn’t happen, it would have ripped the football club out of Brentford.’
Varney is a lifelong Bees fan, raised in nearby Hanworth where his grandparents owned the Oxford Arms pub and operated a minibus service to home games. On his early visits he was lifted over the turnstiles at the Ealing Road End.
He has seen Stan Bowles, Terry Hurlock and Chris Kamara don the stripes, but often it was the company and intimacy of a stadium with a pub on each corner and a tiny stand affectionately known as the Wendy House that made up for low-grade football and limited success.
‘That comes with its challenges,’ says Varney. ‘Our fans are the best in the world at getting into the stadium two minutes before kick-off.’ Brentford spent 58 of 59 years until 2014 languishing in the third and fourth tiers. For 12 seasons from the mid- Sixties they were the lowest-ranked London club in the Football League.
Only when Matthew Benham took control eight years ago with the club in League One did the outlook brighten.
‘He’s been our saviour,’ says Varney. ‘An owner with a very clear vision and the catalyst for getting us to where we are now and where we believe we can go. Prior to Matthew we were static. Since his involvement we’ve done nothing but progress. Who knows where we’d be without him.’
Benham is a Bees fans who made his fortune in the gambling industry and has adapted the data analysis he devised into a recruitment system which has fuelled the club’s rise. neal Maupay, James Tarkowski, Jon Egan, Chris Mepham, Andre Gray, Ezri Konsa and Jota are all in the Premier League having been identified and developed by the system controlled by co- directors of football Rasmus Ankersen and Phil Giles. Maupay, signed from SaintEtienne for £1.6million, was sold to Brighton last summer for 10 times the fee. Profits from transfers have fuelled the vision of Benham to transform the club into a slick, modern operation. They scrapped the academy and created a B-team to develop young players recruited after their release from other clubs around Europe. Benham is modest, unassuming and fiercely private. He has connected with supporters online and promotes an inclusive culture. He also grasped the nettle of the stadium project and the shiny 17,250capacity venue has risen in the last year. The first test events will be in the spring.
‘Most people have watched its rise from the M4 flyover,’ says Crown. ‘Almost everybody I see tells me they drove past and thought it looked amazing. Many fans must have doubted whether it would ever really happen.’
‘ This unlocks a tremendous opportunity for us,’ says Varney. ‘We will go from 60 hospitality spaces on a match day to 2,900. That’s not a little change.’
They want to ensure the legacy of Griffin Park survives. There are talks with the Borough of Hounslow about names of the roads around the new stadium and plans to recycle the old click turnstiles for the bars and concourses.
The boardroom will be named after Harry Curtis, manager when Brentford were promoted from the third tier to the first and finished as London’s top club in 1936, a point above Arsenal.
Curtis left in 1949, the year Griffin Park recorded its biggest crowd of 38,678 at an FA Cup tie against Leicester. There won’t be so many in today but it will be packed and it will get noisy if Frank’s Bees can sting high-flying Leicester.