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Brentford’s sporting director has admitted that the club will find it difficult to prevent Dean Smith revisiting Griffin Park and tempting members of the Bees squad to Villa Park in the January transfer window.

Smith was confirmed as Steve Bruce’s successor at Aston Villa on Wednesday and will likely look to add to his inherited squad once the winter window commences.

There is a chance he will look to raid the team he knows so well, which includes the division’s top scorer Neal Maupay and winger Ollie Watkins.

Bees sporting director Phil Giles, though insisting that there are no guarantees that Smith will be reunited with any potential targets, did concede that if a sufficient offer was made for any of the array of Brentford stars it’d be hard to reject said bid.

Much will depend on where the club find themselves in the league table come January.

“If he [Smith] wants to make offers then we can accept or decline those offers as we wish,” Giles told a fan forum, as reported by Football.London.

“If they want to offer massive money for one of our players then it might be in our interest to sell the player, I don’t know. There is no restriction to stop him going after our players.

“If we’re in the top six or the top two in January we won’t be selling players.

“It comes down to how likely we are to be promoted at any point. If we’ve got a high likelihood of being promoted we’ll be very, very reluctant to sell players.

"There would be huge prices on the players and it would be something that we’d want to build towards promotion, and hopefully they’d want to stay too and see us having a great chance.

“In previous years in January we’ve had a pretty low chance of getting promoted.

“If we’re sitting in 12th or seven points off the play-offs; that’s only three wins but when you have six or seven teams above you there’s a lot of things that have to happen to get in the play-offs to have a 25% chance of being promoted.”