Using statistical analysis to sign players, ditching their academy and scrapping the captaincy are some of the innovations that have turned Brentford into Championship contenders

With the transfer deadline looming on Thursday, you could forgive scurrying rivals for peering over the wall at Brentford in envy. It may seem an odd thing to say given they have lost their captain, John Egan, and the winger Florian Jozefzoon to Championship competitors this summer but few clubs navigate transfer windows better.

Brentford do not panic but rather rebuild and, once more, Dean Smith’s stimulating side – top of the tree after a thumping 5-1 first-game win – have plans for surprising the field.

They are comfortable in their own shell, happy at being different from the rest, visionaries of sorts. Brentford cross-reference potential signings through the owner Matthew Benham’s statistical-analysis company, SmartOdds, and ditched their £2m‑a‑year academy two years ago. This pre-season the manager, Smith, scrapped the captaincy altogether – long before the £4m sale of Egan to Sheffield United – preferring a leadership group. Smith is intrigued by rugby, particularly the freedom for players to get involved in the tactics of the game. He has gathered titbits from visits from the French Rugby Federation and London Irish, while he has an invitation to watch Eddie Jones’s England team.

Middlesbrough cope without Traoré in home win over Sheffield United Read more

“I think we’re not afraid to break the mould,” says Smith, who left Walsall for Brentford in 2015. “I’m not sure the model of having one captain fits within football now. Sometimes when you have a captain you end up with more followers than leaders, and we want to create leaders. I like the way they think in rugby and I think that’s something we can learn from as well. We work on set pieces in football and the players are struggling at times to remember 12 different routines but in rugby you can have 120 different lineout calls and they’re expected to remember them.”

A hybrid of careful planning, forensic scouting and sage spending is fundamental to their recruitment, headed by the technical director, Robert Rowan, in tandem with the co-directors Rasmus Ankersen, also the chairman of FC Midtjylland, the Danish club owned by Benham, and Phil Giles, a maths graduate with a PhD in statistics. Brentford buy not only by numbers but personality; they do their homework, extensive due diligence and referencing.

They are scavenged for their best players season-on-season but successfully replenish their squad in a similar way in which Southampton, in the Premier League, and Peterborough, in League One, have done; they invest in potential, create value and, more often than not, sell for a healthy profit. When the top‑scorer Clayton Donaldson left for Birmingham in the summer of 2014, they signed Andre Gray for £500,000 and Scott Hogan for £750,000 – players they sold for £9m and £12m respectively in 2015 and 2017.

Two years ago they sold the future England defender James Tarkowski to Burnley. Sometimes it is a roulette of calculated risks; last summer the sales of Harlee Dean, Maxime Colin and Jota – who left for a total of almost £12m – were countered by the arrivals of £1.8m Ollie Watkins, £1.6m Neal Maupay and Kamohelo Mokotjo, for £880,000. The list goes on and on – in total it is estimated they have made a profit of £50m by selling 11 players since 2014. This summer Ezri Konsa, the England Under-21 defender, replaced Egan while Julian Jeanvier arrived from the Ligue 2 champions, Reims.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manager Dean Smith joined Brentford from Walsall in 2015. Photograph: TGSPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Brentford are not naive, they know if a bigger fish comes calling for Chris Mepham, the Wales international and a graduate of the B team who replaced their academy side, or Watkins they could be blown out of the water. Bournemouth admire both, Leicester particularly the former, while Ryan Woods, a £1m buy from Shrewsbury in 2015, will likely leave for seven times that amount if Swansea meet his valuation.

“There has to be a balancing act, we cannot keep selling our best players all of the time and we have to stand firm sometimes at what can be head-turning finances for some of our players,” Smith says.

Brentford are fluid, teeming with pace and power, typified by the zest of Romaine Sawyers or Rico Henry, the England Under-20 international who has returned to light training, kicking a ball again following a serious knee injury. Watkins, who was on loan at Weston-super-Mare from Exeter only three years ago, was the pick of the bunch last season, scoring 11 goals.

It was no surprise he handled the step up but the 22-year-old did have a shock when Smith knocked on the door of his apartment. “With a lot of the new players, I like to go and visit them, to make sure they have settled into the new area,” Smith says, laughing. “Ollie had moved in and he said you can only come around if you bring me a moving-in present, so I surprised him with a fish tank. And I believe he got some fish named Dean and Richard, after myself and Richard O’Kelly [the assistant manager].”

Brentford’s Ollie Watkins: ‘We play some of the best football in the league’ | Ben Fisher Read more

A slow start hindered Brentford last season – they did not win in the league until 23 September – but they went on to secure a fourth consecutive top-10 finish since promotion in 2014. For a team who have quietly unearthed tomorrow’s stars, on the pitch, Brentford are making a case to be heard. Now, in their last full season at their 104-year-old Griffin Park home (famously a stadium with a pub in each corner), there is an ambition to take the next step, with the trouncing of Rotherham setting the bar high for the rest of the season, including the trip to Stoke on Saturday.

“This season I think there is a lot more unknown in the league,” Smith says. “We don’t know how Frank Lampard will do at Derby, how Darren Moore will do at West Brom, Stoke have got Gary Rowett in, Marcelo Bielsa at Leeds, which may open it up for everyone. We feel we have been consistent over the past few years and it gives us an opportunity to go and compete in that top six.”

The Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email.

Talking points

• Sheffield Wednesday are working with the EFL to lift their transfer embargo. Joey Pelupessy, the Dutch midfielder, has been Jos Luhukay’s only signing since his appointment in January. The club’s owner, Dejphon Chansiri, said: “Some people, maybe more, say I spend not wisely on players which I disagree.”

• Nigel Adkins eats, sleeps and breathes positivity but there is no hiding from the disenchantment among Hull supporters. A crowd of just over 14,000, a number which includes Aston Villa’s travelling contingent of more than 2,000, witnessed their 3-1 home defeat on Monday – their smallest opening home gate since moving to the KCOM Stadium in 2003.

• Ninety-four minutes into their new season, Blackpool are manager-less after Gary Bowyer quit. The 47-year-old departed two days after an opening-day 0-0 draw, having grown tired of economic frailties, including the sales of key players and a situation whereby he paid for training facilities in Preston out of his own pocket before being reimbursed by the club.

• Having retained Christian Doidge, Forest Green Rovers are feeling optimistic. Mark Cooper stressed the importance of staying grounded after a 4-1 win over Grimsby but their hopes are plain for all to see; they have three stars emblazoned on the back of this season’s shirts, one to commemorate promotion to the Football League last year, and the other two to “represent the chairman Dale Vince’s ambition to reach the Championship in the coming seasons”.

• Brandon Barker has joined Preston on a season-long loan from Manchester City. The 21-year-old has been with City since the age of eight and spent last season on loan at Hibernian.