Brentford Bees Forum With Manager and Sporting Directors

25 Sep 2015

Brentford Bees Forum With Manager and Sporting Directors

An excellent forum was held where all questions were answered as best as reasonably they could. The only difficult moment was a late question again about Mark Warburton and his departure. The fans were given good updates on all aspects of the club. These were maybe the main points:

Promotion to Premier League within 3 years. This is Plan A. There is no Plan B
The new ground should be ready, just, for start of 2018-19 season
Signing a couple of players on loan has not been ruled out to cover injuries
We need to remember than until we move ground we are limited by the small turnover in comparison to other Championship clubs. Last season Brentford turned over 8 m £ in comparison to a Championship average of 17m £
Although signing many EU players, players in the Football League are on our radar even down to Conference level
Football league rules do not allow differential pricing of games for away fans. The example cited of Leeds charging £24 for a junior away ticket for example could not replicated at Griffin Park
The squad is stronger than last season.

In attendance answering questions were

Mark Devlin
Cliff Crown
Marinus Dijkhuizen
Rasmus Ankersen
Phil Giles
Peter Gilham

As a small bit of background Rasmus ankersen and Phil Giles are the co-directors of football at Brentford, Cliff Crown the chairman, Mark Devlin CEO and Marinus Dijkhuizen the manager.

Phil Giles worked at Smartodds – a company owned by Matthew Benham which provides statistical sports modelling services – for eight years and had been their Head of Quantitative Sports Research since 2010
Rasmus Ankersen was Chairman of FC Midtjylland the Danish Superliga team owned by Matthew Benham and author of a book ” The Goldmine Effect”.