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Brentford owner reveals the dream team he almost built
Martin Macdonald
- 10 Mar 2026 13:08 GMT
- 5 min read
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Brentford owner Matthew Benham has revealed a list of players the club very nearly signed over the last few years - and it makes for a hell of a dream team.
The Bees earned promotion to the top flight in 2021 and have since sustained themselves as Premier League regulars. One of the main reasons for that has been their outstanding recruitment as they purchase players for relatively low fees before selling them for big-money.
Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa, as the two most recent examples, fetched Brentford a combined €138 million (£120m) last summer after they were sold to Manchester United and Newcastle, respectively.
An impressive recruitment strategy needs to be in place to achieve these goals and that certainly seems to be the case at Brentford. Even when looking at the players they came close to signing, they might actually have had one of the strongest squads in the whole Premier League.
"There's always going to be ones you regret," Benham said at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston.
"We could have signed [Eberechi] Eze for £4m, I think, in 2019. We could also have signed [Omar] Marmoush on a free about three years ago.
"The summer we got promoted to the Premier League, there was actually two players that scouted amazingly, amazingly well.
"One was [Mykhailo] Mudryk which was maybe a bit complicated if we signed, though we were quite close to signing him for a low fee, for about €20m.
"Then Michael Olise. His scouting was unbelievable, out of this world. But we had just got promoted and we weren't used to the crazy agent fees in the Premier League at the time.
"The agent fee for that one was so insanely high that we stepped away, even though there was part of us thinking 'Well, if you combine the agent fee and the transfer fee, it's kind of not too bad,' but the agent fee on its own was just so insane that we stepped away."
Brentford set-piece trend setters
Everyone knows about the reliance on set-pieces in the Premier League in 2025/26, with league leaders Arsenal making the news every week about their perceived lack of goals from open play.
The trend arguably started with Brentford, though, as current manager Keith Andrews was actually the club's set-piece coach last season before replacing Thomas Frank in the hot seat in the summer.
Benham says the club looked to take inspiration from the NFL and its 'plays'.
"I'm a fan of the NFL, and whenever I'd raise it in football and ask why they can't have a playbook [for set pieces], they'd say it's way too complicated," Benham explained.
"But the main resistance to set pieces was that the players don't like boring training. I was told players like fun training, so no boring learning or repetition or slow walk-throughs. And to be good at set-pieces you need a lot of rote learning, repetition, slow walk-throughs, so teams weren't doing it.
"And traditionally, if the players didn't like it and the manager tried to push it, he might lose the dressing room.
"That was why we tried to push, and for whatever reason it worked better in FC Midtjylland. But it wasn't about data."
Benham says he was initially apprehensive about giving Andrews the big job, however.
“We realised that we were in a high-risk scenario anyway with the high turnover of staff and players. So we could have brought in a big name from outside with an entourage, but that would have been a big risk in itself,” the Bees owner recalled.
“Keith seemed like the clear and logical candidate but maybe we were in our bubble because when it was announced and there was all this uproar we were like, ‘Oh f***ing hell, what have we done?’”
There was indeed some trepidation once Andrews was announced and some pundits even suggested Brentford were favourites to be relegated, especially after selling their two top forwards in Mbeumo and Wissa.
However, they have defied expectations and remarkably sit seventh in the Premier League, with European football next season a real possibility.
In the absence of Mbeumo and Wissa, Igor Thiago has emerged as a lethal Premier League forward with 18 goals to his name this season. Only Manchester City superstar Erling Haaland has scored more in 2025/26.
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