It is a beautiful, bright afternoon at Brentford’s Jersey Road training base adjacent to Osterley Park, a country estate on the western edge of London. A Turf Tank Two robot fitted with a club crest, known as Pontus after their former captain, Pontus Jansson, is marking white lines on to an otherwise spotless pitch, revamped last summer. Grass may seem an odd place to start but the green stuff is an example of how small details paint the big picture.
“We can go toe-to-toe with Man City on those sorts of things because the bottom-line money isn’t going to stop us – it’s not a £100m striker,” says Ben Ryan, the club’s director of elite performance. “Every department here, we’re setting them the objective to be the best in the Premier League.”
Ryan, the former England and Fiji rugby sevens coach who also worked as a consultant for Nike, was an intriguing appointment 14 months ago and his broad remit speaks to Brentford’s fastidious, open-minded approach to competing with the elite.
Culture, Ryan says, has tended to be the last cab off the rank, but not at Brentford. Upon walking through their upgraded training ground he carried out an MOT of sorts. “You start to look at low-hanging fruit: what’s below and above the line? If you consider things above the line to be a standard that you are really proud of, then what’s below it? What are we doing that we could do better?”
Ryan is among five staff, including the head coach, Thomas Frank, who report into Phil Giles, the director of football, while medical, welfare, logistics and kit staff feed into him. It easy to marvel at Ryan as, in his first interview since taking the job, he talks everything from wind surveys, stud plates and sweat-wicking technology to being sensible, a buzz word at Brentford.
“I use the analogy that performance and culture is a garden,” he says, telling how some “bushes” require no attention, others need pruning and occasionally there are one or two that no matter how much they water them, it makes little impact. “Then you have to do other things.”
These days the grounds staff incorporates people with experience of working at everywhere from the Stade de France and Wembley to golf clubs and parks. “It was hard to practise corners because the pitches weren’t good enough; they were too slippy and there wasn’t enough grass coverage.
“It gets windy here, so it was: ‘Let’s do a survey and find out how we can mitigate wind on pitches.’ We can’t have 80% of staff from non-football backgrounds in the building, but we can probably have 20%. Just to keep people honest: don’t get groupthink or cognitive blindness where you’re just thinking: ‘This is how we do it, this is how it’s done.’”
Football, Ryan says, can be stubborn to change. “More than occasionally there might be something you’ve seen and you think: ‘I know what the solution is.’ The easy bit is going: ‘OK, I know where we need to get to.’ But the middle bit is the difficult bit because you have to persuade people who have done things a certain way for a long time – it might be a chef, groundsman, masseur, a coach, physio or a player – and so there is this in-between space where you have to negotiate and persuade. I’ve found that, in a good way, challenging.”
One of the things on Ryan’s to-do list is to investigate how Brentford can further personalise nutrition. Another is, on the face of it at least, more simple. “We want to be the happiest club in the league and the world,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we’re happy to lose. We’d be very unhappy if we’re not in the Premier League.
“You don’t have to be that club where interns are sleeping under the desk because they think more hours means they’re showing their worth or where there are certain areas of the training ground where you can’t walk. ‘Don’t walk down there, that’s just for the manager and the first-team coaches.’ We want to make sure we are at optimal standard for as long and as often as we can.”
In many ways for Ryan this is the dream job. A longstanding Brentford season-ticket holder, he remembers the pain of Marcello Trotta’s penalty miss at Griffin Park a decade ago and then the joy of promotion the following season. “I don’t think that changed things massively for them but at least they thought: ‘Well, he watches football. He might know nothing about it, but he does occasionally watch football.’”
Working in football is not alien to him either. He has worked with Paris Saint-Germain, Major League Soccer and about half the Premier League sides, as well as one day a week at AFC Wimbledon a couple of seasons ago. “I kind of had football buzzing around me but I hadn’t really got into the granularity of it all.”
So, how does he play it with Frank? “I’ll never say to him: ‘Why are we playing three centre-backs today?’ It’s his domain. You lose credibility very quickly if you start to tread into other areas. It has slowly germinated, our relationship. I have come in at a senior level, I’m an ex-coach: so what’s my agenda? Have I suddenly got a crazy plan that I want to be a manager of a Premier League team?” Ryan says, breaking into laughter. “His energy and consistency means that players and staff feel he is very approachable. I think he is fantastic. He is not one of those coaches where you’re not sure who you’re going to get today.”
There are the “little edges” Ryan is always on the lookout for. Brentford have introduced aromas across the Robert Rowan performance centre – named after the club’s former technical director who died of heart failure in 2018 aged 28 – and stadium, including the home changing room.
“You want to be in an environment that you want to stay in,” Ryan says. “I had a few conversations with people who created the aromas in Las Vegas hotels … some smells elicit slightly higher cognitive thinking: for example, there is a slightly different smell in the offices.” Ryan is conscious how this may read. “Great, he’s gone to the supermarket and got a Glade,” he says with a chuckle.
They discovered last season’s blue away kit soaked up sweat, meaning every player was carrying an extra 500g during games, so Brentford often decided to wear their third kit instead and ensured that the kit manufacturer, Umbro, remedied the issue. Talk of getting kitted out leads the conversation on to how the All Blacks had shirts, shorts and socks for the Rugby World Cup individually tailored after travelling to the Adidas headquarters in Bavaria, and their visit to Jersey Road last month.
“They spent more than an hour bouncing ideas around with our players. There were lots of questions around playing with knocks and niggles. Sam Whitelock has 148 caps for the All Blacks but said he was fit for about two of those and wanted to tell some of the boys that, as long as it doesn’t make your injury worse, it’s all right to play with a bit of discomfort and pain.”
It made Ryan think about the recovery tools available at Brentford. They have access to an “old-school sauna out the back”, compression boots, masseurs and a whirlpool. He went into Google’s offices to “play around” with their dry flotation tank but knows it is essential to strike a delicate balance when it comes to toys. Back to Pontus, they are set to add another robot that overnight reads the measurements of the pitches so that coaches can check they are standardised.
“Let’s be honest, every Premier League team has a decent amount of cash to spend. They can just go: ‘Yeah, we’ll get that bit of kit or let’s create a new job.’ Increasing the headcount, in the short term, solves problems but if we get to a point where we don’t know everyone in that building by name and what they’re doing then we’re going away from what we want. You look at other clubs, the amount of people when there is a warmup … you just see these huge entourages. I’m like: ‘Please, Brentford, we can’t.’ I never want it to be like that.”
