Brentford

Brentford are the club that proved Moneyball works in football, and the rest of the Premier League still has not figured out how to respond. The Bees ended a 74-year absence from the top flight in 2021 and have not merely survived but thrived, using a data-driven approach to recruitment that makes the bloated spending of their west London neighbours look faintly embarrassing. This is a club that buys players nobody has heard of, turns them into internationals, sells them for five times the purchase price, and then does it all over again. If that is not the most subversive act in modern English football, it is difficult to imagine what would be.

Thomas Frank, the Dane who has been in charge since 2018, deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Premier League’s elite managers, and the fact that he is not tells you everything about the game’s snobbery toward smaller clubs. Frank’s Brentford play energetic, attacking football in a 17,250-seat Gtech Community Stadium that generates noise completely disproportionate to its size. Every player who arrives at this club gets better. Every player who leaves was sold at exactly the right moment. The system is almost irritatingly efficient.

Australian fans who believe sport should reward intelligence over wealth will find Brentford intoxicating. The Bees are a standing rebuke to the idea that you need a billionaire’s chequebook to compete at the highest level.

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Brentford’s 2025-26 campaign is further validation of a model that the football establishment desperately wants to dismiss but cannot. Frank, now one of the longest-serving managers in the division, continues to oversee a cycle of recruitment, development, and profit that should be studied in business schools. The Gtech Community Stadium provides an electric matchday atmosphere, and every time a so-called bigger club arrives expecting an easy three points, they are reminded why Brentford have become the fixture nobody wants to play. The gap between the Premier League’s haves and have-nots is real — but the Bees keep finding ways to narrow it through sheer intellectual superiority.

VS — Chief sports columnist, australiafootball.com