Is it Munn’s job or the DOF’s job to build a database of staff options like this?
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Management Director of Football
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Brentford's owner and Brighton's use to work together I believe the Brentford owner basically stole the Brighton owners moneyball formula and used it there. Or it could be vice versa there's quite a bit off animosity between them both apaz
Well, if we want to believe what the spurs journos are reporting it’s levy with munn not starting until July. But he was pictured with levy the other day so we’ve got to assume he’s on board with sorting things out.
Here’s the epically long athletic article on Dykes, Brentford, data etc.
In just under a month, Brentford host Woolwich in the Premier League. It’s a Friday night to kick off the new season, Brentford’s first game in the top flight in 74 years.
On that day, May 26, 1947, the same opposition were the visitors and it finished “1-0 to The Woolwich”.
Brentford were closer in years then to their founding by a boat club in nearby Kew than to 2021.
This new, lean, data-driven version of the club is unrecognisable from its ancestors. Once, players changed in the Griffin pub beside the ground; today, Griffin Park is no longer home and Brentford know four potential signings in Uruguay for every position. Old Brentford 1889 are a most modern football machine.
In a cafe near his native Hull, Lee Dykes confirms this transformation.
Dykes has been director of player recruitment at Brentford for a little over two years. Having been at clubs such Carlisle United and doomed Bury, he knows life outside the Premier League and both he and Brentford are entitled to be nervous about the coming season. Not a bit of it. This is Brentford2021.
“Do we want to be the proverbial mid-table team?” asks Dykes (inset above). “We think with our structure and our people, we can be a great addition to the Premier League. We will strive to get better every game, hopefully surprise a few.”
Dykes’s tone is pragmatic. Surprising a few, Brentford think, is a realistic ambition. “Last season,” he adds, “we beat Fulham, Southampton and Newcastle United in the League Cup. So we back ourselves. And we’ll get better. It’s not simply about survival, it’s about establishing ourselves as a Premier League team, which includes survival, then in the future being a European Premier League team.
“There’s no time scale and, listen, it’s going to be tough. Of course it is. We might get beat 8-0 by Man City but we might beat Southampton 2-1. That’s where we are with things. We are also OK if we come back down — we’ll be thinking about going back up. It may take five years and two relegations to become established, but that is,longer-term, the aim.”
Dykes is part of a Brentford hierarchy centred on owner Matthew Benham, co-directors of football Rasmus Ankersen and Phil Giles and head coach Thomas Frank.
They have won admiration for taking a club that was losing a London derby to Leyton Orient in League One in September 2013 to consecutive Championship play-off finals and into the PremierLeague to meet rather different London opposition in Woolwich at the new Brentford Community Stadium. Along the way, Brentford have bought and sold so shrewdly and profitably that they have become a template club. Benham’s focus on data, and creating and curating your own, not relying on others, has given Brentford an edge in recruitment and a profile as young, fresh and inventive.
Buying Neal Maupay, Ollie Watkins and Said Benrahma for a combined £9.8 million and selling them for £77 million raises eyebrows ofappreciation in recruitment circles. Deciding to work without an academy and to instead use a B team is another illustration of a club that thinks and behaves differently.
Dykes is a rare figure in football in that he can say in passing: “I built my own algorithm at Carlisle.” How Benham’s outlook, and Brentford’s application of it, is what attracted Dykes to them and them to him. So it is notable when Dykes is discussing last season’s promotion he says that for all the modernity and innovation, Brentford placed great emphasis on traditional human values such as experience and team spirit.
“We’re massive on togetherness,” he says. “Togetherness got us promoted.”
Dykes is 36. He had just been through the trauma of Bury being expelled from the EFL, where he was sporting director, when he was interviewed by Brentford in 2019.
Before that, he had been at Carlisle with Keith Curle for over three years, having started out coaching at Rotherham United’s academy when he was 20. Injury ended Dykes’ hopes of a playing career — he had not made it at Hull City or as a promising teenage rugby league player.
“Good or bad, the Bury experience was unbelievable,” he says. “I’d lived as a sporting director for a year in a financial-crisis club. Turning it around, just living it. While that was going wrong, Brentford were looking for a head of recruitment. They advertised the role, because they do it that way.
“It was a perfect match — I knew about the structures of clubs, I had a coaching background, I’d built an algorithm. Those were major box-ticks for them. There were bigger and better people than me in for the role but Brentford understood the complexity of the situations I’d been in and therelative success from those, the ability to work on a budget.
“They’re a strategy-driven club, which was geared towards achieving promotion to the Premier League. That was the basic aim — it was a lot more detailed than that. These men have a plan, which is different from others I’ve met who think they have a plan. Rasmus and Phil are two unbelievable people — with a plan. They don’t deviate from it and they trust people. They’d been at the club for around four years by 2019 and they’ll tell you, their first couple of years were fire-fighting. They’d try to change people a little bit. In the season before I arrived, of Thomas Frank’s first 10 games, they’d lost eight. But the data was saying they were performing well. I was so intrigued. Everything I’d studied, Brentford were doing it. I was sold.”
When Dykes arrived in May 2019, Brentford had just finished 11th in the Championship, their fifth season in the division following 2014’s promotion under Mark Warburton. It was acceptable, if not thrilling, but as Dykes says, those at the top: “Saw a real opportunity.
“They’d sold players like Ezri Konsa and Chris Mepham. Because of the financial constraints on so many other Championship clubs, they saw a two-to-three season chance to go to the Premier League. That was what really pulled me in. When Phil and Rasmus first met me they said they weren’t restricted by financial fair play, (that) they could invest. ‘If the recruitment is good and the coaching is good, then we can get there’.
“I back myself, so I came in. I found it very difficult at first, I was going from low-level football to European scouting. I had to get to that level. But that low-level knowledge was key, because thereare some good players down there.
“I was coming in during a hectic period. There was a collective understanding that we needed more experience and a lot of the signings in 2019 were not Brentford-like. Our reasoning was that if you sell Konsa and Mepham, both for £12 million, that’s all good. But it leaves you with two young players next to each other. If you stuck an experienced player in between them — and Brentford were playing three at the back — you might have to pay £4 million, but the other two will be sold for £15 million, because they will improve, the team will concede fewer goals. If you have four or five experienced players, your other younger assets will rise in value because you’ll finish higher up the table and you become better.
“In 2020, when we lost in the play-off final to Fulham, there was a nice consolation to take in £32 million for Watkins and £25 million for Benrahma. Both record values. But if we hadn’t finished near the top, Ollie would have gone for, say, £12 million, Said as well. The bids at the time reflected that — in 2019, other Premier League clubs were in for Ollie Watkins at a third of that amount. It just showed that what we planned had worked.”
Raising overall quality to lift individual valuations sounds like a simple equation. Pulling it off requires thought and nous.
“It was something we discussed before I took the role,” Dykes explains. “How do we get there? It can’t just be: ‘Sign better players’. The season before I arrived they had Maupay, Watkins, Benrahma — all Premier League players. They had the players but finished 11th. They also had Romaine Sawyers. So what was missing?
“What was missing was experience. Experience is invaluable. It’s all well and good coaching players, but what are they saying in the changing room when nobody’s there? Are they talking about a nightclub or promotion? That’s the thing.
“In 2019, we signed Pontus Jansson from Leeds, which surprised everybody; Ethan Pinnock, who was 26 and the best defender in League One; and David Raya out of Blackburn. Rico Henry we already had. We’d signed Christian Norgaard from Fiorentina when he was 25. People were saying to me, ‘This ain’t Brentford’.
“But we were thinking about promotion. Christian, Pontus, David, Henrik Dalsgaard, they want to get there. There’s a real togetherness. If you lose three in a row, which can happen, there’s confidence — ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get out of this’. There’s a massive thing about building a squad rather than a group of individuals. When we lost Said and Ollie people were concerned. We brought in Ivan Toney, Vitaly Janelt from (the second division in) Germany, Charlie Goodefrom Northampton. They slotted in seamlessly because of the experience around them, all this know-how.”
Dykes witnessed quickly the trust and delegation he speaks of. He was barely in the building when the club broke its transfer record.
Bryan Mbeumo was a 19-year-old with Troyes in the French second division when Dykes noticed his improving ratings on the club’s data system. It was thought, however, Mbeumo “was about to sign for Southampton for £8 million” but, as weeks passed and Mbeumo did not move to St Mary’s, Dykes began to wonder.
“Nothing was happening with Southampton,” he says, “so I contacted the agent myself and found out it wasn’t happening. So we started the process. This was a very good player. I was certain. I watched him intensely, and from what I saw, I was just sure. I got some of the recruitment team to look, to check, as I always do.
“The club backed me. They wanted structure and process. They wanted to know where a player was coming in and where he could go to. Basically, it came to the end of July and we had to get Bryan out of Troyes in a day. There’s no local airport, only a private place. We’d to get a private jet into Troyes, do the deal and come back. It’s crazy to think of where I’d come from.”
Mbeumo played 47 times and scored 16 goals in his first season.
Five years earlier, Brentford’s record deal remained the £750,000 paid to Palace for Hermann Hreidarsson in 1998. Five years earlier, Dykes had his first full-time post as head of recruitment with Oldham Athletic, having held similar positions at Notts County and Crawley Town.
Then Curle offered him a job at Carlisle. “Ideveloped my own algorithm at Carlisle. I’d little money so I couldn’t go out. I sat in my room and worked on it — ‘How do we know who the best player is at Boreham Wood without going to the game?’ I just crunched some numbers, the hard stats you can see and got a mechanism we could begin with. I still use it now — it’s one of the things Brentford liked. I began to wonder what else data can be used for, how should clubs like Carlisle, where they struggle to pay wages sometimes, be run? I looked at Borussia Dortmund and other clubs with a sporting director structure and I was thinking, ‘This is where I want to be — sporting directorship’.”
Dykes stayed three years and became assistant manager. The purchase of Charlie Wyke shows the methodology he and Carlisle were developing.
“When I went into Carlisle,” he says, “they didn’t have strong relations with neighbouring clubs. When you’re at that level and you’veMiddlesbrough, Sunderland, Newcastle, Blackburn (in the region), you need their help. Part of my remit was to build relationships and we took a couple of players on loan and bought a couple. We took Charlie Wyke for £20,000 from Middlesbrough. We sold him, after 18 months, to Bradford for £250,000.
“One of the questions I asked and still ask is, ‘What does Charlie need to become a very good player?’ We needed someone to take the opposition’s focus off Charlie, so we signed Jabo Ibehre. We got Nicky Adams from Northampton. On average, he will cross the ball 300 times in a season and these two strikers need crosses. We still think that way at Brentford — your right winger might need a left-sided centre-back who can hit that diagonal pass. It’s about building squads, not signing individuals.”
When Curle left Carlisle he was interviewed by Bury, as was Dykes. The club decided to go for Ryan Lowe as manager but offered Dykes an overall role.
“I’d built up 10 years of looking at players by this stage. Bury loved it. They wanted a sporting director who could run the club self-sufficiently. I did a bit of due diligence on the club and there were more reasons not to take it than to take it — every player seemed to be on two grand a week. They were training at Man City’s old Carrington centre. I thought I’d give it a go. We recruited 16 players in the first few months for £1 million — unheard of — and they got us promoted that year. It was going so well.”
As Dykes says, it is all experience and it has given him alternative perspectives on recruitment. He, for example, operates on 16 positions on a pitch.
“When I came in I had to bring something to the table, because Brentford were very good at recruitment,” he says. “Part of the remit was aligning thinking across structure and process. I had to get everyone thinking the same and I do believe there are 16 positions on the pitch. For example, there’s an 11 and an 11A. It’s a left winger — the 11 is Ryan Giggs, outside, left-footed; the 11A is Cristiano Ronaldo when he was on the left, coming inside and playing almost like a striker.
“I built this system because it’s too easy for scouts to say, ‘There’s the top three wide players’. No, because in the past two seasons and the one before, Brentford have changed formation at critical points. The 16 positions mean we’re never caught out. So all of what we do is tailored towards that. If I click on South America, we have the best players in all 16 positions, if we switch to Germany or Asia, it’s all there. Right down to the Isthmian League. There are roughly 765 players in that league and we can tell at any time how they are doing.”
This, he stresses, is just the identification stage. Scouts will then be assigned. And along with the usual information, another telling question will be asked: “Is this player ready to be a professional footballer?”
Dykes refers to another Brentford recruitment success, Toney. In his Carlisle days, Dykes made numerous trips to scout Toney in Newcastle’s under-23s. He had been present when Toney made his Northampton Town debut in 2012 aged 16. What Dykes saw was raw talent but at Newcastle, he did not consider Toney ready.
“Biological age is something we take into account of course,” Dykes says. “But there is an assessment to be made in terms of maturity. Let’s leave the physical aside and ask: ‘Is this player ready to be a professional footballer?’. It’s a question people don’t ask but it’s key. Is a player ready to play away at Elland Road? It’s part of football, a massive part. We defend zonally, so if it’s a defender we’re looking at, we’re asking if they can take that on board. People underestimate how hard it is to be a professional footballer.
“At Brentford, we have logistics people to help players settle. Our motto is happy off the pitch, happy on it. It’s no coincidence that it clicked for Ivan at Peterborough when his son was born. Something happened in his life that made him knuckle down. ‘I’m ready to be a professional footballer at a high standard’. That’s why we moved for him.”
Next cab off the rank is Fin Stevens.
“I saw him in my algorithm, it’s still working!” Dykes laughs. “It’s not as advanced as Brentford’s but it works. We flagged him up playing for Worthing in the Isthmian League. Released by Woolwich, Fin had a season playing men’s football at 16 as a defender. We met him, were blown away by his character. Three months later, he’s playing in the cup for our first team. And we signed him in a transfer window when our right-back was injured. We could have gone into the market, got a loan, but, no, Phil and Rasmus said, ‘He might be only 17 but he’s the next one in’.
“That’s the key. In a nutshell, that’s Brentford. At 16, Fin Stevens was ready to be a professional footballer; we’ve met 21 year-olds who aren’t ready.”
This fits owner Benham’s holistic approach. Brentford’s rise is about social intelligence as well as data. Benham wants Brentford to out-think competitors, not out-spend them. As Dykes says: “It’s Matthew’s way of thinking. We were one of the first clubs to employ a throw-in coach, a set-piece coach, we were the first to employ a sleep coach. We teach young players how to cook. We have all these things that we plough into individual development.”
Preparing for and reacting to Brexit has also occupied Benham’s management team and if there are recruitment trends caused by the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, one will be a new emphasis on domestic signings, another will be a growth in South America’s presence in the Premier League. Benham also owns FC Midtjylland in Denmark. Dykes is their head of recruitment too. It means he is fully aware of differing regulations.
“It’s been huge,” he says of Brexit. “But we were prepared for it. Fin Stevens and Aaron Pressley, players we recruited for the B team, might have been Europeans or Scandinavians before, but there’s been a shift with GBE — Governing Body Endorsement. A lot of under-valued markets have been closed off by GBE. In the last few weeks, they’ve relaxed it a bit with under-21s.
“But as the EU closes, we can go to South America and Asia. There’s an opportunity and we’ve seen players in Uruguay. You’ve just seen Yerson Mosquera join Wolves for £4.5 million. Twelve months ago, we could have only considered them for Midtjylland. Now he can go to England. Moises Caicedo, another one, has gone to Brighton. They’re from Colombia and Ecuador.”
Midtjylland have just signed Brazilian midfielder Charles from Ceara in Fortaleza and Celtic fans can expect an early glimpse of him on Tuesday when they face Midtjylland in the first leg of a Champions League qualifier. Combining his work for Brentford and Midtjylland “made sense”, Dykes says, and if he were Celtic he would not take the Danes lightly — “People see Midtjylland as the lesser club to Brentford, but they played Champions League group stage against Liverpool, Ajax. If Brentford played Midtjylland 10 times, it’d be very close.”
While at Bury, Dykes completed a Master’s degree in sporting directorship at the University of Salford. Part of his course featured a lecture from Pep Guardiola. Bury and Guardiola may represent football’s extremes, but Dykes loved it. Here’s why.
“It was a group situation, a little theatre at the Man City training ground with about 15 of us. Just unbelievable. One of the most amazing things — as a former rugby league player — was when Pep saw a guy from rugby union on the course. He had a rugby top on.
“Guardiola picked him out and said, ‘Rugby?’
“’Yeah’, said the fella. He was building a new rugby association in Holland.
“‘Rugby is brilliant’, said Pep. ‘I teach my players rugby’.
“‘What do you mean?’, the fella asked.
“‘Rugby, you get the ball, you run towards the man, you draw him in and you pass’.”
An image of Ilkay Gundogan comes to mind immediately.
“Now,” Dykes says, “I watch Man City and it is player after player dragging an opponent in — then pass.
“Incredible. I bet in all the teaching programmes in England, no one has that in the syllabus. And you have Pep Guardiola saying, ‘I do this with my first-team players’.
“It just makes you think.”
Thinking is what Lee Dykes and all at Brentford do.
Woolwich will see the evidence soon.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
Edited 14 hours ago by arnoldlayne
The Athletic
Algorithms, devouring data and togetherness – life as Brentford’s director of player recruitment
Michael Walker Jul 19, 2021In just under a month, Brentford host Woolwich in the Premier League. It’s a Friday night to kick off the new season, Brentford’s first game in the top flight in 74 years.
On that day, May 26, 1947, the same opposition were the visitors and it finished “1-0 to The Woolwich”.
Brentford were closer in years then to their founding by a boat club in nearby Kew than to 2021.
This new, lean, data-driven version of the club is unrecognisable from its ancestors. Once, players changed in the Griffin pub beside the ground; today, Griffin Park is no longer home and Brentford know four potential signings in Uruguay for every position. Old Brentford 1889 are a most modern football machine.
In a cafe near his native Hull, Lee Dykes confirms this transformation.
Dykes has been director of player recruitment at Brentford for a little over two years. Having been at clubs such Carlisle United and doomed Bury, he knows life outside the Premier League and both he and Brentford are entitled to be nervous about the coming season. Not a bit of it. This is Brentford2021.
“Do we want to be the proverbial mid-table team?” asks Dykes (inset above). “We think with our structure and our people, we can be a great addition to the Premier League. We will strive to get better every game, hopefully surprise a few.”
Dykes’s tone is pragmatic. Surprising a few, Brentford think, is a realistic ambition. “Last season,” he adds, “we beat Fulham, Southampton and Newcastle United in the League Cup. So we back ourselves. And we’ll get better. It’s not simply about survival, it’s about establishing ourselves as a Premier League team, which includes survival, then in the future being a European Premier League team.
“There’s no time scale and, listen, it’s going to be tough. Of course it is. We might get beat 8-0 by Man City but we might beat Southampton 2-1. That’s where we are with things. We are also OK if we come back down — we’ll be thinking about going back up. It may take five years and two relegations to become established, but that is,longer-term, the aim.”
Dykes is part of a Brentford hierarchy centred on owner Matthew Benham, co-directors of football Rasmus Ankersen and Phil Giles and head coach Thomas Frank.
They have won admiration for taking a club that was losing a London derby to Leyton Orient in League One in September 2013 to consecutive Championship play-off finals and into the PremierLeague to meet rather different London opposition in Woolwich at the new Brentford Community Stadium. Along the way, Brentford have bought and sold so shrewdly and profitably that they have become a template club. Benham’s focus on data, and creating and curating your own, not relying on others, has given Brentford an edge in recruitment and a profile as young, fresh and inventive.
Buying Neal Maupay, Ollie Watkins and Said Benrahma for a combined £9.8 million and selling them for £77 million raises eyebrows ofappreciation in recruitment circles. Deciding to work without an academy and to instead use a B team is another illustration of a club that thinks and behaves differently.
Dykes is a rare figure in football in that he can say in passing: “I built my own algorithm at Carlisle.” How Benham’s outlook, and Brentford’s application of it, is what attracted Dykes to them and them to him. So it is notable when Dykes is discussing last season’s promotion he says that for all the modernity and innovation, Brentford placed great emphasis on traditional human values such as experience and team spirit.
“We’re massive on togetherness,” he says. “Togetherness got us promoted.”
Dykes is 36. He had just been through the trauma of Bury being expelled from the EFL, where he was sporting director, when he was interviewed by Brentford in 2019.
Before that, he had been at Carlisle with Keith Curle for over three years, having started out coaching at Rotherham United’s academy when he was 20. Injury ended Dykes’ hopes of a playing career — he had not made it at Hull City or as a promising teenage rugby league player.
“Good or bad, the Bury experience was unbelievable,” he says. “I’d lived as a sporting director for a year in a financial-crisis club. Turning it around, just living it. While that was going wrong, Brentford were looking for a head of recruitment. They advertised the role, because they do it that way.
“It was a perfect match — I knew about the structures of clubs, I had a coaching background, I’d built an algorithm. Those were major box-ticks for them. There were bigger and better people than me in for the role but Brentford understood the complexity of the situations I’d been in and therelative success from those, the ability to work on a budget.
“They’re a strategy-driven club, which was geared towards achieving promotion to the Premier League. That was the basic aim — it was a lot more detailed than that. These men have a plan, which is different from others I’ve met who think they have a plan. Rasmus and Phil are two unbelievable people — with a plan. They don’t deviate from it and they trust people. They’d been at the club for around four years by 2019 and they’ll tell you, their first couple of years were fire-fighting. They’d try to change people a little bit. In the season before I arrived, of Thomas Frank’s first 10 games, they’d lost eight. But the data was saying they were performing well. I was so intrigued. Everything I’d studied, Brentford were doing it. I was sold.”
When Dykes arrived in May 2019, Brentford had just finished 11th in the Championship, their fifth season in the division following 2014’s promotion under Mark Warburton. It was acceptable, if not thrilling, but as Dykes says, those at the top: “Saw a real opportunity.
“They’d sold players like Ezri Konsa and Chris Mepham. Because of the financial constraints on so many other Championship clubs, they saw a two-to-three season chance to go to the Premier League. That was what really pulled me in. When Phil and Rasmus first met me they said they weren’t restricted by financial fair play, (that) they could invest. ‘If the recruitment is good and the coaching is good, then we can get there’.
“I back myself, so I came in. I found it very difficult at first, I was going from low-level football to European scouting. I had to get to that level. But that low-level knowledge was key, because thereare some good players down there.
“I was coming in during a hectic period. There was a collective understanding that we needed more experience and a lot of the signings in 2019 were not Brentford-like. Our reasoning was that if you sell Konsa and Mepham, both for £12 million, that’s all good. But it leaves you with two young players next to each other. If you stuck an experienced player in between them — and Brentford were playing three at the back — you might have to pay £4 million, but the other two will be sold for £15 million, because they will improve, the team will concede fewer goals. If you have four or five experienced players, your other younger assets will rise in value because you’ll finish higher up the table and you become better.
“In 2020, when we lost in the play-off final to Fulham, there was a nice consolation to take in £32 million for Watkins and £25 million for Benrahma. Both record values. But if we hadn’t finished near the top, Ollie would have gone for, say, £12 million, Said as well. The bids at the time reflected that — in 2019, other Premier League clubs were in for Ollie Watkins at a third of that amount. It just showed that what we planned had worked.”
Raising overall quality to lift individual valuations sounds like a simple equation. Pulling it off requires thought and nous.
“It was something we discussed before I took the role,” Dykes explains. “How do we get there? It can’t just be: ‘Sign better players’. The season before I arrived they had Maupay, Watkins, Benrahma — all Premier League players. They had the players but finished 11th. They also had Romaine Sawyers. So what was missing?
“What was missing was experience. Experience is invaluable. It’s all well and good coaching players, but what are they saying in the changing room when nobody’s there? Are they talking about a nightclub or promotion? That’s the thing.
“In 2019, we signed Pontus Jansson from Leeds, which surprised everybody; Ethan Pinnock, who was 26 and the best defender in League One; and David Raya out of Blackburn. Rico Henry we already had. We’d signed Christian Norgaard from Fiorentina when he was 25. People were saying to me, ‘This ain’t Brentford’.
“But we were thinking about promotion. Christian, Pontus, David, Henrik Dalsgaard, they want to get there. There’s a real togetherness. If you lose three in a row, which can happen, there’s confidence — ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get out of this’. There’s a massive thing about building a squad rather than a group of individuals. When we lost Said and Ollie people were concerned. We brought in Ivan Toney, Vitaly Janelt from (the second division in) Germany, Charlie Goodefrom Northampton. They slotted in seamlessly because of the experience around them, all this know-how.”
Dykes witnessed quickly the trust and delegation he speaks of. He was barely in the building when the club broke its transfer record.
Bryan Mbeumo was a 19-year-old with Troyes in the French second division when Dykes noticed his improving ratings on the club’s data system. It was thought, however, Mbeumo “was about to sign for Southampton for £8 million” but, as weeks passed and Mbeumo did not move to St Mary’s, Dykes began to wonder.
“Nothing was happening with Southampton,” he says, “so I contacted the agent myself and found out it wasn’t happening. So we started the process. This was a very good player. I was certain. I watched him intensely, and from what I saw, I was just sure. I got some of the recruitment team to look, to check, as I always do.
“The club backed me. They wanted structure and process. They wanted to know where a player was coming in and where he could go to. Basically, it came to the end of July and we had to get Bryan out of Troyes in a day. There’s no local airport, only a private place. We’d to get a private jet into Troyes, do the deal and come back. It’s crazy to think of where I’d come from.”
Mbeumo played 47 times and scored 16 goals in his first season.
Five years earlier, Brentford’s record deal remained the £750,000 paid to Palace for Hermann Hreidarsson in 1998. Five years earlier, Dykes had his first full-time post as head of recruitment with Oldham Athletic, having held similar positions at Notts County and Crawley Town.
Then Curle offered him a job at Carlisle. “Ideveloped my own algorithm at Carlisle. I’d little money so I couldn’t go out. I sat in my room and worked on it — ‘How do we know who the best player is at Boreham Wood without going to the game?’ I just crunched some numbers, the hard stats you can see and got a mechanism we could begin with. I still use it now — it’s one of the things Brentford liked. I began to wonder what else data can be used for, how should clubs like Carlisle, where they struggle to pay wages sometimes, be run? I looked at Borussia Dortmund and other clubs with a sporting director structure and I was thinking, ‘This is where I want to be — sporting directorship’.”
Dykes stayed three years and became assistant manager. The purchase of Charlie Wyke shows the methodology he and Carlisle were developing.
“When I went into Carlisle,” he says, “they didn’t have strong relations with neighbouring clubs. When you’re at that level and you’veMiddlesbrough, Sunderland, Newcastle, Blackburn (in the region), you need their help. Part of my remit was to build relationships and we took a couple of players on loan and bought a couple. We took Charlie Wyke for £20,000 from Middlesbrough. We sold him, after 18 months, to Bradford for £250,000.
“One of the questions I asked and still ask is, ‘What does Charlie need to become a very good player?’ We needed someone to take the opposition’s focus off Charlie, so we signed Jabo Ibehre. We got Nicky Adams from Northampton. On average, he will cross the ball 300 times in a season and these two strikers need crosses. We still think that way at Brentford — your right winger might need a left-sided centre-back who can hit that diagonal pass. It’s about building squads, not signing individuals.”
When Curle left Carlisle he was interviewed by Bury, as was Dykes. The club decided to go for Ryan Lowe as manager but offered Dykes an overall role.
“I’d built up 10 years of looking at players by this stage. Bury loved it. They wanted a sporting director who could run the club self-sufficiently. I did a bit of due diligence on the club and there were more reasons not to take it than to take it — every player seemed to be on two grand a week. They were training at Man City’s old Carrington centre. I thought I’d give it a go. We recruited 16 players in the first few months for £1 million — unheard of — and they got us promoted that year. It was going so well.”
As Dykes says, it is all experience and it has given him alternative perspectives on recruitment. He, for example, operates on 16 positions on a pitch.
“When I came in I had to bring something to the table, because Brentford were very good at recruitment,” he says. “Part of the remit was aligning thinking across structure and process. I had to get everyone thinking the same and I do believe there are 16 positions on the pitch. For example, there’s an 11 and an 11A. It’s a left winger — the 11 is Ryan Giggs, outside, left-footed; the 11A is Cristiano Ronaldo when he was on the left, coming inside and playing almost like a striker.
“I built this system because it’s too easy for scouts to say, ‘There’s the top three wide players’. No, because in the past two seasons and the one before, Brentford have changed formation at critical points. The 16 positions mean we’re never caught out. So all of what we do is tailored towards that. If I click on South America, we have the best players in all 16 positions, if we switch to Germany or Asia, it’s all there. Right down to the Isthmian League. There are roughly 765 players in that league and we can tell at any time how they are doing.”
This, he stresses, is just the identification stage. Scouts will then be assigned. And along with the usual information, another telling question will be asked: “Is this player ready to be a professional footballer?”
Dykes refers to another Brentford recruitment success, Toney. In his Carlisle days, Dykes made numerous trips to scout Toney in Newcastle’s under-23s. He had been present when Toney made his Northampton Town debut in 2012 aged 16. What Dykes saw was raw talent but at Newcastle, he did not consider Toney ready.
“Biological age is something we take into account of course,” Dykes says. “But there is an assessment to be made in terms of maturity. Let’s leave the physical aside and ask: ‘Is this player ready to be a professional footballer?’. It’s a question people don’t ask but it’s key. Is a player ready to play away at Elland Road? It’s part of football, a massive part. We defend zonally, so if it’s a defender we’re looking at, we’re asking if they can take that on board. People underestimate how hard it is to be a professional footballer.
“At Brentford, we have logistics people to help players settle. Our motto is happy off the pitch, happy on it. It’s no coincidence that it clicked for Ivan at Peterborough when his son was born. Something happened in his life that made him knuckle down. ‘I’m ready to be a professional footballer at a high standard’. That’s why we moved for him.”
Next cab off the rank is Fin Stevens.
“I saw him in my algorithm, it’s still working!” Dykes laughs. “It’s not as advanced as Brentford’s but it works. We flagged him up playing for Worthing in the Isthmian League. Released by Woolwich, Fin had a season playing men’s football at 16 as a defender. We met him, were blown away by his character. Three months later, he’s playing in the cup for our first team. And we signed him in a transfer window when our right-back was injured. We could have gone into the market, got a loan, but, no, Phil and Rasmus said, ‘He might be only 17 but he’s the next one in’.
“That’s the key. In a nutshell, that’s Brentford. At 16, Fin Stevens was ready to be a professional footballer; we’ve met 21 year-olds who aren’t ready.”
This fits owner Benham’s holistic approach. Brentford’s rise is about social intelligence as well as data. Benham wants Brentford to out-think competitors, not out-spend them. As Dykes says: “It’s Matthew’s way of thinking. We were one of the first clubs to employ a throw-in coach, a set-piece coach, we were the first to employ a sleep coach. We teach young players how to cook. We have all these things that we plough into individual development.”
Preparing for and reacting to Brexit has also occupied Benham’s management team and if there are recruitment trends caused by the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, one will be a new emphasis on domestic signings, another will be a growth in South America’s presence in the Premier League. Benham also owns FC Midtjylland in Denmark. Dykes is their head of recruitment too. It means he is fully aware of differing regulations.
“It’s been huge,” he says of Brexit. “But we were prepared for it. Fin Stevens and Aaron Pressley, players we recruited for the B team, might have been Europeans or Scandinavians before, but there’s been a shift with GBE — Governing Body Endorsement. A lot of under-valued markets have been closed off by GBE. In the last few weeks, they’ve relaxed it a bit with under-21s.
“But as the EU closes, we can go to South America and Asia. There’s an opportunity and we’ve seen players in Uruguay. You’ve just seen Yerson Mosquera join Wolves for £4.5 million. Twelve months ago, we could have only considered them for Midtjylland. Now he can go to England. Moises Caicedo, another one, has gone to Brighton. They’re from Colombia and Ecuador.”
Midtjylland have just signed Brazilian midfielder Charles from Ceara in Fortaleza and Celtic fans can expect an early glimpse of him on Tuesday when they face Midtjylland in the first leg of a Champions League qualifier. Combining his work for Brentford and Midtjylland “made sense”, Dykes says, and if he were Celtic he would not take the Danes lightly — “People see Midtjylland as the lesser club to Brentford, but they played Champions League group stage against Liverpool, Ajax. If Brentford played Midtjylland 10 times, it’d be very close.”
While at Bury, Dykes completed a Master’s degree in sporting directorship at the University of Salford. Part of his course featured a lecture from Pep Guardiola. Bury and Guardiola may represent football’s extremes, but Dykes loved it. Here’s why.
“It was a group situation, a little theatre at the Man City training ground with about 15 of us. Just unbelievable. One of the most amazing things — as a former rugby league player — was when Pep saw a guy from rugby union on the course. He had a rugby top on.
“Guardiola picked him out and said, ‘Rugby?’
“’Yeah’, said the fella. He was building a new rugby association in Holland.
“‘Rugby is brilliant’, said Pep. ‘I teach my players rugby’.
“‘What do you mean?’, the fella asked.
“‘Rugby, you get the ball, you run towards the man, you draw him in and you pass’.”
An image of Ilkay Gundogan comes to mind immediately.
“Now,” Dykes says, “I watch Man City and it is player after player dragging an opponent in — then pass.
“Incredible. I bet in all the teaching programmes in England, no one has that in the syllabus. And you have Pep Guardiola saying, ‘I do this with my first-team players’.
“It just makes you think.”
Thinking is what Lee Dykes and all at Brentford do.
Woolwich will see the evidence soon.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
Edited 14 hours ago by arnoldlayne
Benfica have a very successful set up.
People are really struggling with this lol
Liverpool already had a coach, a clear style of play, and other recruiting staff left behind doing the exact work Edwards left.
There is no comparison.
We have no Coach no direction and no plan
Getting a DOF in early won't define a style of play and a coach has totally separate duties from a DOF, and we already have recruiting staff in place working behind the scenes.
Liverpool still don't have a DOF by the way and they are being linked to a host of players in the TW - work that one out.
Plus, had Liverpool acted sooner, this seasons fall away might not have occurred.
It’s been three weeks since Paratici left. And there’s folk getting their panties in a bunch because we haven’t replaced him?
If I’m recruiting a sales exec for. a wee company that turns over a couple of million a year, by the time I start looking, interview a couple of times, notice periods are sorted, etc, it takes me a couple of months.
Yet we expect a huge decision like this to happen in the space of three weeks? No.
If I’m recruiting a sales exec for. a wee company that turns over a couple of million a year, by the time I start looking, interview a couple of times, notice periods are sorted, etc, it takes me a couple of months.
Yet we expect a huge decision like this to happen in the space of three weeks? No.
We may not even get a DOF , Levy has been doing the Hokey Cokey on that for 23 years . It might be his preferred strategy , but we have not had a DOF for several long periods during ENIC‘s ownership . Muddled thinking springs to mind , surely you either believe in having a DOF or you don’t . This half arsed approach is a mess
That's true.
The reason is he (rightly or wrongly) backed his managers decision on whether to have a DoF or not .
Hopefully he's now firmly fixed on having a DoF now.
The problem of who to choose as our new manager and Director of Football is simple. Let Harry Kane choose both of them.
It’s been reported that Harry is heavily involved in the choosing of a new manager. It’s also reported that Nagelsman is delaying his decision until he sees who Levy appoints as Director. Let Harry choose both...simples.
It’s been reported that Harry is heavily involved in the choosing of a new manager. It’s also reported that Nagelsman is delaying his decision until he sees who Levy appoints as Director. Let Harry choose both...simples.
Thanks for your selfie , but I think you meant to put it on instagram
Let’s hope so , 23 years is a long time to be flip flopping on a foundation stone of strategy
Nah , to much hair sadly in the GIFYou must be my long lost twin
Exactly.
Some people think real life is exactly the same as Football Manager - hiring someone with a click of a button.
Much better to do our due diligence and ensure we know what direction we want to go in!