This may be the most difficult preview to write this year...

Last season, Brentford finished 10th in the league.

Since then, their head coach (Thomas Frank) has left for Tottenham. Their Captain (Christian Norgaard) is now at Arsenal. Their leading scorer (Yoann Wissa) is holding out to try and force a discounted move [elsewhere]. Their second leading scorer (Bryan Mbeumo) earned them a HUGE fee as he transitioned his career to Manchester United. And their starting GK (Mark Flekken) moved to Bayer Leverkusen.

It’s the type of turnover you would expect to see from a relegated team, not one that just had one of their best ever seasons in the top flight of English football.

Solid. Good? Not great, except at set pieces. Home matches were goal fests, and away matches were not. They couldn’t win an away match in the first half of the season, and then took a ton of scalps in the second.

On the whole, it was a very enjoyable season for fans at the GTech and people who like to bet Overs.

But also… the squad was aging a bit and needed freshening. The first half of the season contained a ton of injuries — it was almost as if they had a mandatory quota of players that had to be injured at one time. The moment one got healthy and rotated off the training table, someone else went down.

Contracts on the scorers were running down and needed resolving. They likely do not want to lose both Mbuemo and Wissa in the same summer along with all the other change, but the returns on the fees look like they will be exceptional. Brentford and Brighton remain the two best selling clubs in the PL.

And Brentford’s brain trust are among those you’d absolutely expect to be able to rebuild multiple times without things going too wrong.

Probably…

But man, that is a lot of change for one summer. Benham’s played things pretty safe since they entered the promised land, so this recent window feels very “risk on” in terms of change, even if they have restocked the bank balance for the future.

“They hired the set piece coach?!?” I adore the old school football responses to this one. “It’s the modern equivalent of hiring the Goalkeeper Coach - it’s just not done.”

“It’s just not done” might as well be Brentford’s club motto.

We know very little about Keith Andrews, because he’s never been a head coach… anywhere. Brentford previously promoted Thomas Frank from an internal position, but they did so on the back of the fact that Frank had success leading Brondby, and was a known quantity around the club and at the top of somewhere else.

To everyone outside of the training ground, Andrews is currently an enigma. We don’t know what style of play his prefers his team to play. His assistant manager stints were at MK Dons, Ireland, and Sheffield United — not exactly hotbeds of attacking flair.

But there is one thing that astounded me when doing the research for this preview:

Brentford’s set piece goals scored: .34
Brentford’s set piece goals conceded: .05
Source: StatsBomb

There are no teams in the last decade of the PL that start with .0X set piece goals conceded per game across a season. Assuming Andrews was in charge of that, no one in football has had the opposition on lockdown in that phase of the game like Brentford’s new head coach.

Now he just needs to prove he can coach everything else.

Milambo is at least a little exciting. He is a baby who played a hybrid 8/10 role at Feyenoord last season. Size is fine, excellent work rate in the press, and he can move the ball and set up teammates. He’ll probably still need a year or two of seasoning before he pops.

Then you get Jordan Henderson... A player who potentially had the most ill-fated, chase-the-bag move ever to the Saudi league, and came scrambling back to the continent just as quick as his aging legs would allow him. I think everyone on the planet expected him to go to Sunderland and lead them in their return to the PL, but he’s cropped up at Brentford as a comfy, older personality in far West London.

He was perfectly fine at Ajax. Can he still play in the Premier League? We’ll see!

The club also bought two players they had on loan last year. Michael Kayode was brought in last year as a test run and definitely seems suited to the Premier League. I suspect he’ll go for a sizeable fee elsewhere before his contract runs out. Romelle Donovan seems like a future dribbling machine. His is the type of transfer you expect to see over at Palace every other season.

In terms of future inbounds, there’s little noise either in the press or at the club beyond Omari Hutchinson. That said, deals at Brentford don’t create a lot of noise in general, so don’t lose hope, Bees fans.

Uh… Kelleher?

Shot stopping on teams that give up few shots is always fairly volatile, so last year was less great, but the Bees are presumably hoping he’s more like the 23-24 version who saved shots at an above average rate and did all the things.

GK experts definitely felt like he was ready for a full-time job, while Liverpool clearly felt they had better options to secure as the long-term number 1 in the transfer market.

Look folks, I am not a psychic. There is way too much change here to pin this down and put a precise number on it.

The only goal Brentford have for next season is staying up. Everything else is secondary, and they’d probably be happy with 17th on goal difference while restocking the squad over the next two windows to try and compete again.

On my end, I expect them to be defensively sound and good at set pieces. Which sounds literally like every 13th-17th place PL team in the history of the Premier League that didn’t have higher aspirations (*camera pans to United and Spurs last season*).

One thing is for certain about the Bees — they do things their own way, and everyone else’s opinions about how football teams should be run don’t matter.

—TK

Prediction: 15th