2008/09 in Lincoln City history was the season of the Magnificent Seven, of big promises from Peter Jackson, and ultimately, a failed plot to begin climbing the division.
It was two years into Goal 2010, and we were marooned in League Two, on a five-year play-off comedown that would ultimately lead to the Salisbury and Welling. While all of that may seem significant, there is more to the story. In that season, our fixture list had trips to Brentford and Bournemouth.
This season, as we broke records and delighted supporters, Brentford finished 9th in the Premier League, above Spurs, Chelsea and Everton. Bournemouth did even better, finishing 6th, qualifying for Europe and only finishing one win shy of Liverpool. In 17 years, those two teams have gone from League Two to top-end Premier League outfits, and they keep being held up as a beacon of hope – if they can do it, why can’t we?
Today, we focus on Brentford and their rise. How did they do it, and can we replicate that success?
Brentford
We played Brentford in 2007/08, as well as 08/09. Our record wasn’t bad, one win, one defeat and two draws, one of those with just ten men. They had been a third and fourth division tier for much of their history, and at that point of revolution, 2009, their average attendances had averaged between 4,500 and 6,500, a little more than us, but then in London, there are more chimney pots. That could also help a little with recruitment, being more central to bigger clubs. Griffin Park was a little bigger as well, 12,300, so you might suggest they were a bigger club, but I suspect take them out of London and drop them in Lincolnshire, and they’d be Grimsby-sized, which historically, is a little bigger than us, but as a starting point, not much different.
While that was their state of play around 2009, Brentford’s modern story begins amid austerity. After the ITV Digital collapse, Ron Noades’ financial constraints left former Imps assistant Wally Downes with a threadbare squad and administration was only narrowly avoided in August 2002.
Bees United, the supporters’ trust, took control as the club clung on, surviving a relegation scare in 2003/04 before rallying to reach the FA Cup fifth round and successive play-off semi-finals in 2004/05 and 2005/06. Relegation followed in 2006/07 despite a bright start, but an anonymous benefactor, later revealed as lifelong fan and professional gambler Matthew Benham, had already begun shoring up the balance sheet, assuming significant debt and giving the club a financial floor to rebuild upon.
From 2009 onward, Brentford built a repeatable model, and they started their ascent at a time we started to crumble. Benham’s investment and eventual ownership kept Bees United on the board, preserving local accountability while empowering a new philosophy: recruit on underlying performance data, develop aggressively, sell at peak value, and reinvest before decline. Expected goals informed both scouting and playing style, prioritising shot quality and chance volume over reputations. This was matched by a clear-eyed approach to churn: departures were part of the plan, not an interruption to it.
The transfer market became a profit centre and a competitive edge. Brentford identified undervalued forwards and creators in less scrutinised leagues, improved them with coaching, and sold at the right moment. Notable examples include Andre Gray, Neal Maupay, and Ollie Watkins, who each moved on for substantial fees that funded the next wave of transfers. The key was process discipline: profiles were defined first, and replacements lined up early. Misses were tolerated because the overall hit rate kept the squad trending upward.
They never finished outside of the top 11 in the Championship, and only once outside the top ten. They were an immediate hit, surprising given their absence from the level for such a long period of time, and they did that in a manner that matches our intentions. In 2014, only their second season in the second tier since 1954, they broke their first £1m signing (sold for £3.5m a season later), and added six players to a squad already rated highly after their League One promotion.
The Championship looked just as tough back then as it does now – in 2015, 78 points didn’t get Wolves into the play-offs, whereas Hull crept in on 73 this campaign. At the bottom, Rotherham stayed up on 46 in 2014/15, but Oxford were relegated on 47. Small margins, perhaps, but an indication that despite what feels like an increasingly tough division, it was as competitive when the Bees made it up. They started well, and that continued, in part, down to their impeccable record for appointing managers.
Across the Benham era, Brentford have repeatedly appointed coaches to fit with a stable, data-led model rather than headline pedigree, which is why the churn works. Uwe Rosler was given his first English job and pushed the club forward before sporting director Mark Warburton seamlessly stepped in and delivered promotion.
The one real misstep, Marinus Dijkhuizen, was corrected quickly, with Lee Carsley steadying the side and Dean Smith installed from Walsall for his alignment with player development and process. Smith’s assistant Thomas Frank then took over to preserve continuity and scale the plan into the Premier League. When Frank left for Tottenham, the club again chose the consistent path by promoting Keith Andrews from within, already versed in the set‑piece and game‑model principles the recruitment and analytics teams build around. Each appointment has been made to plug into the same machine, not to rewrite it.
Infrastructure and coaching are aligned to the same principles. Griffin Park gave way to a modern stadium to unlock revenue, while head coaches were selected for their fit with data-led planning and adaptable structures. On the pitch, Brentford aimed for high xG-per-shot by working chances inside the box and cutting low-value efforts, and off the ball, they used analytics to tune pressing and protect transitions. The result was compounding improvement: a club that moved from near administration to the Premier League by trusting evidence, trading well, and treating change as design rather than disruption.
Similarities to Lincoln City
I’m sure that plenty of Bees fans will laugh this off, but I can see so many similarities between them in 2014 and us, and what they have done when compared to what we seem to be trying to do.
All recruitment seems more data-led now. Brentford, in my opinion, revolutionised it, and I recall reading somewhere that if they ‘won’ games on xG, but lost on goals, then the manager wouldn’t be hassled. If they won several but were behind on xG, he’d answer questions. It fascinated me, and they are a leader in terms of xG recruitment. In the 12 years they’ve been using it, I’d suggest it has changed and become more widespread, but how did we find Ivan Varfolomeev? Data.
The move from Griffin Park is important. One of Ron Fowler’s ideas seems to have been to improve Sincil Bank, to bring in fresh revenue in the week and to make it more commercially viable. It’s maybe something that gets overlooked, but the importance is huge. We’re at capacity on a matchday now, we’ll likely average 10,000 supporters next season, and yet for 13 days out of 14 (give or take) it’s an empty stadium, or it was. The Foundation building makes it busier; the latest changes will make it more profitable. Minor? You might think so, but it’s part of the Brentford model.
Promoting from within is important as well. Of course, that appointment still has to be right: George Kerr and John Pickering were not good choices back in the day. Football is different now, and the Brentford model impresses me hugely. They’ve set a structure in place, a ‘Brentford’ methodology, and the subsequent appointments help drive that. The key is getting that right in the first place, and if this season is anything to go by, we have.
There is also the record of misses – Marinus Dijkhuizen in the dugout and £2.5m signing Andreas Bjelland, who played 65 games in an injury-ravaged spell. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out, and you have to roll with the punches.
Even tactically, there were similarities, with high xG opportunities, cutting down on the low-quality efforts, perfecting a press and minimising risk on transitions. In fact, if you stripped out all of the names, years and just left the bones with no meat, you could almost (almost) be reading about Lincoln City, from ownership to tactics.
Brentford, for me, is the team to aspire to. They’ve had a clear philosophy now for more than a decade, and it has delivered Premier League football for five seasons in a row. Plus, they play in red and white, so it’s sure to be an omen!
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