'Outstanding' Andrews and Benham's early Bees vision
· Yahoo Sports
Brentford's majority owner Matthew Benham says head coach Keith Andrews proved to be an "outstanding" candidate at a time of high risk for the Bees.
Andrews - a former set-piece coach at the club - succeeded Thomas Frank during the summer at a time when the Bees also lost strike duo Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa to Manchester United and Newcastle respectively.
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Speaking to presenter Roger Bennett from the Men in Blazers podcast at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference 2026, Benham discussed how he viewed losing key players, citing an increase in probability of relegation given both walked out the door.
On replacing Frank, he explained: "I'm a big believer in sort of the collective making decisions. Not in a group think way. So I don't like the idea of me saying 'oh I think we should go for Keith, does everyone else agree?' And they all say 'yes boss'.
"It's more myself, Phil Giles - who's a director of football, Lee Dykes, the technical director, and Ben Ryan, head of performance. The first thing we did, the four of us, we go away separately and think about, who could be interesting and then we come together to talk and and all four of us thought, you know, Keith seemed like a really, really strong candidate.
"He is clearly, as you have seen, an amazing communicator, fantastic leader. We knew that he was very good with with the players and also with the existing staff. We realised we were in a bit of a high-risk scenario anyway with all the sort turnover of staff and players.
"So we could have brought in a sort of big name from outside who comes with an entourage that would have had a lot of risk. It just seemed that Keith was like the clear logical candidate. Maybe we were in a bubble because then when it got announced and there was all this uproar we were like 'what have we done?'
"But from where we were sitting it just seemed that Keith was like a clear outstanding candidate."
Benham also spoke at length about buying into Brentford in 2005.
"For the first few years of being financially involved, really from 2005 until I took over fully, I didn't really see a serious long term prospect," he explained.
"It was more like a labour of love, the team I supported as a kid. This is a bit of fun, could I put enough money in to be a third or fourth division team?
"It was around the summer of 2013 that I thought it could be a bit more than a labour of love.
"Until then the conventional wisdom was unless you're a huge club with a huge following and stadium then you'll always be a lower league team. But it got to a stage where the TV deal in the Premier League was so big that it seemed you didn't need this traditional support to make a viable business.
"If we got to the Premier League we would have that TV money. But if we weren't the money was washing around and Premier League teams would buy the top players in the Championship. We could climb up via the transfer market."