Brentford: Championship club's B team taking on Europe and England's elite

They are the jet-setting side without a league who are playing and beating European giants.

It is a team made up of talented teenagers plucked from 'undervalued' countries, including Iceland, Denmark and Finland, plus young recruits from Manchester City, Brighton, Chelsea and Celtic, all moulded together with former Bees academy players.

All have first-team ambitions. And the club have made it their business to help realise them.

And so, with a peculiar fixture list that reads like the who's who of European football mixed with the who's that of the London game, the B team play out their season.

In the past week, they have beaten non-league club Wealdstone in the Middlesex FA Cup and Bayern Munich Under-19s 5-2 at the German club's £64m academy campus, then returned home to overcome Wingate & Finchley in the London Senior Cup.

"This week has been a really English week, playing in the cup on Tuesday followed by Saturday and again on Tuesday," said head coach Lars Friis.

"Sure, this Saturday game is in Europe, but travel-wise that is no different to going to Leeds.

"Now we are not in a league, we can structure who we want to play, when we want to play and when to give them days off.

"It is all about the players for me. What we put into the player, from daily training, education, nutrition, everything is more important than actually following the structure that they have done for 100 years in the football world.

"We have to look into other ways to develop players because the culture today is totally different to what it was 15 years ago."

Unearthing and nurturing talent, when competing for youngsters against English football's most glamorous clubs, is both demanding and sometimes brings little reward.

Some figures claim fewer than 1% of boys playing organised football make a career in the game, while it has also been reported than only 10% of academy players will sign professional contracts.

The Bees abandoned their academy after losing gifted teenagers Ian Carlo Poveda to Manchester City and Josh Bohui to Manchester United for little compensation.

At Brentford headquarters in Jersey Road, Isleworth, it equated to bad business.

The result: a radical restructure, which led to a number of job losses and aspiring young players being cut loose.

Controversial when viewed from the outside, "heartbreaking" for those who went through it.

'Going rogue' without an academy

Allan Steele, now the B team assistant coach, says the restructure was "the toughest thing" he has ever been part of, but sees "going rogue" as an "unequivocal success" for the club.

"Maverick is a good way to put it. If no-one ever dared to be different then no-one would ever progress," said Steele, who has completed coaching badges in the United States, Spain and Republic of Ireland.

"We need to be innovative and come up with ideas that no-one else is doing because in two years time everyone will do them.

"In those few years if we can get a yard or two on them, I think we will be in a better place."

Huddersfield were the first to follow Brentford's lead, restructuring their academy in 2017 and phasing out under-16 sides.

An international first

While Brentford's B team made steady progress along snow-covered roads following their arrival in Munich on Friday, they were also celebrating a historic achievement almost 3,500 miles away in Qatar.

It was there that 19-year-old midfielder Kolbeinn Finnsson made his senior international debut for Iceland.

He became the team's first player to win a full cap for his country without having made a first-team club appearance.

"It's big achievement. It's also a big shock," said defender David Titov, who has been with Brentford since the age of 15.

"It shows that the people you are around here are quality players. You may not get these chances at other clubs.

Friis added that it was a "big" moment for the team and "massive" for the club.

"We are very proud and happy for Kolbeinn, but also happy for the Brentford Football Club because it is good for us and adds to the impressions that we are a club to look out for," he said.

'Brentford's European prestige'

What started as an ambitious project to create "an outstanding games programme" for what is effectively an under-21 team - the idea of the club's late technical director Robert Rowan, who died in November aged only 28 - now commands attention all round Europe.

Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, AC Milan, Porto, Benfica and Premier League giants Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City all have sides, either youth or B teams, beaten by the relative unknowns from west London.

Brentford is a B team by name that has developed a reputation in Europe for bringing its A game.

"At the moment Brentford have a good prestige," said German match agent Gerald Prell.

"Bayern Munich is one of the best youth teams in Germany, who play in the Uefa Youth League [previously known as the Under-19 Champions League] against sides like Ajax, Real Madrid, Paris St-Germain and Juventus and now they play Brentford B.

"It has become word of mouth that every game against them is good. They are unique for having just one youth team but they have created a team that can compete with Bayern Munich and many others."

'We play only the most amazing clubs'

On a training pitch on the outer reaches of a multi-million pound facility where Bayern Munich hope to produce more homegrown players, Brentford's blend of British, central European and Scandinavian youngsters showcased what can be achieved on the cheap.

The single-team youth set-up is understood to run at little more than half of the £2m previously needed to run the academy.

With Brentford 2-0 up against Bayern's under-19s early on, childhood friends and Bees fans Tom Irving and Will Waters - the only two Brentford supporters in the small crowd - acknowledge that the B team model is one that seems to work.

"We only play the reserve teams and youth teams of the most amazing clubs in the world, and we are beating Bayern Munich in Munich," Irving said.

"We know the model of the club, develop players and make money off that. This is a long way from where were were less than 10 years ago in League Two and playing Barnet in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy.

"It is weird because most clubs have an academy, but if players are schooled by Brentford like they are with the B team they are still Brentford-bred players. You can see it working now with young players coming through the first team."

Chris Mepham, who started with Brentford's academy, but became a first-team regular and went on to play for Wales after a season with the B team, is lauded as proof that it is working.

And he is being linked to a £15m move to Premier League club Bournemouth - a sum that would pay for the B team for years to come.

Facing Aubameyang after joining Brentford B

This season Mads Bech Sorensen and Finland Under-21 international Marcus Forss were promoted to the first-team squad and have appeared in the senior side, taking the total to nine B team players to feature for the Championship club in less than three seasons.

Meanwhile, Kevin O'Connor, a club legend as a player, was promoted from B team boss to first-team assistant to Thomas Frank in December.

England Under-20 goalkeeper Ellery Balcombe and defender Luka Racic, who started in Munich on Saturday, were both recently unused substitutes in Brentford's FA Cup third-round win over Oxford.

Racic was drafted in to first-team training just five days after joining the B team. An early experience on the field was trying to contain Arsenal pair Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Alexandre Lacazette in a pre-season friendly.

"I could already see the first-team journey before I joined the team," he said.

"It went really quick, one injury and I was playing in pre-season and suddenly I'm standing there trying to stop Aubameyang - this is a player I use when I'm playing Fifa and here I am covering him and Lacazette.

"It is all I wanted when I came here, games and opportunities."

Opportunities, however, do not come easy as striker Joe Hardy - who played with Phil Foden, Borussia Dortmund star Jadon Sancho and Real Madrid's Brahim Diaz in Manchester City's youth teams - can attest.

Hardy took his goals tally for the season to 24 with two in Munich followed by another two in Tuesday's 3-2 extra-time win against Wingate & Finchley.

"I've scored all season and I'm sure I'm on the manager's mind," Hardy said. "What I want is first-team football, and while I'm not there yet I feel like I'm getting there.

"You are told to be ready for when the opportunity comes. Here, you always feel closer to it.

"There is no shame in knowing that where you played academy football is not where you could go on to be a professional. I moved on to make it somewhere else just as Diaz and Sancho have."

Friis first arrived at Brentford in January 2018 as an 'individual development coach' to help smooth the way into the first team for younger players.

He was already familiar with Brentford after working with Frank at the Danish Football Association and under co-director of football Rasmus Ankersen at FC Midtjylland - a Danish top-flight club where Brentford owner Matthew Benham holds a majority share.

Working for Brentford also means applying 'statistical modelling' when it comes to player recruitment - something that delivered Midtjylland its first Superliga title in 2015, but prompted the departure of Mark Warburton as Bees boss in the same year.

Use of data, and the number crunching involved, allows Brentford to "compare leagues", to look where others do not and at those others may skip over.

"We can pick some of the best fruits and some of those discarded fruits from other academies," said Friis.

"We don't have all the young teams, but we have this one team that is like an academy for 17, 18, 19 and 20-year-olds. All our resources are put into this."

Midfielder Jayden Onen is the latest to arrive from Brighton, having given up a place in a Premier League academy and turning down the prospect of joining another Category One side for "a bigger and better challenge".

The 17-year-old said: "It's a big gamble and I could have stayed where I was comfortable, but with the B team I think there is a better pathway to the first team."

And for Cole Dasilva, who was one of three brothers from Luton signed by Chelsea in 2012, the thrill of pursuing first-team dreams while playing in Europe is like Champions League football, minus the music.

"Because we are not in a league like a usual team, it gives us a chance to play teams like Bayern and you never know who is watching. You could go back with the first team or further your career," he said.

"When you play European teams, it has the same feel to it as Champions League, just without the points."