Where is moneyball playing in london

So, the Jamie Vardys of this world, we call the rejects. We like to go pick them up. The new strategy was created with two targets in mind: "the rejects," players released or unwanted by other English clubs, and overseas players, who would see Brentford as a path to English football, and ultimately the Premier League.

First, the rejects. When they were running their academy, Brentford's location in London was a disadvantage: Their best players were ripe for being picked up by the Premier League elite. But Brentford hope their B-team will use their geography as an advantage by making them uniquely well placed to sign the best academy players released from Premier League clubs, especially in the capital.

Left-back Ilias Chatzitheodoridis was recruited from Arsenal last summer. Brentford can help "bigger clubs capitalise on their surplus assets, rather than just releasing them and losing the development costs they had" through selling their players on to Brentford for a small fee or agreeing to a percentage of any future resell. Some castoffs Brentford sign may have been rejected for the wrong reasons.

In , 45 percent of Premier League academy players were born from September to November, suggesting that many clubs were wrongly preferring bigger and older players over younger and more skilled ones. Brentford's approach is a way of guarding against the relative age effect. It is also ideally suited to picking up late developers, who can often usurp prodigies. In Germany, national team footballers had less organised practice than lower-league players in their youth, specialised in football later and only started playing more organised football around age If they've got the talent, it will come out at some point.

The B-team system's second great advantage is its appeal to overseas players. The Premier League's sheer wealth and profile renders Brentford's B-team attractive to foreigners who dream of playing there.

In fact, their squad includes youth internationals from Denmark and Greece. The B-team are treated less like reserves than a parallel squad to the first team: A B-team player trained with the first team times last season.

Next season, Brentford will try to organise a playing schedule as arduous as the senior team's; one player elevated this year "struggled mentally to adapt" to playing three games a week in the Championship, says Rowan.

The structure enables Brentford to do "succession planning. The list includes players at English clubs in the Champions League. B-team players are generally given three-year contracts, and positions with probable vacancies in the first team in the coming years are prioritised; Brentford currently have a shortage of strikers, so Rowan will be willing to pay more for B-team strikers who would have a good chance of progressing.

The system also means that Brentford's scouts can identify players not yet ready for the first team who could improve with the B-team. Ankersen believes Brentford's new strategy enables the club to transform its small size into an advantage. Because Southampton was in administration. They had to play them. And then they get good. You never know if he's going to make it before you've given him 35 games. But do you have the guts to give him those 35 games? Is the risk of bringing a young player on worth it?

Necessity breeds innovation, just as was true for the Oakland Athletics in baseball, or Northamptonshire in English Twenty20 cricket. Brentford will not be able to compete with richer clubs by doing the same things on a smaller budget. Last season, fellow Championship team Aston Villa spent more on transfer fees than Brentford have in their entire year history but still finished three places lower.

In the transfer market, Brentford aim to mimic a shrewd share investor, buying when stocks are low and selling when they are high, using data and analytical thinking to inform their judgements.

When Brentford buy, that means a focus on young players and a determination to find undervalued talents, usually on the Continent, where the player market is less inflated than England. I think that's the philosophy of the club. We want hungry, energetic players that want to prove themselves, that want to learn, are open-minded to buy into the club's philosophy—doing things different.

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Director Bennett Miller. UK release date 25 Nov Links IMDb. You Might Also Like Now a club who have had four spells in the fourth tier since they last played in the elite have a second chance. Brentford, the ultimate Moneyball team, one game from Premier League jackpot Little London club keep on playing the numbers and that could reap big dividends in the Championship play-off final.

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