Brentford tickets

Brentford Football Club was founded in 1889 and joined the Football League in 1920. For most of the century that followed it was a west London club of the lower divisions, familiar to anyone who followed English football closely and largely unknown to everyone else.

That changed in 2021, when the club won the Championship play-off final at Wembley and returned to the top flight for the first time since 1947. Seventy-four years is a long wait, and it made the promotion one of the more remarkable stories of the modern Premier League.

Brentford also became known for how it got there. The club built a reputation for data-driven recruitment, finding players other clubs had overlooked and selling them on at a profit, an approach that has since been studied and copied across the game.

Home was Griffin Park for more than a century before the move to the Gtech Community Stadium in 2020. The new ground is a short distance from the old one and was built deliberately compact, which is why a Premier League fixture here feels closer than it does almost anywhere else in the division.