Brentford FC 2, Nottingham Forest FC 0. It feels great not to be writing about another league draw. For too many weeks the routine has been Brentford in front, Brentford pegged back. All the while no team in the Premier League has spent less time losing than us. Saturday broke the rhythm as Ouattara’s cross after direct wing play forced Nikola Milenković into his own net on the half hour, Igor Thiago added a second with 14 minutes to go, the football gods finally paying him back via a deflection lifting the ball over a committed and desperate keeper. For the first time in a month all the minutes spent leading were converted into three points so we start this talking about the clock.

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The clock tells as much if not more of a story than the table. Across the nine games Bees have trailed for around 65 minutes out of 810 played, just 8 percent of the time and the lowest share in the division, comfortably ahead of Arsenal ranked second on 11 percent and Chelsea in third on 14. The league average time spent losing is 25 percent. Strip out the frustrating 20-odd minutes we spent behind against Liverpool with ten men and then nine and the half hour or so at Hull, the rest of our season contains four minutes of deficit at Bournemouth. Until the Hull penalty we had been behind for three minutes and ten seconds all season. In front, the numbers are reasonably healthy rather than overly dominant. Brentford have led for 31 percent of match time, roughly 254 minutes, which is seventh in the league and well clear of the 25 percent average but some way short of Brighton and Bournemouth on 48 and 49 percent respectively. The defining figure of the season to date is the time spent level. Yes, those minutes spent drawing, because we have been in an even game state for 61 percent of our football. We’re a team that rarely loses control of a game but also too rarely takes defining ownership.

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That is ultimately how you end up sixth and in the European spots with three wins. Brentford have scored first in eight of nine league matches, Hull being the only side to score before us and still drawn five, the most in the Premier League. Eleven points have slipped away from winning positions, more than any other club this season and that isn’t a recent habit, given the 102 points we have squandered from in front since promotion. The unwanted framing of this would be a poor approach to leading matches. I believe the majority of the time it has been down to team quality, luck and the strength of the rest of the division as some of those leads have gone in a flash, ie Yarmolyuk’s opener at Villa Park lasting two minutes and Schade’s at Bournemouth four.

Saturday was finally different and the reasons are worth exploring. Forest took fifteen shots to our seven and should have scored.

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Igor Thiago looks like a striker who is struggling. The body language has taken a hit. The usually positive, effervescent character who scored 22 Premier League goals last season, more than any Brentford player in the top flight for 88 years, looks flat on the pitch. This season he has one goal in eight games.

So is the slump backed up by the numbers and is it genuinely something to worry about? Or have we been here before? The Premier League is strong enough that good strikers go through dips. Not everyone is Erling Haaland, and even Haaland has lulls of his own. In January he went eight games in all competitions without a non-penalty goal, and by mid-March he had three league goals in his last 12.

The headline number in Thiago’s season is one. The important number is two: the goals he is short of what his chances are worth. Over eight games, two goals is close to nothing.

To show why, I set him beside the striker every Brentford forward gets measured against. Ivan Toney.

Here’s Thiago’s slump in 5 figures.

1. Take out the penalties and Thiago and Toney are the same striker

Expected goals (xG) gives every shot a probability of going in. Non-penalty xG (npxG) does the same but removes every penalty attempt, which Opta values at 0.79 each, scored or missed. What is left is the chances a striker earns from open play and set pieces.

Toney’s 20 goals in 2022/23 are the benchmark season of Brentford’s Premier League era. Six were penalties. That leaves 14 non-penalty goals from 13.2 npxG.

Thiago’s record-breaking 22 last season included eight penalties. That leaves 14 non-penalty goals from 13.5 npxG.

Same output. Same finishing, a fraction above average. The two extra goals that broke Toney’s record came from the spot.

So Thiago was never a 22-goal finisher. He is a striker who gets into great positions, finishes them about as well as the model expects, and scores his penalties. Which is exactly what Toney was.

2. An average finisher ends up where Thiago is about once in six

This season Thiago has taken 17 non-penalty shots worth 3.0 npxG. He has scored once, the rebound against Chelsea in September. He also hit the post with a penalty on the opening day against Spurs.

So how unlucky is one goal? I simulated 20,000 versions of his season so far. Same 17 shots, same average chance quality. Each shot went in or stayed out as it would for an average finisher.

The most common result was three goals. One goal or fewer came up in 16% of simulations. About one in six.

More than a third of the simulations finished on four goals or more. Same striker, same chances. In one version he is flying. In another, people are asking whether he has lost it.

The simulation has no idea who Thiago is. It still rates his record as entirely ordinary.

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Whenever thinking or writing about Brentford, one thought keeps coming to the fore - surely draws are happening more often? They feel like an increasingly regular feature of the Premier League season, and it has left me wondering whether the numbers back up that impression, and what it means for Brentford.

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Football has changed enormously over the past three decades. Arsène Wenger helped accelerate the professionalisation of English football after arriving at Arsenal in 1996, bringing greater attention to nutrition and conditioning. Pep Guardiola’s juego de posición later influenced how teams use possession to control space, while Brentford have been at the forefront of data-led recruitment under Matthew Benham. Specialist set-piece coaching and the physical demands placed on players have also become increasingly important. Clubs are better prepared and more tactically sophisticated to exploit the smallest advantages.

That makes winning consistently a significant challenge across the division. In The Futility of the Anti-Set Piece, Bees Tactical explored how teams respond to effective attacking routines, forcing opponents to adjust their defensive approach. The same principle applies more broadly: the advantages one club develops become harder to sustain as others improve. The Premier League’s financial strength has helped spread specialist coaching and analytical expertise, even if the gap between the biggest budgets and the rest remains substantial.

So, are draws becoming more common? The recent numbers suggest they are. In 2021/22, 83 of the 380 Premier League matches ended level, around 22%. That rose to 87 in 2022/23 before falling to 82 in 2023/24. There were 93 draws in 2024/25, followed by 104 in 2025/26, more than 27% of all matches. The current season has continued in a similar vein. It is not a straight line upwards, but the latest figures support the feeling that draws have become a more prominent feature of the league.

For Brentford, the significance lies in what those points mean in the context of individual matches. The 2-2 draw at Aston Villa was a valuable return from a difficult away fixture. Villa created the better chances by some measures, yet Brentford twice took the lead and responded almost immediately after John McGinn put the hosts ahead late on. Kristoffer Ajer’s equaliser ensured the Bees left with something to show for their efforts.

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Manchester City’s guilty verdict has opened up the Champions League race, but the betting market has yet to treat their position as anything close to concerning. City moved from 1/20 to 1/4 to finish in the top four, taking the implied probability from 95.2% to 80%, before moving to 2/5. It’s a reaction to the verdict, but hardly the market pricing a club expected to win the league out of the Champions League places. With some estimating points deductions of 50, 60 or even 90 points, the movement looks remarkably weak.

City must be dealt with this season, otherwise the Premier League risks the absurdity of Manchester City winning the title while facing a potentially enormous retrospective punishment. If a 90-point deduction is even remotely plausible, finishing positions become almost impossible to assess until the sanction is known. City could pick up enough points to win the league on the pitch and then be dragged into a relegation battle by a decision made afterwards. For Brentford, that would create an extraordinary opening, but it is still only an opening.

There is another change taking place across elite football that is relevant to this conversation, although the idea that AI will somehow make the manager redundant is overstated. Matthew Benham has spoken openly about models being capable of assessing win probability more accurately than a human manager and potentially improving decisions such as substitutions. That does not mean the manager disappears. It means one part of the job becomes increasingly open to challenge from better information. If the evidence eventually shows that a model consistently makes better substitution decisions, a manager may have to surrender some of that authority. That is the same process football has gone through with recruitment, performance analysis and sports science. The manager remains the person responsible for turning all of that information into a team that can actually win football matches.

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I wonder if Chelsea believe Brentford have a style of play after that hiding under the Friday Night Lights at the G-Tech.

A 3-0 win at home is a fairly emphatic answer to the question Rory Smith posed…

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The underlying numbers speak to a similar story. Brentford have generated 1.75 xG per game at home compared to 1.28 away, while their xGA rises from 1.32 to 1.51. They create more, concede less and earn significantly more points at the Gtech.

After a sensational start to the season, away form in the Premier League remains the spectre looming over Brentford ahead of the trip to Elland Road. Something changes away from home, whether it is confidence, familiarity, the way opponents approach the games, energy management or a combination of all of these factors. The split has been remarkably consistent throughout their Premier League years.

It makes the opening-day victory over Spurs particularly relevant as Keith Andrews has the opportunity to take the momentum on the road. Brentford were outstanding at the Gtech playing with craft, aggression and conviction. They pressed from the front and dominated the physical contest. The organisation and squad depth allowed Bees to sustain an unmatched intensity throughout the entire game.

So, what do we expect to see against Leeds? Bees are known for strategic consistency and there is a huge sense of continuity about Leeds too. Daniel Farke has been at Elland Road since July 2023 and in Premier League terms is now one of the division’s longest-serving current managers. Continuity matters in a league where managerial turnover is so frequent. Giving Leeds an established way of playing and a solid group of players who understand what Farke expects is working.

Talking of continuity the Leeds squad has also evolved rather than been rebuilt with targeted additions of James Trafford, Tarik Muharemovic and Harry Wilson among the new arrivals this summer. They opened the league season with a 1-0 win at Nottingham Forest before beating Forest again in the Carabao Cup.

This makes for an intriguing meeting between two clubs who can both point to continuity as a source of strength given the finishes last year. Brentford are now into the second season of Andrews’ tenure, trying to break a series of draws at Elland Road while Leeds have Farke’s long-term presence and a settled framework to put onto Beed.

Ultimately, Leeds are a much better team and will pose very different problems to Tottenham, particularly through a midfield built around Ethan Ampadu and Anton Stach. For Brentford, Sangaré will be an important presence after an impressive debut and could be the missing link between home and away form. His ability to cover ground and to threaten first time from the edge of the box if a ball comes near him is a already a weapon.

On the latest episode of “The Transfer Flow Podcast”, Ted Knutson described Brentford’s demolition of Tottenham as the best Brentford performance he has ever seen. For someone who has followed the club so closely through its data revolution and rise to the Premier League, that is high, high praise.

Leeds at Elland Road is the first opportunity to see whether Brentford can take the G-Tech quality, focus and attacking aggression on the road with them.

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Two matches into the World Cup and Brentford’s last Bee standing race has become considerably more interesting.

When the tournament began, Jordan Henderson led the model with a 41% chance of being Brentford’s final remaining representative. Igor Thiago followed at 36%, Kristoffer Ajer sat at 17% and Aaron Hickey trailed on 6%.

England have taken four points from two matches. Brazil have recovered from an opening draw to move onto four points. Norway have won both of their fixtures and become one of the first nations to secure qualification for the round of 32. Scotland have beaten Haiti and lost narrowly to Morocco, leaving their fate hanging on the final group game. Using the latest group positions, outright odds and projected knockout paths, the model now produces the following probabilities:

Jordan Henderson – 38%

Igor Thiago – 30%

Kristoffer Ajer – 25%

Aaron Hickey – 7%

Henderson remains the favourite, although his advantage has narrowed since the start of the series. England’s victory over Croatia strengthened their position considerably and placed them on course to top Group L. The subsequent draw with Ghana did little damage to their qualification hopes, but it also failed to provide the kind of boost that comes from securing progression with a match to spare. England remain one of the strongest teams in the tournament and the model still views Henderson as the most likely Brentford player to be involved during the final stages.

The biggest mover and shaker is Ajer.

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