Brentford’s majority owner Matthew Benham has discussed the club’s focus on set-pieces and revealed the Bees paid players a bonus for scoring an eye-catching number of goals from kick-off this season.
Keith Andrews’ side scored inside 40 seconds in three consecutive games earlier in the season and Benham told the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference 2026: “They are on a set-piece bonus which drives them quite a lot and and they did say the three goals are straight from kick-off. They are set pieces and we we had a bit of a debate about whether they qualify as set pieces.
“We did have to pay out the bonus.”
Benham’s data-driven approach to football has been widely discussed and in a revealing discussion as a guest speaker, the Oxford physics graduate was quizzed on gaining an edge from set-pieces.
He added: “I should say Keith Andrews last year was our set-piece coach. He wouldn’t want to be identified as a set-piece coach. I mean you know he saw himself as an all-round coach. He made it clear that when he spent last season with us as a set-piece coach that wasn’t his ultimate calling.
“Whenever we raised the idea of a playbook in football – have signals – we were always told that was way too complicated.
“And yet you get players that barely have a high school education and can still memorise a 100-page playbook in NFL. It seemed the main resistance to set-pieces was that players don’t like it, don’t like boring training.
“Traditionally in English football, players absolutely love someone like Kevin Keegan, the training is fun, five-a-sides, head tennis, no boring learning/repetition or slow walkthroughs.
“But if you’re going to be good at set-pieces or a tactical matter, it is quite a lot of boring stuff, repetition, rote learning and slow walkthroughs. A lot weren’t doing it because players didn’t like it.
“And traditionally if players didn’t like it and the manager tried to push it, the manager might lose the dressing room. That was why we tried to push.”
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