2026/27 season preview: How high can the Bees go?

Transfers, pre-season form, the players who could define the campaign and what to expect from Keith Andrews’ second year in charge

Almost uniquely, Brentford have had a summer free of elongated transfer sagas surrounding the departure of a star player. They are well set, and after an overachieving first season in the job, manager Keith Andrews will have ambitions to get over the line and secure European football for the first time in Bees history.

There’s still been departures, but thankfully for Brentford faithful not the type to prompt decisive predictions of relegation by TV pundits and anonymous social media accounts alike.

In one of the more puzzling moves of the summer, Jordan Henderson has joined Chelsea on a free transfer, while Frank Onyeka has gone to newly promoted Coventry. A number of younger players have also left permanently or on loan.

But these departures don’t change the shape of the team in the way Ivan Toney, Bryan Mbeumo, Christian Nørgaard or Yoane Wissa did in the previous two summers.

Mamadou Sangaré, Jaidon Anthony and Jannik Schuster have arrived, with Callum Wilson joining on a free transfer from West Ham. Sangaré is the big one, costing somewhere between £38.5m and £42m depending on the source and becoming the most expensive player Brentford have ever signed.

There has been plenty to like in pre-season too. Brentford have won all four of their games, beating AFC Wimbledon 3-2 behind closed doors, Wycombe 4-1, Rennes 4-2 and most recently hammering Eintracht Frankfurt 7-0 at the Gtech.

The Frankfurt result is one difficult to not get excited about. Kevin Schade bagged a brace, perhaps a sign that this will finally be the season he turns flashes of brilliance into consistent output.

Igor Thiago also netted twice, adding to his pre-season tally after opening the scoring against Rennes. Off the back of a disappointing World Cup with Brazil, the signs look positive that Brentford’s front man has no desire to go down as a one-season wonder. New boy Sangaré getting on the scoresheet for the first time put the cherry on the cake of a near-perfect pre-season.

However, pre-season is pre-season, and the Frankfurt side that showed up will not be the same team Brentford would encounter in a competitive European fixture.

Still, it has been a summer which has given supporters plenty of reasons to feel optimistic, particularly after finishing ninth last season with 53 points, matching their best Premier League finish.

They were close enough to Europe for it to be tempting to wonder what might have happened with a few different results. Sunderland finished one point above them to take the Europa League place, while Brighton finished level on points and went above them on goal difference for the Conference League.

So there is a fairly obvious question hanging over the new season. Is this who Brentford are now?

Are they perennial contenders for European competition with relegation battles at the back of their mind? Or was last season a flash in the pan, with Brentford benefiting from a number of sides underperforming?

New signing Mamadou Sangaré

The squad

The most important thing about Brentford’s transfer business is probably what they haven’t had to do. Thiago, Damsgaard, Ouattara, Kayode, Collins and the rest of the core of last season’s side are all still here, leaving Andrews to work on improving the team rather than replacing it.

Thiago scored 22 of Brentford’s 55 league goals last season and his contract runs until 2031. There hasn’t been the usual transfer speculation that follows prolific Brentford strikers, with his signing of a contract extension in February keeping the wolves from the door, at least for a while.

Sangaré is the most significant addition. The 24-year-old arrives from Lens after a season in which he played 33 times as they finished second in Ligue 1 and won the Coupe de France, earning himself a place in the division’s team of the season in the process.

He looks like a good fit for Andrews’ midfield, particularly with his ability to win the ball and cover ground, and his early performances have done little to dampen the excitement around the club’s record signing.

Jaidon Anthony has arrived from Burnley for a reported £17m and Jannik Schuster from RB Salzburg for around £16.5m. Wilson brings a wealth of experience and goal-scoring nous. Now 34, he has scored more than 90 Premier League goals for Bournemouth, Newcastle and West Ham, played for England and spent much of his career proving himself to be one of the better penalty box strikers in the division when fit.

Left to right: Mikkel Damsgaard, Dango Ouattara, Michael Kayode

Ones to watch

Mikkel Damsgaard

Damsgaard is entering an interesting period of his career. It’s been apparent for a number of seasons now that on a technical level there are few better in the division, but last season was stop start, owing to injuries and Keith Andrews figuring out how best to utilise the Dane in a system that prioritised industry and intensity.

It should be said that even in a disrupted campaign he still finished as Brentford’s top creator, with four goals, four assists and 42 chances created.

He’s at his best when he has time to receive the ball between the lines, turn and play the sort of pass that can change the direction of an attack, and Brentford could benefit from finding more ways of getting him into those positions. Andrews has now had a full season to understand the squad and Damsgaard in particular, and with the Dane fit for the start of the campaign there is an opportunity to build him more deliberately into the way Brentford want to play.

If he can stay fit and become a more consistent presence rather than a player who drifts in and out of the side, Damsgaard could end up being one of the reasons Brentford are able to push beyond last season’s ninth place.

Dango Ouattara

Brentford paid Bournemouth an at the time record fee (prior to Sangaré)  for him last summer and there were enough good performances last season to suggest that the fee wasn’t going to weigh him down forever, but he still had periods where his influence on games disappeared.

His pace is an obvious asset and there were plenty of occasions last season when he was able to carry the ball into dangerous areas or get beyond his full-back. The next part is making more happen once he gets there. He doesn’t need to become a completely different player, but if those good performances start arriving every week rather than every few weeks, his contribution could look very different by May.

Much the same could be said of Kevin Schade, whose time at Brentford has followed a similar pattern. He has the pace to get in behind and the ability to produce moments few others in the squad can, but those moments have tended to arrive in bursts rather than week after week, and there were spells last season where his confidence looked to have gone. His two goals and two assists against Frankfurt were a reminder of what he can do when things click.

If he and Ouattara find that consistency in the same season, Brentford’s attack starts to look like a very different proposition, and Thiago stops carrying quite so much of the load on his own.

Michael Kayode

For those who watched him regularly last season, he is already one of the best full backs in the league. At 22, there are still parts of his game that will develop, but the combination of his athleticism and willingness to take players on deserve as much attention as his famed long throws.

He completed more take-ons than any other defender in the Premier League last season and became one of those players where you could almost feel the crowd getting excited whenever he picked the ball up with space in front of him.

The next step is probably less about Kayode becoming a better player and more about the rest of the league taking notice of just how good he is. Brentford have had plenty of players who became widely admired only after spending a few seasons establishing themselves at the Gtech, and Kayode could be the next one.

Keith Andrews

Andrews’ second season

It is easy to forget quite how unlikely Andrews’ first season was. He had never managed a first team before taking over from Thomas Frank, lost eight of his first 15 matches and nevertheless guided Brentford to ninth.

The club clearly liked what they saw, handing him a contract until 2032.

His Brentford side were not particularly interested in dominating possession. They had just 39.7% of the ball last season and played the sixth-fewest passes in the league, instead picking their moments to press and looking to exploit space when matches opened up.

It worked. Brentford finished third in the league for big chances created, scored nine goals on the break and found the net 18 times in the final 15 minutes.

The interesting part now is seeing what Andrews does with a year of Premier League management behind him. Opponents know what to expect, and he has had the summer to think about how to make Brentford less predictable without losing what made them so effective.

There is also plenty of room for improvement at set pieces, despite much being made of the manager’s previous role at the club. Brentford scored only four goals from corners last season, joint-worst in the league.

Damien Duff has joined the coaching staff this summer after winning the League of Ireland title with Shelbourne in 2024, adding another experienced voice to Andrews’ team.

So where does that leave Brentford?

There are good reasons to be cautious about expecting Brentford to improve dramatically on ninth. The Premier League is a strange place once you get beyond the established top clubs, and the difference between finishing seventh and 13th can be very little. A few injuries, narrow defeats or an unfortunate run of games can change the whole picture.

Brentford still have things to prove. While often effective, last season’s football wasn’t always easy on the eye, and if Thiago had an off day, goals looked very hard to come by. Intensity and hard work were defining characteristics of Andrews’ Brentford, but a clear style of play and attacking identity often felt difficult to pin down.

This is forgivable given the damage Brentford’s squad took prior to the season beginning, but this year there will be no such excuse.

But there is enough here to think last season was more than a collection of things going Brentford’s way. They have kept the players who made ninth possible, added genuine quality in Sangaré and have a manager who knows his squad and the league much better than he did twelve months ago.

A return to mid-table, considering the resources available to them, would still constiute Brentford punching above their weight, but to some may feel like a disappointment. Finishing slightly higher is undoubtedly the goal, and it’s well within their grasp.

And for all the sensible reasons not to read too much into a 7-0 pre-season win, it is still difficult to watch Thiago and Schade scoring goals, see Sangaré settling in and look at a team which has largely stayed together without feeling that there might be something exciting ahead.

Tottenham at the Gtech on 22 August will offer the first real indication of whether that feeling is justified.

All images supplied through Smartframe and Brentford FC.