Keith Andrews on life at Brentford: 'Push boundaries, find marginal gains — that’s the challenge with elite sport'

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It is where Brentford’s community sports trust hosts some of its projects — not just coaching sessions for local youngsters but walking football, chair-based exercise classes and “the memory hive” to support both those living with dementia and their carers. Brentford coach Keith Andrews arrives to a cheer, working the room with an easy charm. He spends time with each group, enjoying the backchat from some of the walking footballers, who tell him he has to bring leading goalscorer Igor Thiago with him next time. He goes into the cafe, where the trust is helping people out of work or at risk of homelessness train as baristas in the hope of finding employment. The event is in part to promote Brentford’s new shirt sponsorship deal with employment agency Indeed, but these activities are laid on by the club’s community trust every day. “That’s the beauty of a football club,” Andrews tells The Athletic afterwards. “And when it comes from a very genuine place, which it does with this club, it’s really special.” Every club has a community project of some sort, but some are underfunded and others carry a distinct air of corporate-social-responsibility box ticking. At Brentford, Andrews says, the trust’s work is integral. “When you’ve got an owner (Matthew Benham) who’s a fan, it trickles down from that,” he says. “It comes from a very authentic place. “There’s a lot of common sense within the football club. And on this side of it, common sense is looking after your own; looking after the people that really matter. “It’s very easy to get carried away with the trappings and ways of the Premier League and what an exciting journey the club has been on to get to this point, but (it’s important) never to lose sight of where you’ve come from.” As Queens Park Rangers supporters liked to chant, before Brentford fans began to sing it in self-deprecation, the club sitting ninth in the Premier League — level on points with west London neighbours Chelsea and Fulham — is “just a bus stop in Hounslow”. It is a remarkable story, a club transformed under owner Benham, a lifelong fan and former City trader who built his personal fortune in the gambling industry. Marcus Gayle, an ambassador for the community trust, says it was unimaginable when he played for the club in the 1980s and 1990s that Brentford would end up in the Premier League. “It was like looking at the moon at night,” he says, “and thinking, ‘Yeah, I can see the moon. But we ain’t going there.’” Brentford made it to the Premier League in 2021 and have defied the odds and the doom-mongers ever since. When much-loved coach Thomas Frank left for Tottenham Hotspur, along with several of his staff, and four key players were sold to bigger clubs (goalkeeper Mark Flekken to Bayer Leverkusen, captain Christian Norgaard to Arsenal and forwards Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa to Manchester United and Newcastle United), it felt like the Brentford fairytale might have run its course — a view reinforced, in the eyes of many, by the seemingly eccentric decision to replace Frank with Andrews, who had been the club’s set-piece coach. The bookmakers agreed, installing Andrews as favourite to be the first Premier League manager to lose his job this season. “I didn’t have time to be reading lots in the summer but I obviously was aware of the feeling around it,” he says. “It didn’t bother me in the slightest. If I was sat in a coffee shop in Dublin, having a coffee with my dad — without knowing what goes on at Brentford, within the club — and I read that Thomas had left and the set-piece coach had taken over, I probably would have had the same opinion.” The scepticism about the Andrews appointment grew when Brentford were 3-0 down at half-time in their opening game at Nottingham Forest, eventually losing 3-1. “It hurt a lot because it was my first Premier League game,” he says, “and I’ll never forget that feeling, stood on the sideline.” How did it feel? A sinking feeling? “Pain. Pain. Feeling you can’t truly affect the outcome. But the painful days make who you are. Nobody enjoys them at the time, but you’ve got to take them on the chin. I’m a big fan of taking the hits and then coming back stronger.” Andrews suffered a fair few hits in his playing career. Having left Ireland at 15 to chase his dream, he made his league debut for Wolverhampton Wanderers at 19, led the team as captain at 20, briefly tasted Premier League football at 23 and then found himself down in the fourth tier with MK Dons at 25. It took a certain resilience to earn a move back to the Premier League, with Blackburn Rovers, shortly before his 28th birthday, and to force his way into the Republic of Ireland’s senior squad at an age when Robbie Keane, two months his senior, was approaching 100 caps. He likens a career in football to a game of snakes and ladders, adding that there are far more snakes — long, long snakes — than ladders. Even two years ago, after almost a decade in various coaching roles with MK Dons, the Ireland under-21s team, the Ireland senior team and Sheffield United, he admits the prospect of becoming a head coach in the Premier League seemed “pretty distant”. But it wasn’t a coincidence that Andrews ended up at Brentford. “I had studied the team, how they play,” he says. “I did a study on their throw-ins when I was working with Ireland. I had read numerous articles about Brentford, like we all do, and was intrigued by it and the goodness I felt that came from it — the authenticity around it. It was all those factors that made me want to come if the opportunity ever arose.” Andrews joined Frank’s Brentford staff as a set-piece coach in the summer of 2024 and made an immediate impression, not just via corners and free kicks and but also with the kick-off routines that yielded goals inside 40 seconds in three successive Premier League games last season. But still, set-piece coaches tend to be seen as specialists, micromanaging a single aspect of the game. The widespread expectation when Frank left for Tottenham last summer was that Andrews would follow him across London. Few people outside Brentford imagined he would be in the frame to succeed Frank. Fewer still imagined he would prove an inspired choice. The players still call him by his name. Not gaffer, not boss, just “Keith” — the same way Frank was always just “Thomas”. Some clubs and some coaches prefer a more authoritarian regime, but at Brentford, the first-name approach works. His goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher describes him as a “great people person, great at managing people”, even daring to liken him to Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp in that regard. Kelleher only knows Andrews as a head coach, but he describes the transition this season as “seamless”. Still, how do you go about trying to improve a team who had exceeded every expectation under Frank and who, as well as its charismatic coach, lost four key players last summer? The obvious assumption, given Andrews’ previous role and the impact of Kayode’s long throws, is set pieces. But Andrews says Brentford had been highly proficient at set pieces — “ahead of the game” — for a long time. If anything, it has been harder to maintain a competitive edge from set pieces when they have been the subject of increased emphasis across the Premier League this season. “I was at Arsenal’s quarter-final and semi-finals last year in the Champions League and there were long throws going into the box,” he says. “I remember speaking to a couple of the people I was with, going, ‘It’s not good for us, that’. Because normally, what happens when the big boys do things, it trickles down the footballing pyramid. “That’s exactly what happened. So what happens is that teams go from preparing that on a weekly or fortnightly basis, as opposed to two or three teams in the league using a long throw. “I knew that would be a challenge and it certainly has been. You’ve got to maintain your level to try to push boundaries and find marginal gains in different ways. That’s the challenge with elite sport.” Is there any part of Andrews that is bothered by the league-wide focus on set pieces? “No, I like it,” he says. “There’s been a little bit made around the (amount of) time the ball is out of play. But you need to find different ways to win. “Would I do it at every single club, if I was in charge of different clubs? I can’t answer that. Maybe not. But for us it’s a really important part of the game to make the opposition feel uncomfortable and to give us an opportunity of creating chances.” This brings us to the great Brentford paradox. On the one hand, theirs is a highly sophisticated, data-based approach that informs recruitment, physical preparation and set-piece routines alike. On the other hand, it is all underpinned by old-school values. And those values — the “basics”, as Andrews calls them — are embodied by a group of players who, year after year, have proved greater than the sum of their parts. “That’s a really, really huge part of it,” he says. “You walk into any business around the country or around the world now, any football club, any sporting environment — it doesn’t matter what it is — and you’ll see things (slogans and motivational messages) on walls. And for me, they’re not practised really. They’re preached. I think that’s nonsense. “The culture is what you do day to day. It’s who you are, what you represent, your behaviours, your values. That’s not one person. That’s everybody. I’m big on that. I’m big on who we are, what we are, where we want to get to.” Authenticity is a subject Andrews keeps coming back to. It calls to mind something Sean Dyche said years ago at Burnley, suggesting that the “earthy” values intrinsic to elite-level sport were at risk of being lost amid the “glossiness” of the Premier League. “The basics of the game haven’t changed,” Andrews says, warming to the theme. “A lot of the game has changed tactically and there’s a lot more emphasis on certain aspects of the game because everything is scrutinised. But the real basics — the basics of being willing to work really hard and the habits you instil in a group — I think some teams don’t pay enough attention to. “They prefer to look at the new shiny toy and the glossiness you’re alluding to. But without the basics, the shiny bits don’t come to the fore.” Does he mean shiny toys on the pitch — ie, expensive players — or shiny toys like expensive cars and jewellery? “It’s everything really around the game,” he says. “Because of the nature of the beast of the Premier League, you can really get lost in it: the temptations for a modern Premier League footballer who’s obviously earning a really good wage, the pitfalls off the pitch. “But even in games, the way certain teams play… it’s every coach’s prerogative to set up a team the way he wants, but consistency is really important and what you strive towards. And the basics are huge.” The firm emphasis on basics and authenticity, along with the warnings about the trappings and temptations, calls to mind another former Republic of Ireland midfielder: Roy Keane. But the pair are not exactly close. When Andrews joined the Ireland national senior team’s coaching setup in 2020, Keane remarked in an interview with the Sunday Independent that “I’ve heard a lot of bulls****ers over the last 10 years and Keith Andrews is up there with the best of them”. Has he ever sought to clean the air with Keane, or vice versa? “Nope,” Andrews says. Did it bother him what Keane said? “No,” he says. “I’ve got very thick skin. And I’m very comfortable in my own shoes — like, very comfortable. I’ve always been very forthright with this because I’ve done media work and everyone is entitled to their opinion. It doesn’t mean it’s fact.” So Andrews says he is comfortable with his criticism. Is he as comfortable with praise? “Not really,” he smiles. “I don’t deal with flattery too well.” He might have to find a way to start doing so. He has had a lot of compliments lately, with Brentford ninth in the Premier League table and in serious contention to qualify for Europe for the first time. If the Premier League’s manager of the year award is about recognising performance relative to resources and expectations, he will be one of several strong, less fashionable candidates beyond Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta and Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola. Uncomfortable flattery notwithstanding, what does he make of the suggestion? “It makes me think of what you said at the start, where a lot of people would have been thinking that I might have been one of those managers not in place come the end of the season,” he says. “So it makes me feel proud of where we’ve got to. We’ve got to a very good place. We’ve still got a few games left and we’re really keen to finish strong. But, yeah, to be spoken about in those ways is obviously nice.” Andrews suggests the claims of Arteta (“his attention to detail around every game”) and Guardiola should not be dismissed lightly. He also picks out two other coaches, Regis Le Bris and Daniel Farke, for the work they have done at promoted Sunderland and Leeds United. Those success stories notwithstanding, the Premier League looks an increasingly hostile environment for coaches. Of the last 17 head-coach hires in the Premier League, only seven are still in place. Of the other 10, only Ruben Amorim (at Manchester United) was still in charge after 12 months. Five (Ivan Juric at Southampton, Liam Rosenior at Chelsea, Igor Tudor at Tottenham Hotspur, and Ange Postecoglou and Sean Dyche at Nottingham Forest) were gone within four months. In Postecoglou’s case, 39 days. “We live in a very demanding world,” Andrews says. “The Premier League is probably that on steroids, in terms of what fans want, potentially what some owners want. And it’s a ruthless industry.” It is an industry that chews coaches up and spits them out. Rosenior’s brief experience in charge of Chelsea, where he encountered derision and ridicule and was sacked barely three months into a six-and-a-half-year contract, was just the latest example. “I’m not involved in any social media, never have been,” Andrews says. “I genuinely don’t read a lot, but again, I can only imagine the narrative that was around. And it’s not nice. In any walk of life, it (abuse and mockery) wouldn’t be acceptable. It shouldn’t be at the level it’s at. The game needs to have a look at itself.” Frank’s unhappy tenure at Tottenham was another example, a bruising experience for a coach who was loved at Brentford. “Thomas did an amazing job here,” Andrews says. “People really shouldn’t forget that. What he achieved here, and the journey he was part of, was such a special time within this club’s history.” In an interview with The Athletic in 2024, Frank said he had “close to the perfect football life” at Brentford, adding that he was “very aware the grass is not greener even if it looks like it”. As a foreshadowing of his brief, unhappy tenure at Tottenham, it was depressingly accurate. Andrews nods at the reminder. “I’ve already touched on the owner, Matt,” he says. “With Matt, Phil Giles, our director of football, Lee Dykes (technical director), Ben Ryan (performance director) and the like, the support I have is as good as it gets. There’s an unbelievably common-sense approach towards what we are and where we’re going.” But that common sense and that air of realism — that knowledge, starting with the owner, of what Brentford is and, crucially, what Brentford isn’t — does not amount to a curb on ambition. If it did, the club would not have made it to the Premier League in the first place, never mind pushing boundaries season after season. Just how far can this remarkable journey take them? Europe next season? “We’ll push as hard as we can and see where that brings us,” he says. “We obviously don’t know. But where the ceiling is… for this club, there shouldn’t be a ceiling. The club has proved that time and time again. “This season is a good example of that. There were a lot of question marks around the club in the summer. Would this be the end of this chapter? Where would go from this point? You’re going to be in good hands as long as you’ve got really good people making common sense decisions, with a medium- to long-term approach.” And always looking forward, but never losing sight of where they have come from. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms