Brentford face Premier League champions Liverpool at Gtech Community Stadium on Saturday (8pm kick-off GMT), live on Sky Sports.

The Bees have lost just one of their five home games this term, while Arne Slot's side come to west London having picked up zero points from their last three league matches, prior to a 5-1 win over Eintracht Frankfurt in the Champions League on Wednesday night.

Analysis, team news, match officials and more. Here's everything you need to know ahead of the fixture.

Pre-match Analysis

Stephen Gillett, Playmaker Stats: Full-backs the focus for Saturday's fixture

Fresh from Monday’s convincing 2-0 win over West Ham, Brentford host Premier League champions Liverpool at the Gtech on Saturday - and their flying full-backs could again be key.

Michael Kayode and Kristoffer Ajer excelled against the Hammers and, with Aaron Hickey, Rico Henry and the versatile Keane Lewis-Potter all impressing at times this season, Brentford appear strong in wide defensive positions.

The marauding Kayode carved out seven chances at London Stadium - the most by a Brentford player in Premier League history. Ajer, meanwhile, was a rock against the dangerous Jarrod Bowen, winning the most tackles (four) and the joint-most aerials (eight) among Bees players.

Playing ahead of Kayode on the right, Lewis-Potter claimed an assist after coming off the bench to round off an excellent night for Brentford’s wide players, and a very good night all round.

Arne Slot's Liverpool roll into town this weekend, reeling from a trio of Premier League defeats against Crystal Palace, Chelsea and, most recently, Manchester United.

Collectively, the Merseysiders are under the microscope, and their new look at full-back is particularly under scrutiny.

Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson, in many ways, rewrote the manual for the modern Premier League full-back, but the former's move to Real Madrid and the subsequent arrivals of Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong have shaken things up.

Liverpool are yet to find a new rhythm at full-back, with Slot even forced to deploy midfielder Dominic Szoboszlai at right-back amid form and fitness issues for Frimpong and Conor Bradley. In many ways, that position feels like a microcosm of Liverpool’s wider transition - as Slot's side reshapes its style and identity in the Dutchman's second season.

In his first season in the dugout, Keith Andrews can relate to Slot’s challenge of blending new arrivals into a proven core. Yet where Liverpool’s evolution has spluttered, Brentford’s has arguably been more assured - the seamless integration of Igor Thiago, Dango Ouattara and Jordan Henderson driving them forward this season.

Thiago, restricted by injury to just 169 Premier League minutes and two shots last term, has burst into life with six goals in nine appearances. The Brazilian now looks every inch the next name in Brentford’s production line of prolific strikers - following in the footsteps of Ollie Watkins, Ivan Toney and Yoane Wissa in TW8.

Thiago (five) and Ouattara (five) fired in 10 shots between them during the first half against West Ham, while Henderson was heralded as "imperative" by his head coach after completing more accurate passes (77) than any player on the park.

Ouattara’s penetration, Thiago’s goals and Henderson’s nous have added new dimensions to the Bees’ game, and there is now clear evidence that the west Londoners are growing in confidence under Andrews.

With Liverpool also having to contend with their midweek outing in Europe, Saturday will certainly test the mettle of two teams in transition.

Scout Report

Dan Long, Sky Sports: Three league defeats in a row leave Liverpool needing to bounce back

Liverpool waited 28 years for their first-ever Premier League title, and when that wait finally ended in 2019/20, such was the cruel reality of Covid restrictions, there were no fans inside Anfield to witness the historic moment when Jordan Henderson lifted the trophy.

Under Jürgen Klopp, the closest they came to another was in 2021/22, when they finished, agonisingly, just one point behind Manchester City. But after Arne Slot replaced him in the summer of 2024, a second in six seasons was in the bag with four games left to play.

“You can feel how important it was for the fans to be here,” Slot told Sky Sports when his side wrapped it up with a 5-1 win over Tottenham.

The writing was on the wall a long time before that day. Liverpool had lost only twice before that: 1-0 at home to Nottingham Forest on 14 September and 3-2 at Fulham on 6 April. There was a 26-game unbeaten run between the two - the 10th-longest time without defeat in the history of the competition.

When they visited Gtech Community Stadium in January, a quadruple was on, too, but those hopes were extinguished within two months. They suffered a shock FA Cup fourth-round defeat at Plymouth, and were knocked out of the Champions League by Paris Saint-Germain in the last 16. There was a run to the Carabao Cup final, but they were outclassed by Newcastle at Wembley.

That said, winning the title was enough to earn Slot a serious amount of credit for achieving the feat in his first season in English football. Klopp had encouraged the fans to get behind him before he left, and the Dutchman proved himself a worthy replacement for the man they adored.

After a summer in which the club spent almost half a billion in the transfer window - including the British-record signing of Alexander Isak from Newcastle for £125 million and the signing of Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen for £100m - they started the season in inspired form.

There were five straight Premier League wins, a Carabao Cup third round victory over Southampton and a 3-2 win over Atlético Madrid in the first game of the Champions League’s league phase. All seemed to be ticking along just nicely.

But their recent shaky form serves as a reminder of how quickly things can change. Even Mohamed Salah’s starting place has been questioned by Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher.

They will be hell-bent on lifting themselves out of this blip, but with three league defeats already - as many as they suffered in their first title-winning season and just one less than last season - even at this early stage, chances of winning back-to-back titles for the first time since 1984 are slimming quickly.

In the Dugout

Arne Slot

Arne Slot had a long career in his native Netherlands, which spanned 18 years from 1995 to 2013. He was a goalscoring midfielder - once capped internationally at Under-19s level - who scored 100 league goals in 462 appearances, over 300 of which came during spells at PEC Zwolle and NAC Breda.

During the three separate periods spent at Zwolle, he won the Eerste Divisie – the Netherlands’ second tier - in 2001/02 and 2011/12.

After retirement, Slot moved into a coaching role within Zwolle's youth academy, before four years at Cambuur, first as assistant to Henk de Jong, Marcel Keizer and then Rob Maas, before being appointed joint head coach with Sipke Hulshoff. The pair guided Cambuur to a third-place finish in the Eerste Divisie in 2016/17, which secured a play-off spot, though they were defeated 3-2 on aggregate by MVV Maastricht.

Slot left Cambuur in the summer of 2017 to take up the assistant role at AZ Alkmaar and he was handed the head coach role two years later. His first and only full season in charge was disrupted by Covid but, when the season was abandoned on 24 April 2020, his side were joint top with Ajax.

He lasted less than eight more months in the role before he was reportedly sacked for a lack of focus after agreeing a deal to take over at Feyenoord in 2021. It was in Rotterdam that he really started to make a name for himself.

In 2021/22, Feyenoord finished third in the Eredivisie and as UEFA Conference League runners-up. In 2022/23, they won the league for the first time in six years, reached the semi-finals of the KNVB Cup and the quarter-finals of the Europa League. And in 2023/24, they finished as Eredivisie runners-up and won the KNVB Cup.

In all, he won 98 of his 150 games in charge at De Kuip, before being named as Jürgen Klopp’s successor in April 2024.

The Gameplan

With Andy Jones, The Athletic

Andy Jones, Liverpool reporter for The Athletic, discusses how Arne Slot is likely to set up his team on Saturday night.

"It is pretty similar to what they did last season: the 4-2-3-1 system," said Jones. "There was a little bit of a tweak against Manchester United, who play a back-three, where Slot pushed both of his two higher centre-midfielders further forward, which left Ryan Gravenberch on his own in the middle to build play.

"The ultimate question is what Liverpool's style is at the moment. Because of the changes, they are not quite playing the same way as they did last season. It is also difficult to adjust the playing style when they keep going 1-0 down, because that changes the dynamic.

"One of Liverpool's issues so far this season has been against the back-three. Crystal Palace have become a bit of a bogey team, and Manchester United were able to have success as well. It is one of those systems where they are not quite clicking. The record, generally, across Slot's tenure against back-three teams is pretty good, but they have had a few problems with it in more recent times.

"Generally, it will be your usual Liverpool. They want to dominate the ball; they want to control the game.

"It will be interesting to see if they can get through that initial phase at 0-0 at the very least, then see how they can impose themselves on the game. That is not what they have been able to do in the last few games because they have been behind after 15 minutes!"

Read our full interview with Andy Jones here

Match Officials

Hooper to referee Saturday's clash

Referee: Simon Hooper

Assistants: Adrian Holmes and Simon Long

Fourth official: Tim Robinson

VAR: John Brooks

Experienced Wiltshire referee, Simon Hooper first took charge of games in the EFL back in 2008, before being appointed to the Select Group 1 of Premier League referees in the summer of 2018.

Hooper has been the man in the middle for seven top-flight games this term, showing 33 yellows and two red cards.

He refereed three games at Gtech Community Stadium last campaign, with the Bees unbeaten in all of those.

Memorable Meeting

Brentford 3 Liverpool 1 (Premier League, 2 January 2023)

Brentford beat Liverpool 3-1 to make it seven points from a possible nine over the festive period and climb to seventh in the Premier League.

Ibrahima Konate turned into his own net to give the Bees a 19th-minute lead, which Yoane Wissa doubled on the stroke of half-time.

Liverpool pulled one back through Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain five minutes after the restart, but Brentford were not to be denied.

After keeping the Reds at bay, Bryan Mbeumo struck on the counter attack with six minutes to play to ensure a winning start to 2023.