Phil Giles and Rasmus Ankersen, Brentford FC Co-Directord of Football, have spoken to the Daily Mail. The pair sat down, virtually, with the newspaper days before The Bees begin their first ever Premier League season. Brentford's first top flight game since 1947 will take place on Friday, 13 August, when Arsenal visit our new stadium.

Phil and Rasmus spoke to the newspaper about how Brentford have prepared for their first ever season in the Premier League. They discussed the journey to this stage and what may come next. Phil's studies were also mentioned, as the below extract shows.

‘When Covid first broke out, we didn’t know what to make of it,’ Rasmus Ankersen says. So a board meeting was called. The consensus? This will blow over in a couple of weeks. And then Giles dipped into his personal archives. ‘This is something I never thought I was going to use in football. But this is my PHD,’ he told them. While reading statistics at Newcastle University, Giles had studied pandemics.

Against all the odds. ‘You know these guys who build statistical models that predict how these things will evolve and how many cases there are likely to be in the future? I was doing that,’ he explains. It made him sceptical - he knew how the crisis could drag. So Brentford quickly negotiated wage deferrals with their squad. ‘By doing that early, we put ourselves in good shape to see it through without having to take emergency measures later on,’ Giles says.

The article is available in full on the Daily Mail website. It includes discussion on Brentford B, the pair's first year in charge and using skills from outside football. Read it here.