The appearance of Brentford FC Director of Football Phil Giles on the Training Ground Guru podcast has been written up for the channel's website. Training Ground Guru is a website that produces articles insight into the teams behind the teams in professional football. They also produce podcasts roughly once a month and Phil was a guest earlier this year

Phil spoke for around 40 minutes on a range of subjects. He discussed his own personal journey and how he came to work for Brentford. There were also questions on Brentford as a Premier League team.

Phil explained how Brentford progressed to the top flight despite having limited resources in the Sky Bet Championship. The topic of innovation was repeatedly discussed.One of the key topics was about Brentford's B Team, which was formed in 2016.

“The aim when we made that decision was to get promoted,” said Phil. “We can talk about developing players and bringing young players through, but ultimately we wanted to get promoted. So we decided we would focus absolutely everything on that objective.

"From that perspective you could say it’s been successful. If it comes to developing young people and playing young players I don’t think you could see a better example of that than Brentford over the last number of years. We have really focused on that.

"We took players who, yes, they were young, but who were much closer to the first team than we were going to get through the Academy system and were ready to make an impact and try to get promoted as quickly as possible. That feels to me like a good thing. A good opportunity for us first of all to look at those markets but good also for those players.

"When we got promoted last year, Mads Bech played something like 25 games, came through our B team. Marcus Forss, while not a regular starter, scored plenty of goals, scored the winning goal against Bournemouth in the Play-Off Semi-Final. He a player who had been released.

"We saw these opportunities of players who would get released but go on again and we thought we could pick them up. Marcus Forss, he was released and we gave him the opportunity to come in and play with us. Fin Stevens, he was on the bench for us a lot last season, a young player who came from Worthing, we gave him that pathway."

The podcast and the written piece are available for fans. Listen to the podcast here. Read the write-up here.