The setting was Brentford’s buoyant home dressing room and Thomas Frank was delivering a rousing speech.
It was last Saturday, minutes after Newcastle United had become the latest side to crumble at the Gtech Community Stadium. Brentford dispatched their visitors 4-2 to earn a seventh home win in eight Premier League games this season, but rather than salute the club’s star goalscorers Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa, Frank made a beeline for less-feted players.
There was praise for captain Christian Norgaard for making 100 Premier League appearances and for Ethan Pinnock for reaching 200 games for Brentford. Substitutes Mikkel Damsgaard and Kevin Schade were heralded for their ability as “finishers” while defender Ben Mee, who only came on in the 87th minute, was hailed for offering encouragement and leadership.
🗨️ “Just wow. They are a good team with good players and you, totally fair, well deserved win” 🙌
Thomas Frank in the dressing room after yesterday’s win ❤️🤍 pic.twitter.com/5ZzEOh3BdM
— Brentford FC (@BrentfordFC) December 8, 2024
The footage went viral and led to replies from former players such as Peter Crouch saying they would have loved to play for Frank, whose star is rising almost as fast as his club’s league position (Brentford now sit ninth, above far better-resourced rivals such as Tottenham, Newcastle, Manchester United and West Ham).
But what is it really like to play for and work with Frank? What are his best qualities as a leader and how does he bring out the best in people?
The Athletic spoke to a number of his players, past and present, as well as those who coached alongside him, to find out.
Pontus Jansson is in no doubt.
“He is a friend for life and the best coach I ever worked with,” the former Brentford captain, now playing for his hometown club Malmo, tells The Athletic. “What a fantastic person he is. He comes into rooms and gives people energy.
“As a football coach, the way he has developed and finds new solutions, how open-minded and brave he is to do these things; he is up there as one of the best in the Premier League. To do this with a small budget and squad is crazy. Not only to do it one year but he and Brentford are clever enough to change things. It keeps everyone on their toes.
“I came here (to Brentford) as a guy who wanted to show off and shine. I became a leader and people remember me as a good captain and a good person. The way he changed me, I will never forget.”
That willingness to take risks, his attention to detail and the mindset of trying to win every game — even against Manchester City and Liverpool — has rubbed off on others who have played for Frank, who used to be a teacher in Denmark before coaching the national team’s youth sides and then at Brondby before arriving at Brentford in 2016, first as assistant manager and then in the main role from 2018.
That much was evident in The Athletic’s Access All Areas podcast at Brentford before the 2023-24 season when “positivity” was the buzzword at the club’s training ground.
“I remember speaking to Thomas when we were either losing or drawing in a game,” Mee recalled. “I looked over to him to say, ‘Shall I go up for a throw-in?’ He said, ‘Yeah, always go every single time, no doubt about it.’ That is refreshing for me.”
Mee said the level of detail Frank goes into was the most he had received during his playing career, citing examples of when to play the pass or delay and to feel comfortable having a few more touches, rather than just moving the ball quickly.
“He’s approachable in ways that maybe others wouldn’t be,” Mee added. “He’s open to ideas, which is great, he’s always trying to take things on board from players but ultimately he’s got a lot of knowledge about the game.”
Brian Riemer, who was Frank’s assistant at Brentford between 2018 and 2022 and is now manager of the Denmark national team, agrees. He says his former boss’s great strength was his tactical and technical understanding of the game and his human touch.
“Thomas is calm and is so good at dealing with people,” Riemer tells The Athletic. “Sometimes when a manager has been at a club for as long as Thomas has, it looks like some people start to get a bit bored. But with Thomas, everyone can see he still has the whole team behind him. That’s because he’s so good at creating that base, that togetherness.
“He starts every meeting by saying, ‘What a beautiful day it is today.’ It doesn’t matter whether it’s sunshine or it’s raining or it’s freezing, he always starts with that note — and I think he does that to remind everyone, ‘Listen, we have got a magnificent life. We are so fortunate. Let’s make sure we value it and we all give our best every day’.”
Riemer gives the example of Damsgaard, who struggled when he first joined Brentford from Sampdoria in 2022, as a player where Frank’s patience had been rewarded.
“Some other managers would have given up and said, ‘That’s not gonna work’ and sold him,” he said. “But Thomas knows Mikel is a quality player and he has worked with him, talked with him and now he’s getting the benefit. Things like that have always been, for me, the biggest strength of Thomas.”
Forging a close bond with his players and his personal touch has been a recurring theme during Frank’s seven years at Brentford.
In December last year, for example, Frank called Nathan Collins in the car on his way home after Wolves beat Brentford 4-1, in a game where the defender made two big mistakes. The message was clear: Collins had Frank’s full support. He has had an outstanding season in 2024-25 and scored against Newcastle last week.
Frank offered private and public support for Ivan Toney during his ban for breaking Football Association gambling rules and held two meetings with the striker during his first week back in training to ease him back into the routine of playing.
Thomas Frank devoted time to Ivan Toney during the striker’s troubles last season (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
There is no disputing Frank’s authority at Brentford but he is not aloof from his players. He attended the British Grand Prix in the summer of 2023 with Toney, Pinnock, Vitaly Janelt, Mads Roerslev and Phil Giles, Brentford’s director of football, while he takes his coaching staff out for dinner a couple of times a season.
“He’s someone you can sit and have a coffee with,” Luke Daniels, who spent four years as Brentford’s second-choice goalkeeper between 2017 and 2021, previously told The Athletic. “You would have chats about what you had done at the weekend and he would ask about your family.
“I had a couple of cars stolen once and he just told me to get it sorted and make sure that my family were alright. It was never an issue to knock on his door.”
Riemer says Frank is “always the guy who knows when to look behind a situation and say, ‘Let’s just chill out one second. Let’s just find out what happened here.’ It could be like when some of the players had some personal issues — which could be anything from the Ivan situation to a happy thing like some a player becoming a dad.
“I would be the first one to be saying, ‘Yes, he’s become a dad, but we need him to play this afternoon!’ But Thomas would know when to say the player needs to be with his family. He is calm and is so good at dealing with people.”
That applies to other members of club staff, not just players. In another video released this week on Brentford’s social media channels, Frank gave a speech praising the club chefs individually by name before their Christmas meal, saying they gave his team “three and a half points, because of the good food.”
“If we put a lot of hard work in it, and we do it together, everything is possible.”
Thomas Frank’s speech at today’s training ground Christmas dinner 🎄❤️ pic.twitter.com/tBPtVUsU4l
— Brentford FC (@BrentfordFC) December 10, 2024
Away from football, Frank likes to socialise and enjoys a beer, but is also a keen traveller. Like many other Premier League managers, he is also a devotee of padel, playing against other members of his coaching staff on a court at Brentford’s training ground, where his competitive streak comes through.
“It’s always a cosy atmosphere at his home,” says Riemer, who lived with the Frank family when he was at Brentford. “There’s always stuff going on there, always football on the television, always something happening, playing board games in the evening. One of them is (military strategy game) Risk.”
How does he approach it? “He goes all in,” Riemer replies, laughing. “With a clever touch. He wins most of the time. He really does not like losing.”
Riemer acknowledges that Frank is “definitely enthusiastic” in what he calls the “war zone” on a matchday but that he never loses control in front of his players once the final whistle blows.
“You see some managers coming in and screaming and shouting after a game or in half-time, and I’ve never experienced that with Thomas,” he says.
“He’s always calm before the game, calm in the dressing room, calm afterwards. But when the 45 minutes are ticking, he has a different song. I don’t think anyone should underestimate that there’s also an animal in there — if only for the 90 minutes.”
It would be unfair to suggest that Brentford’s success is solely down to Frank. The club’s slick recruitment, based around a unique data model driven by owner Matthew Benham, is the envy of the Premier League.
As The Athletic previously reported, Benham set up Smartodds — a betting firm which provides data and advice to gamblers — and applied this to Brentford as well. It covers around 85,000 players globally (that they then bring down to a more manageable 5,000 players). They have six key criteria and scout 16 different positions on the pitch, not 11.
The numbers are vital in helping a club that historically has lived in the shadow of its bigger, wealthier London neighbours thrive at the top level, but Frank’s ability to coax performances out of a largely unheralded squad is just as important. He has called the culture that has been instigated at the club its “secret sauce” but he also has a sharp football brain.
“He’s shown how strong a manager he is on the tactical board and how he’s able to integrate his ideas into the team quite quickly,” Riemer says. “You need to be able to do that if you want to survive in the Premier League.”
Thomas Frank’s man-management skills are beyond doubt but he also has a sharp tactical brain (Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
Under Frank, Riemer believes Brentford evolved from a dominant, possession-heavy Championship team to a more pragmatic one in the Premier League before becoming a more expansive outfit again following Toney’s sale to Al Ahli in the summer. No Premier League team has scored more home goals than Brentford this season, with 26 in eight games.
“As we have seen in other cases, if you come up (to the Premier League) and you play a little bit too naively, in terms of the quality you have in your team compared to other teams, it can give you problems,” Riemer said. “So Brentford developed themselves into a very strong, counter-attacking team which in my opinion was the correct route.”
Riemer also credited Frank with switching to a 3-5-2 from a 4-3-3 at the beginning of his Brentford tenure, which kickstarted the whole journey after a miserable start. He lost eight out of his 10 first matches when he moved up from assistant manager under Dean Smith in 2018. Three years later, they’d been promoted to the Premier League.
“Thomas is meticulous in what he does,” Daniels previously told The Athletic. “He leaves no stone unturned — everything is analysed. We used to concede a lot of goals so we would have to win games by outscoring teams.”
Frank, who rises at 6am every morning, is always looking to find areas where Brentford can unlock the smallest gains — with one obvious example their success from kick-offs this season and going ahead early in matches.
He also devotes time in training to specifically prepare for the end of matches — effectively, how Brentford should play from the 90th minute onwards, doubly relevant now that more stoppage time is being added on by referees at the top level. Brentford practise fast counter-attacks and try to ensure they have at least two players in the six-yard box, between the goalposts, to meet crosses.
In previous interviews, Frank has spoken about the importance of being willing to adapt depending on the opposition. The Dane is unlikely to to face the kind of criticism levelled at Tottenham’s Ange Postecoglou, or Southampton’s Russell Martin, who have both been accused of being too wedded to their principles.
Frank is a more pragmatic character. Brentford, for example, do not play out from the back as much against teams like Liverpool, who are likely to press high and hurt them on turnovers.
Frank’s tactical tweaks don’t always work. At Fulham last month, he took off Mbeumo and brought on Mee, with Brentford leading 1-0. Mbeumo had been Brentford’s main outlet but, with him off the field, there was no way to relieve the pressure and Fulham scored two late goals to win the game.
Bryan Mbeumo has been a key player under Frank (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
That defeat was part of a run of away results which is as dismal as Brentford’s home form has been exemplary. Frank’s side has collected just one point away from the Gtech all season (although five of their seven games have been against teams who finished in last season’s top eight) and with Chelsea to come on Sunday, that record may not get better in the short term.
The six-mile trip east, however, is particularly pointed for Frank, who made the final two in the process to replace Mauricio Pochettino at Stamford Bridge in the summer. There was great respect for the job he had done at Brentford, and his abilities as a leader, but ultimately concerns over his style of play swung the job to Enzo Maresca.
That is unlikely to be the last time Frank finds himself courted by a bigger club and he has many admirers among Premier League executives, who generally consider him intelligent, likeable and engaging company.
He was in the frame to take over at Manchester United in the summer before the club decided to stick with Erik ten Hag, and featured on the list of names suggested by then-sporting director Dan Ashworth when the Dutchman was eventually dismissed in October.
In a previous interview with The Athletic Frank said he was happy at Brentford, appreciated his life largely out of the limelight and knew the grass was not always greener. However, he said he could not predict what could happen in the future.
Riemer is convinced he could make the step up to a bigger club, but could he handle the big stars and the circus that comes with it?
“He’s not the kind of person who gets starstruck,” Riemer replied. “I truly believe he is the type of guy with the personality and intelligence who could deal with those challenges.”
(Top photo: Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
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