Beesotted regular Lewis ‘Sherlock’ Holmes kicks the new season off with a new article and ask’s whether The Bees are having a Brat Summer… whatever the ***** one of them is!
I’m not really sure what a Brat Summer is but I keep hearing it. Even Kamala Harris busted it out recently, and she’s the Vice President of the US of A. Listen right, if the latest buzzword is good enough for the Veep then it’s good enough for me.
I love jumping straight into my half thought out articles but I needed a bit of a steer before starting this one. So I asked my zeitgeist-adjacent wife, who is way cooler than I am (sat here among my Pearl Jam CDs, pining for Arnie’s action movie heyday, watching Bottom repeats on Gold) and she told me that the Brat Summer was gifted to the world by Charli XCX. In the words of the artiste herself it’s “Quite luxury, but also trashy… like a pack of cigs and a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra. That’s kind of all you need. It’s all about flaws, fuck ups and ego all rolled into one. It’s very honest, very blunt. A little volatile. Essentially, brat is being your true, unapologetic, messy self in a way that’s aspirational.”
Now, I really don’t want to see you lot in strappy white tops with no bras, but I feel there are definitely some parallels here. For the last three transfer windows, Brentford have tried to take that next step up to improve our chances of remaining at the top table. £20m deals were the stuff of dreams even 10 years ago, yet here we are going for players who are in that bracket, luxury names yet still raw – dare I say trashy? – enough to be honed and sold on. The approach has been unapologetically, truly Brentford while also undeniably aspirational.
For various reasons these transfers haven’t come off. Bakayoko, Nusa, Gray – we all know the names. With each ‘snub’, the grumblings across social media and the GPG grew louder. I’m not even on the GPG and I could hear the rumbling. Smash cut to summer 2024, and the rumblings persisted. Low level, nothing truly mutinous, but definitely there. Why oh why aren’t we SIGNING anybody? We need SERIOUS reinforcements. The squad is NOT GOOD enough! I’ve deliberately done that weird tabloid thing of capitalising random words because that’s how I read most of these posts. I’m gonna say this with love but it’s true: the tone of so many of them was decidedly bratty. It’splain to see that the aspiration from the fanbase clearly matches the club’s, but it’s messy and volatile in its delivery, and it’s patently the total opposite of how the club is going about its business.
Reading those sorts of responses makes me wonder how many Brentford fans still dwell in the bad old days. Picture some pitiless, harried soul hunched over a desk in a windowless room, filled with the fug of cigarette smoke, waiting forlornly for a decrepit fax machine to whirr into life. Finally a sheet of paper spits out onto the floor. The tortured fax jockey bangs the door open and yells down the corridor: “Leroy, we got Thomas Pinault!” You know those days are dead, right?
I started writing this an hour after the Fabio Carvalho announcement. A signing that we all knew was going to happen, just the motions to go through. But maybe Spurs sharking Archie Gray rattled a few cages, because the tone got quite querulous as the afternoon wore on. It got to the point where I thought whoever was on socials at the club was watching the reaction online and spinning proceedings out purely to wind up the fanbase. It wasn’t that, of course, only a dickhead like me would gleefully yank so many chains. It was just a complex deal, and they take time. They involve coordination with the player, his agent and the selling club. Simply put, it is politics and you’ve got to keep a lot of parties happy. The fans are not one of those parties though, and you lot have got to chill out.
Because I’ve got the attention span of an excited puppy, I’m still writing this the following morning. Overnight, the Jens Cajuste transfer has taken a turn and looks to be off. Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is the most likely; it looks to me like Napoli have pissed around on the terms and Giles has walked away. The Cajuste move was dependent on other moves, so it was another complicated transfer with lots of moving parts, but the reaction overnight was predictable: Same old Brentford, why can’t we get these deals done? and that already-tired-old-classic – lol Spurs. Gang, you’ve got to start reading the runes better.
I understand how repeated collapses may have worn people down, but the plain truth is that this is going to happen. What happened with Cajuste is different to what happened with Archie Gray, which was different to what happened with Antonio Nusa, which was different to what happened with Yohan Bakayoko. Moved goalposts at the 11th hour, a big six gazumping, an undiagnosed medical issue, the player’s own naked ambition. None of those outcomes could have been predicted or managed – they were all circumstances out of our control.
Phil Giles and co monitor thousands of players at any one time, you don’t honestly think that we’re going to run out of options any time soon, do you? You don’t really believe that they’d release six squad players and sit on their hands all summer, right? I’m no happy clapper, I’m just talking straight facts: since that season where we went too Moneyball too soon, the recruitment department has rarely put a foot wrong. Even last year, when everyone bemoaned Ghoddos and Maupay gracing the hallowed turf again, it turned out okay in the end. The summer signings kicked in and did their jobs. Also, let’s not forget that the issue last season was an injury crisis, plain and simple. The chances of that happening again are minimal.
If a Brat Summer is all about flaws then it’s easy to clasp that “It’s Brentford innit” comfort blanket close to your chest. But it’s also all about ego, so I reckon we stop blaming ourselves and start aiming our ire outwards. We’ve got the best recruitment team on earth and if other people don’t realise that they’re dealing with greatness then that’s their issue (Napoli, I’m looking right at you). There’s thousands of players out there, and plenty of them will jive with the blunt, unapologetic, aspirational vibes down at TW8. Cor, I’ve gee’d myself right up there. Bring on Palace, I cannot wait. Up the Bees!
Lewis Holmes
Dude, you did it again. Great article!