Mapping Brentford's Premier League squads
Elite football clubs commonly stock their teams with the best talent from around the world. Brentford is no different. In this story, we'll look at where the players in the current squad have come from, and we'll also look back and see how that has changed during the team's time in the Premier League.
A quick note about our methodology. We've typically used Wikipedia to determine a player's birth city. Note that a player's birth location may not correspond with the country they play for internationally – for example, Ethan Pinnock was born in Lambeth (London) but plays for Jamaica. For selecting which players to include/exclude, we've generally gone with players who have played a reasonable number of minutes for the team in a given season. There are some exceptions where we've carried over a player who spent the year away on loan (for example, Frank Onyeka last year or Ji-Soo this year) and included them for the sake of continuity.
The 2025-26 squad
The current iteration of the squad is the most geographically dispersed of all of the Premier League era squads, with players from North and South America, Africa, Asia and of course Europe. The geographic centre of the squad is in Normandy, France.
Brentford 2025-26 squad map (Sources: BrentfordFC.com, Wikipedia)
The squad over time
We've previously mapped the flow of players over the 5 Premier League seasons. This time we want to take a more literal approach to mapping the players to see if/how the squad's birth cities have changed over time, and where the geographic centre point of the team was and is. For example, the early PL years felt very Danish, whereas now there are fewer Danes and a pair of Brazilians.
The centre shifts
We'll jump ahead a little bit to plot the geographic centres of the squad over the 5 Premier League seasons using some sophisticated geographic mathematics skills.
You'll note that there is a small change within the first 3 seasons where the squad moves ever so slightly to the south and east. That pattern changes significantly during seasons 4 and 5, with a sharp move west, showing the impact of the addition of players like Fabio Carvalho, Igor Thiago, Gustavo Nunes and young American goalkeeper Julian Eyestone.
Squad geographic centres over the years
Earlier Premier League seasons
For completeness, we include the squad maps for each of the Premier League seasons, in reverse chronological order.