The ultimate guide to Brentford's new stadium (2024)

“Small but perfectly formed,” is how Brentford chief executive Jon Varney describes the club’s new stadium.

The players have become accustomed to their new surroundings over 11 months of behind-closed-doors games, but the fans had only been able to attend matches on a few occasions and in very restricted numbers.

That all changed on Saturday as Brentford officially launched their new home with a pre-season friendly against leading Spanish club Valencia.

Supporters started mingling on the concourses hours before kick-off as they soaked up the atmosphere.

Democratic Republic of Congo international forward Yoane Wissa was also in attendance. The 24-year-old, who can play on the wing as well as centrally, has spent the last few days at Brentford’s training ground, finalising details ahead of his transfer from French top-flight club Lorient.

Head coach Thomas Frank’s side paraded the Championship play-offs trophy they won in May, lifting the club into the top division for the first time since the 1940s, as club legends including Marcus Gayle and Steve Coppell watched on. Kurupt FM, the stars of popular BBC mockumentary People Just Do Nothing, treated the crowd to a live performance.

Brentford came from behind thanks to goals from Ethan Pinnock and Frank Onyeka, who secured a 2-1 victory over their La Liga opponents. Club-record signing Kristoffer Ajer also looked very impressive at the back in his first appearance since joining from Scottish giants Celtic.

More important than the result, though, letting fans through the turnstiles at the £71 million ground marked the end of a very long process.

“I’m 52 now and I probably went to my first game when I was about 10 and I would say for at least 40 years there was talk of leaving Griffin Park,” Varney tells The Athletic during a special tour of the facilities.

“There have been all sorts of wacky plans over the years. The one that got quite a lot of momentum was to move out to the Western International Market, at Heathrow Airport. But thank goodness it didn’t happen because we’ve moved less than one mile from our old home into our new home.

“We are still in the heart of the Brentford community, so we haven’t ripped the heart and soul out by moving out of the local area, which is hugely important for us.”

Rita Ochoa of AFL Architects was the project’s lead architect.

“We won a design competition in 2003 and developed a series of designs,” she says.

“A few years later the club’s ownership changed and the new owner (Matthew Benham) insisted on keeping us on board and developing a new design in line with a new business plan.

“The previous stadium had serious sightline issues and was very uncomfortable for the fans and the players. The business case just didn’t support redevelopment.”

When sporting institutions want to build new stadiums or redevelop their current ones, ensuring the project is delivered on time and within budget is critical. However, there was one slightly more concerning issue during the construction of the Brentford Community Stadium.

Space. Or rather, the complete lack of it.

“This is an incredibly tight bit of land,” says Varney.“It’s a triangle, with three railway lines running on all of the sides, which creates lots of challenges.”

“The stadium is surrounded by the M4 (motorway) and railway lines, so at the early design stage and construction stage we have had to work closely with bodies like Network Rail to ensure everything is as safe and optimised as possible,” adds Ochoa. “Even with these restrictions, there’s room for a stunning fan zone and approach, as well as residential developments.”

Getting to the ground, at least, will be very easy.

Brentford will share their new 17,250-capacity home with top-flight rugby union side London Irish and it will also stage several matches when England hosts the Women’s European Championship next July. This means the stadium has been built to comply with FIFA, UEFA, Premier League and Premiership Rugby guidelines.

From the very beginning of the process, the club were insistent that they wanted any prospective new ground to retain Griffin Park’s edge.

There was one clear way to achieve this.

“The one thing we were known for at Griffin Park was that you can literally lean over and touch the players,” Varney says. “We’ve replicated that type of atmosphere within the new stadium.”

Even with only a few fans inside, the noise is immense. Some 3,830 lucky supporters came through the gates for the second leg of Brentford’s play-off semi-final against Bournemouth in May and Varney says the atmosphere then was “electric”.

Ochoa reveals this is all possible because the shape and sound modelling of the building “ensures the roar of the crowd remains in the bowl” formed by its stands.

It probably also helps, as Varney confesses, that there is only room for 1,725 away supporters, who will be housed at the back of the East Stand. The rest of the ground will be filled with “fervent Bees fans” and, as the ground’s name suggests, “community” is something of a buzzword in these parts.

“Every spare inch that we’ve got in this stadium has been used for spectators,” Varney insists. “There are two things that we’ve had at the heart of everything that we’ve tried to do when designing this stadium: make it really fan-friendly — as many seats as we could get in, lots of kiosks and bar areas, lots of toilets because that’s something we were severely lacking at Griffin Park — and the other key component was to make it the most broadcast-friendly stadium that we possibly could.”

Perhaps most importantly, in conjunction with AFL, the club listened to their partners and have crafted a venue that caters to the needs of all fans.

The stadium has a sensory room — an intimate, soundproofed area situated next to the TV gantry that should transform how families or people who might be intimidated by the atmosphere and noise at matches experience live football. “It’s an amazing facility,” says Varney. “We’re going to (determine who attends) on a game-by-game basis so we can get as many people through it as we possibly can.”

There is also a dedicated family concourse and wheelchair-accessible lounges.

In contrast to other venues, wheelchair provision is not segregated. Instead, spaces have been distributed throughout all the stands to allow flexible seating for friends and family. A CCTV system will help to substantially improve security and fans’ well-being.

These are small touches, but they will help revolutionise how spectators enjoy match days.

However, arguably the biggest contrast between the Brentford Community Stadium and Griffin Park is the sheer volume of hospitality options available. All of the areas have a Brentford theme and the most exclusive package, The Oxford and Cambridge Lounge, features private dining, luxury seating and a full panoramic view of the pitch.

Griffin Park was famous for having a pub within a few yards of each corner of the ground, but times have changed.

“I wouldn’t say hospitality has been upgraded, I would say it has had radical surgery,” Varney chuckles. “At Griffin Park, we had 60 hospitality spaces, here we’ve got 2,900 premium seats and they’ve all been sold out. And the great thing is, they’ve not just been sold to corporate organisations, a lot of our fans have upgraded.

“That move from Griffin Park to the new stadium was probably a point in time in some people’s lives where they said, ‘I’m going to treat myself. I want to have a premium experience when I come to the new stadium’.

“And what we are trying to do with our hospitality is make it really informal. We are a pretty relaxed football club, so we want to be true to our values and people are coming here to watch football. We want them to bring their families and enjoy their day and not feel like they have to put a jacket and tie on and dress up for the occasion.”

Brentford have also made a conscious effort to ensure fans aren’t priced out of attending matches, even now they are in the Premier League. Season-ticket prices range from £419 to £549, with £740 adult seats behind the dugouts.

“One of the big messages from Matthew Benham is about affordable football,” Varney adds. “If you look at our season-ticket prices, I believe we are probably the most value-for-money season ticket in the league.”

The pitch, which is about 95 per cent grass and five per cent plastic, is a smooth playing surface and has the same dimensions as the one at Wembley Stadium.

The dressing rooms are a massive improvement on the facilities at Griffin Park, where players from both teams had to sit on uncomfortable benches with tiny metal lockers underneath where they could store personal possessions.

At the Brentford Community Stadium, the changing rooms are huge open spaces that have adjacent areas next to them where players can stretch and warm down after games. They were made extra-large to accommodate the larger rugby union teams that will also use them.

Leaving Griffin Park after 116 years was an emotional process for the club, further complicated by the fact fans didn’t get the opportunity to say goodbye properly owing to the pandemic. They did, unknowingly, sign off in style though — thumping Sheffield Wednesday 5-0 in front of 12,273 in what was the old place’s last match with a crowd before the first lockdown in March last year.

An exhibition about Griffin Park, which has been set up by the club’s official supporters’ trust, launches at the nearby London Museum Of Water & Steam on Friday just before the opening game of the season at home to Arsenal that night and will hopefully provide some closure.

A few pieces of memorabilia have been bought over from Griffin Park, including a couple of old turnstiles, and the infamous Marcello Trotta crossbar (more on that to come in a future article) is going to be hung above one of the bar areas in the South Stand.

Brentford were able to conduct a few tours of their old ground before demolition work began and also auctioned off a lot of items, including dugout seats and block-identification signs from the stands.

On Saturday, before the match against Valencia, the excitement outside and inside the new ground was palpable.

Matt Ridley used to attend matches at Griffin Park, where he had to peer around a pole in front of his seat to get a clear view of the action.

“It’s a complete change and the way the new ground has tied in with getting promotion as well is absolutely fantastic,” he tells The Athletic. “It looks amazing. To see it go from a junkyard, slowly seeing it built up and everything added in was just absolutely amazing.”

“I love it,” adds fellow fan Mick Bemmer. “I obviously miss Griffin Park, it was part of my life for 50-odd years, but they needed this. It’s a beautiful stadium and they could not have asked for a better opening fixture (against Arsenal).”

(Top photo: Victoria Jones/PA Images via Getty Images)