Brentford FC Case Study

In the summer of 2021, Brentford F.C. celebrated promotion to the Premier League (the top tier of English football) for the first time since 1947. Based in West London, ‘the Bees’ were formed way back in 1889, and play their home games in the modern Brentford Community Stadium since moving in in 2020. 

They have been described as ‘the Premier League’s most innovative and unique club’, and they wear that badge with pride. It was this innovative and ambitious mindset that led them to Kairos – the industry-leading platform that provides an intuitive, robust and secure way to support the club’s squads and backroom staff to simplify scheduling and streamline communications. 

Brentford Head of Data & Technology, Luke Stopforth spoke to us about the value they are seeing from the platform: “To compete at the very highest level, you need to have the tools in place that can maximise staff and player time. Kairos allows us to dramatically reduce the number of platforms we used to manage all of the 1000s of interactions players and staff would have into one easy-to-use platform. It was a simple decision for us to bring on the platform.”

The Problem

Stopforth continues; “Communication for us is integral to what we do at the training ground. It pretty much knits everything together. We’re a small group at Jersey Road with the first team and the B-team, so I think it’s really important for us to bring both those squads together and make sure that everybody’s on the same page. I think the biggest issue for us over the past few years is basically having everything on WhatsApp and we all know what WhatsApp is like, you send your schedule out there, and then suddenly it gets lost in a group when there’s lots of communication going back and forth. So, what we were finding is that players were having to ask for that schedule again, staff were having to ask for that schedule again and so it was important for us to try and move off WhatsApp and bring it into one centralised location.”

The Solution

“Kairos has been really beneficial and valuable for us and particularly around the meetings. So being at the training ground, I’m sure as people know, timings and schedules are changing almost every minute, so the moment that somebody changes a schedule or a meeting, that’s automatically updated and pushed out to us with notifications. So, we’re kept on top of any change, whenever it happens. 

I think it’s become really valuable across the whole club, and we’ve got our chefs able to put mealtimes onto the Kairos app, logistics are able to schedule when we’re going to leave, and then the physios are also able to put booking slots on the app as well, so players can literally log in and see when the physio is available and book themselves in for a time with them. It’s been a really smooth transition away from WhatsApp onto Kairos for us and I think it’s saved everybody at the club a lot of time which allows the players and the staff to focus more on the performances on the pitch.”

To find out more about how Kairos can transform how your team communicates – get in touch here.