Brentford FC received £3.23m in public money for research and development | Brentford

Brentford football club have received £3.23m in public money for research they have commissioned into sports science, medicine, training and tactics over the past two years.

Under the terms of the research and development (R&D) tax credit scheme, businesses can claim back 20% of the costs of a research project on the proviso that the results of the research are made widely available and ‘create an advance in the overall field’.

Brentford have spent about £16m on their research department over the past two years, leading to the publication of several academic papers on a range of subjects, including training loads, running intensity and positional play. The results have been used by the head coach, Thomas Frank, whose team are renowned for their high energy and intensity.

A note in Brentford’s 2023-24 accounts published this week revealed that the club received a £3.23m tax credit last year, although the Guardian has been told that part of the payment was backdated for a claim made the previous year.

The R&D tax credit scheme was set up in 2013 to provide incentives for businesses to innovate in science and technology for the public good but has attracted considerable controversy because its cost has ballooned from an initial £1.1bn to £7.5bn a year in the most recent figures.

The Times reported earlier this week that Chelsea have claimed £2m in R&D tax credits between 2020 and 2023, and Nottingham Forest £607,000 last year, with both clubs declining to discuss what projects the money was awarded to support.

Brentford have been more open, with sources at the club pointing to several research papers that have been published in academic journals over the past two years. The club recruits about half a dozen PhD students every year to conduct research, with the results published and fed back to the football department.

Performance director Ben Ryan, a former rugby player who coached Fiji’s sevens team to win gold at the 2016 Olympics, has co-authored some of the work, and Frank also takes a keen interest.

Recently published work includes a comparison of the positional demands of the Premier League and France’s Ligue 1, a study on the impact of match location on players’ high intensity running speed and a similar piece of work looking at high-speed running and sprinting based on the quality of the opposition.

A data-led approach pioneered by the club’s owner, betting entrepreneur Matthew Benham, has transformed Brentford from a team in League One to an established Premier League side despite modest resources, and the club are now applying their successful recruitment principles to other areas.

“Our research programme has been developed in collaboration with leading academic institutions involving our team of PhD researchers within the club,” a Brentford spokesperson told the Guardian. “These projects, many of which are published in peer-reviewed journals, are making new contributions to the fields of sports science, medicine, biology and athletic performance.”

The large sums being handed over by the government to top-flight clubs for R&D projects has raised eyebrows in football, particularly at a time when the Premier League has yet to make an offer of a new financial settlement to the EFL that has been under discussion for almost five years.

The clubs are also attempting to resist the creation of an independent regulator, which was a key recommendation of the fan-led review published four years ago, was introduced by the previous Conservative government and was in the Labour party’s general election manifesto.