2009/10 to 2017/18

Brentford never reached the Premier League in the nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18, spending four in the Championship and five lower down. Their best finish was 7th in the Championship, in 2014/15. They didn’t win a major trophy. Over those nine summers they paid £18.8m in transfer fees and took in £23.1m, a net profit of £4.4m.

Brentford arrived in the Championship for 2014/15 and immediately behaved as if they belonged. Seventy-eight points and a play-off place in their first season up, then ninth, tenth and ninth again. Four years, no relegation scare and a growing reputation for doing things differently.

That reputation was built on buying cheaply and selling well. Andre Gray left for Burnley for £9m in 2015 and Moses Odubajo went to Hull. Coming in, the club looked abroad and further down the pyramid: Neal Maupay from Saint-Étienne and Ollie Watkins from Exeter, both in summer 2017, for around £8m combined.

For the first five seasons of this game Brentford are outside the top two divisions, so the 115.football task is to fast-forward what took years in reality. Give that clever recruitment a £900m chequebook and the top flight comes into view a long time before it did in real life.