Ben Ryan: The Olympic gold medalist helping Brentford reach peak performance

Brentford’s new performance director is no stranger to making history. Seven years after guiding Fiji to its first Olympic medal—a rugby sevens gold in Rio—Ben Ryan has returned to the west-London suburb where he grew up, tasked with squeezing every last drop of potential out of the Premier League club he has supported since childhood.

Ryan’s boyhood home on Field Lane sat less than a mile from Griffin Park. On Saturdays he would hear the roar drifting down the railway line at the bottom of the garden, yet a professional life that began at 17 and morphed into a globetrotting coaching career rarely allowed him to attend. When he could, he savoured the ritual: “No phone coverage, the toilets were s**t, but I’d get my Bovril at half-time and everything just disappeared.”

Those escapist afternoons are now office hours. Appointed in June 2022, Ryan oversees medical, welfare, logistics, performance, nutrition and kit departments that feed into him, while he himself reports to director of football Phil Giles alongside head coach Thomas Frank. His brief: improve culture and performance without tearing up a model that took Brentford from the Championship to a stable top-flight existence.

It is a delicate assignment, far removed from the blank canvas he faced in Fiji, where he arrived with “a whistle and nothing else”. There, he introduced nutrition standards after watching a player balance ten chocolate croissants topped with fried eggs; within months the squad bought in, energy levels spiked and the island nation stood atop an Olympic podium. At Brentford, the margins are slimmer and the egos more entrenched. “When something already works, you’re rightly asked, ‘Why change it?’” Ryan says. “You need evidence.”

He spent his first months compiling what he calls a “personal MOT”, quietly observing, questioning and mapping gaps. Some fixes were immediate: grounds staff were overhauled so that both stadium and training pitches now allow repetitive set-piece work; an operations department was restructured; a player-care unit was created. Others—tweaks to training load, injury-prevention protocols, even the fabric of the away kit—are phased in over seasons. Last year the club discovered its blue away shirt absorbed so much sweat that players carried an extra 500 g; Umbro was swiftly enlisted for a redesign.

Ryan, a Loughborough and Cambridge graduate who steered England’s sevens to a World Cup final before consulting for Olympic athletes and Fortune 500 companies, applies the Pareto principle: 80 per cent of success derives from 20 per cent of actions. Identifying those “trampolines” is the easy part; persuading departments to jump is where diplomacy is earned. Tattooed on his wrist is the Fijian phrase “Vei Lomani”—love one another and work together. “Trust takes time,” he says. “No matter how good people think you are, you still need to evidence that change is in their best interests.”

The measured approach mirrors the club’s wider philosophy. Ryan praises owner Mathew Benham and the board for rational, sustainable decision-making that resists the knee-jerk churn common elsewhere. “We’re just doing sensible things every day,” he notes. “That shouldn’t be underestimated in elite sport.”

Despite operating on a fraction of the budgets enjoyed by Manchester City, Liverpool or Manchester United, Ryan believes Brentford can become the league’s best-run club. “Cash isn’t always a limiting factor; it’s good joined-up thinking,” he insists. “Nothing is impossible.”

Whether fine-tuning a training schedule, re-seeding a pitch or simply asking a player at half-time if he has considered a marginal gain, Ryan is guided by one mantra: performance is about people. And if the smiles on the faces of 1,000 Fijian fans requesting photographs are any barometer, those people tend to end up believing in Ben Ryan.

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