Brentford Quiz

Brentford began with a show of hands: members of Brentford Rowing Club voted to take up football rather than rugby, and west London gained the club everyone knows as the Bees. From 1904 to 2020 the red-and-white vertical stripes played at Griffin Park, famously said to be the only English league ground with a pub on each of its four corners, before the move to the stadium that has carried the Gtech name since a 2022 naming-rights deal. This free Brentford quiz covers the whole story — the rowing-club origins, the Griffin Park decades, and the data-driven rise that ended 74 years outside the top flight.

The old days reward knowing. Brentford were founder members of the Third Division in 1920, one of 21 Southern League clubs who formed the new tier, and under Harry Curtis — manager for 23 years from 1926 to 1949 — climbed from the Third Division to the First, finishing fifth in 1935-36, still the club's highest-ever placing. Griffin Park's record crowd of 38,678 squeezed in for a 1949 FA Cup tie against Leicester City, and Jim Towers remains the record goalscorer with 163 goals between 1954 and 1961. The modern chapter belongs to Matthew Benham, the professional gambler whose analytics-first recruitment rebuilt the club: Dean Smith laid the foundations from 2015 until Aston Villa came calling in October 2018, and Thomas Frank absorbed the pain of losing the 2020 play-off final to Fulham at Wembley before beating Swansea City 2-0 a year later to end the 74-year wait. On the opening night of 2021-22, Sergi Canós scored the club's first Premier League goal in a 2-0 home win over Arsenal.

Expect the full spread — transfers, records, managers and cult heroes. The recruitment model is a quiz in itself: David Raya signed from Blackburn Rovers and Pontus Jansson from Leeds United in 2019, with Jansson later made club captain; Ivan Toney arrived from League One Peterborough United in 2020; Ollie Watkins left for Aston Villa the same year in a then-record sale reported around £28 million, after Neal Maupay's 2019 move to Brighton. And in January 2022, Christian Eriksen — months after his cardiac arrest at Euro 2020 — joined a Danish head coach at Brentford. Difficulty climbs from easy openers (the nickname, the pubs on Griffin Park's corners) to genuinely hard deep cuts about record crowds, Harry Curtis-era finishes and exact fees.

Every question comes with a short explained answer, so a miss still teaches you something — why the fifth-place finish of 1935-36 still stands, or how a rowing club ended up producing a Premier League football team. Play the sample set below free in your browser, no sign-up needed. When you want the full Brentford quiz — plus daily challenges, leaderboards and multiplayer — it's all in the Ball IQ app.

Ball IQ has 25 Brentford questions — 5 easy, 15 medium and 5 hard.