1997–98 Brentford F.C. season
season of football team
During the 1997–98 English football season, Brentford competed in the Football League Second Division. Just 11 wins in 46 matches saw the club relegated to the Third Division on the final day of the season.
Season summary
Following defeat in the 1997 Second Division play-off final, David Webb moved "upstairs" to become the club's new chief executive in August 1997. Formerly Brentford manager since the beginning of the 1993–94 season, Webb acquired a majority shareholding of the club as part of a consortium with Tony Swaisland (chairman) and John Herting (director). Days after the takeover, the spine of the previous season's team (Carl Asaba, Barry Ashby and Paul Smith) were sold for six-figure fees. Brian Statham was sold later in August and promising youngster Marcus Bent was transfer-listed. Replacements were found in the lower divisions, non-League and in Premier League reserve teams, with Paul Barrowcliff, Derek Bryan, Leon Townley, Ricky Reina and Charlie Oatway arriving for five-figure fees. First team coach Kevin Lock took caretaker charge of the club until the appointment of Eddie May as manager four days after the regular season began. Clive Walker installed as May's assistant.
A 3–0 defeat to Millwall on the opening day saw Brentford begin the season bottom of the Second Division.
“1997–98 Brentford F.C. season” enters the record as season of football team. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Brentford, season and football can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24039297. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “1997–98 Brentford F.C. season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.