Brentford – Choosing an accreditation solution to grow with the club

Who are they?

Founded in 1889, Brentford Football Club was recently promoted and now plays its football in the English Premier League. In 2020, Brentford moved to their new stadium, the Brentford Community Stadium from Griffin Park. The move presented the ideal opportunity to implement new accreditation processes and procedures with the ability to improve and expand to meet current and potential future demands.

The requirements

Brentford wanted a new accreditation process that could be deployed in their current stadium while at the same time was future proofed for their upcoming move to their new stadium. The required system needed to have ability to integrate with their stadium access control provider.

New requirements were set out on how to run matches behind closed doors, this included a medical questionnaire with an audit trail and the implementation of the new zoning requirements as set out by the English Football League.

Additionally as London Irish play their home games at the Brentford Community Stadium a second set of requirements needed to be incorporated into the accreditation platform, to ensure they were able to utilise the system as well.

Our Approach

Starting with a meeting to discuss their operational requirements, the required end-to-end process was mapped out from data and photo collection requirements at the start of the process to access control scanning onsite via the stadium’s turnstiles in place as the endpoint.

The end-to-end process provided insight on all internal and external Stakeholders (such as catering, security, stewarding) involved in the process and who would also be users of the system in order to get the data of those working within these groups at the matches into the system. A fundamental list of requirements was established, but with Brentford’s impending move to a new stadium, the ability to expand the processes and procedures was there, so the system could be utilised at both the old and new ground.

The confirmed set of requirements allowed us to marry up what tools and functionality within the Accredit system would work best for Brentford and would deliver the newly planned accreditation process in the best and most efficient way for the club.

We used the flexibility of the Accredit system to address the COVID-19 requirements by incorporating the medical questions into the accreditation application form, implementing the new zone protocols into the system matrix and ensuring these zones were visually identifiable on the badge design.

The Accredit system was used to manage the London Irish season accreditation process alongside Brentford FC simultaneously. Including their own events fixture list and unique badge designs.

The Benefits

• Configure the Accredit system to be used at the old stadium and implement into a brand-new stadium

• Use our expertise with existing clients to implement new processes and procedures

• Flexibility of the Accredit system to manage unforeseen circumstances – COVID-19

• Flexibility of the Accredit system to scale up (large capacity games) or scale down in the case of behind closed doors play

• Manage two different sports simultaneously in Brentford (Football) and London Irish (Rugby)

• Integration with stadium access control system

• Ability to apply new processes and procedures on demand

The Results

We worked to ensure Brentford implemented an effective accreditation operation for their old stadium to manage COVID-19 in a closed door environment while simultaneously developing the processes and procedures required for their new stadium.

Brentford was able to run the Accredit platform in a closed-door environment ensuring every person within the stadium was fully accredited. They were able to adjust their operations through the system to manage the COVID-19 secure environment, which included updates to accreditation zones, badge designs and running a complete audit on all medical questionnaires collected.

Since the system was launched Brentford has been promoted to the English Premier League, which resulted in the need to operate accreditation on a much larger scale. Due to the processes Brentford implemented in 2020 they have been able to take advantage of the ability to scale up, or down, as the requirements demand.