Whether it’s with Brentford or another club, Ivan Toney won’t be playing in the Championship next season.
After scoring 32 goals and grabbing ten assists this season, it’s fair to say he’s completed England’s second tier, even before the play-off final against Swansea this Saturday.
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People notice those sort of numbers, and it’s no surprise the 25-year-old has been linked with a host of Premier League clubs.
But it’s not just the big English teams who are looking towards the Championship for talent these days.
No, Jude Bellingham went from a Birmingham relegation scrap to the Champions League quarter-finals and England’s provisional Euro 2020 squad in the space of a season.
On Thursday, Bayern Munich made Reading academy graduate Omar Richards their new No. 3, signing the 23-year-old on a free transfer.
Meanwhile, Norwich full-back Max Aarons has also been linked with the German club, as well as Barcelona.
Attention from European giants may come as a surprise to most Championship sides, but Brentford are used to being a feeder club: it’s how they operate.
Until now, the Bees had to generate £15m profit in the transfer market every year to function as a profitable business, a task which will get easier when fans are allowed into their lovely new stadium, and more so if they get promoted to the Premier League.
Similarly to most Football League clubs, Brentford accept they must sell their best players to survive, but they are better prepared than the rest.
Brentford owner and boyhood fan Matthew Benham made his millions through a company called Smartodds: a team of genius statisticians who calculate the outcome of football matches to gain an edge over bookmakers.
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His tools compare the relative quality of clubs around the world, helping Brentford find your classic Football Manager wonderkids, usually on the Continent, where the player market is less inflated than England.
They pick them up for peanuts, turn them into superstars, gradually building a higher level of both quality and income, raising the bar with each passing season.
Brentford co-director of Rasmus Ankersen told talkSPORT.com last year: “The key is being able to identify undervalued talent in the market, develop them, and then sell them on for profit, gradually building more value into the squad and gradually increasing the level of the squad.
“Now we come to a place where we have a huge amount of value in the squad and we’re good enough to compete at the top of the league.”
And while they’ve made huge profits in every area of the pitch, from the likes of Ezri Konsa to Aston Villa and Chris Mepham to Bournemouth, their strikers of recent times illustrate the system perfectly.
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Let’s start with Andre Gray: bought from Luton Town for £550k in 2014 and sold for £11.1m the following summer.
Just a few seasons later, Neal Maupay would arrive from Ligue 2 for just £1.6m, then gets sold to Brighton for £19.8m.
His replacement, Ollie Watkins, didn’t cost Brentford more than £2m, and neither did Said Benrahama.
Both of them went to the Premier League for nearly £30m last summer.
Watkins has even earned a place in England’s provisional Euro 2020 squad with his performances for Villa, while Benrahama is starting to find his feet at West Ham.
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And now they’ve got Toney, bought for £10m last summer and probably worth more than all of his predecessors already.
You see how it works? Brentford find them, everyone else buys them, and as the price goes up each season, so does the quality of the Bees.
At some point, they would love for one of these superstar strikers to get their big move to the Premier League via promotion, rather than a big-money transfer.
You can find out whether the Bees finally make it live on talkSPORT against Swansea this Saturday.
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