Mark Warburton plays for high stakes again but will get no reward at Brentford - even if they are promoted to Premier League

Even play-off success will not stop former City trader’s exit

Brentford manager Mark Warburton faces an uncertain future (Getty Images)

The next eight days bring the two biggest games in the history of Brentford Football Club, potentially leading to a prize now estimated at £130m.

Their manager, Mark Warburton, also knows that whatever the outcome of the Championship play-off matches against Middlesbrough, to be followed, he hopes, by a Wembley final with Norwich City or Ipswich Town, he and his assistant David Weir will both be unemployed by the end of the month.

So why, sitting in a cramped Portakabin at the club’s Academy just off the A4, does he not look more nervous?

One clue emerges when talk turns to his previous life as a City trader. How many times, he is asked, has he ever been responsible for sums of money like those on offer in the Premier League bull market? “Oh, hundreds and thousands,” is the disarming answer. “It wasn’t my money or a club’s money – it was a different game there. My individual turnover every day was between £1.5-2bn. Every day. And there would be 10 guys round a desk doing that.”

Perhaps the stresses of the trading floor are good preparation for the touchline. A background as a part-time footballer with Enfield helped keep him from the excesses of the City boys who “go out every night and get hammered, and stick whatever you want up your nose”.

Breaking away in 2005 to give himself 10 years to succeed in football quickly brought experiences of a very different world at the Watford academy, “quibbling over £25 for a set of cones”. It was there, working with a group of coaches including Brendan Rodgers, Sean Dyche and Malky Mackay, that he met Matthew Benham, a potential investor and Brentford fan who decided to back the Bees rather than the Hornets.

Benham, a professional gambler who started his own spread betting company, joined up with Warburton in founding the highly successful NextGen youth tournament, subsequently usurped by Uefa. At Brentford, Warburton became sporting director and when Uwe Rösler unwisely left for Wigan in December 2013 he was surprised to become the German’s successor.

The previous season Brentford had suffered a shattering blow in the last minute of their final game against Doncaster, missing a penalty and then conceding the goal that denied them automatic promotion; then losing the play-off final 2-1 to Yeovil. Under Warburton they stayed on course to go up to the Championship with Wolves for only a second season outside the lower divisions in 60 years.

This season they rose from the bottom half of the table in November to play-off contention and just as remarkably stayed there despite the stunning news in February that Warburton and Weir would leave this month because of irreconcilable differences with Benham over future direction.

The owner wanted a continental model of sporting director and head coach, as well as considerable emphasis on what he called “a new recruitment strategy using a mixture of traditional scouting and other tools including mathematical modelling”. That strategy has worked famously with Benham’s other club, FC Midtjylland, who are about to win the Danish Superliga for the first time. For Warburton, however, what political leaders have recently been calling the “red line” not be crossed was the decree that the head coach would have no veto on incoming transfers.

Although the outcome has left him “frustrated, disappointed, angry at times” it is hugely to his credit that Brentford stuttered only briefly when it was announced: after two successive defeats they beat Bournemouth, the new and deserved champions 3-1 with supporters chanting his name.

Once “very close” to joining West Bromwich Albion, he claims to be worried now that because of a lack of experience “people see me as a risk”, adding “we finish at the end of May and we hope the phone rings”.

There will surely be no shortage of calls.