Jeffrey Schlupp's forgotten month at Brentford

A loan nobody talks about

In March 2011, Jeffrey Schlupp was an 18-year-old squad player at Leicester City who had only just been named among the first-team substitutes for the first time. To get games, he was sent out on loan to Brentford, then in League One, on 14 March 2011. It meant turning down a call-up to the Germany under-19 squad in order to complete the move, a sign of how much he wanted first-team football, even in the third tier.

Debut, goals, and a cup final

Schlupp made his senior debut the following day, coming on as a substitute in a 1–0 defeat to Huddersfield Town. Ten days later, in his first full start, he scored twice in a 2–1 win over Carlisle United, an eye-catching start to life as a professional. He followed that up almost immediately with another goal, a header from a Lewis Grabban cross, in a 3–1 victory over Sheffield Wednesday.

The spell also brought him onto one of English football's bigger domestic stages for a teenager: the 2011 Football League Trophy Final at Wembley on 3 April, where he played the full 90 minutes and struck the post with a shot on goal. Brentford lost 1–0 to Carlisle United, denying Schlupp a winner's medal in only his third senior start, but it remains one of the more unlikely entries on his CV.

The loan was extended on 14 April to run until the end of the 2010–11 season, giving Schlupp a full campaign's taste of first-team football before he returned to Leicester for pre-season.

Why it matters

That month-and-a-bit at Griffin Park is the kind of spell that gets lost entirely once a career takes off. Schlupp went back to Leicester, scored a hat-trick on his first senior appearance back at the King Power, and within a few years was a Championship winner, then a Premier League champion, then a near-ever-present for Crystal Palace across more than 200 appearances. Later still he added an FA Cup winner's medal on loan at Celtic and a move to Norwich City. None of that era registers Brentford at all.

But it was at Brentford, not Leicester, that Schlupp first scored as a senior professional, first started a cup final, and first showed the pace and power that would define his style for the next decade and a half. It was a short, scrappy introduction to men's football, two goals in a man-of-the-match display against Carlisle, a Wembley final lost by the odd goal, and a return home to a club that would go on to build a Premier League title around players just like him. The spell was brief enough to vanish from most summaries of his career, but it is where the Jeffrey Schlupp story actually starts.