AS key performance indicators go, you might have thought that helping to steer lowly Brentford to the brink of the Barclays Premier League wasn't bad going.

Unfortunately for David Weir, and the rest of the Bees' backroom staff, the computer belonging to the club's eccentric owner Matthew Benham says no.

This professional gambler and hedge fund manager places huge store on maths, metrics and stats when analysing performance, and wants to take the club even further in this direction regardless of which league the Greater London club are in next season. While this approach is also bearing fruit with his other team, Danish side FC Midtjylland (they recently won the Superliga for the first time in their history and could face Celtic in Champions League qualifying this summer) it all presents Weir with something of a play-off predicament on Friday night.

While a heroic fifth-place finish in the Sky Bet Championship - secured with victory against Gary Caldwell's Wigan Athletic last Saturday, and a Derby County collapse - means £130m in guaranteed cash is on the line when the Bees host to Middlesbrough in a play-off semi-final first leg at Griffin Park, Weir already knows he will see none of it. Instead he, manager Mark Warburton and sporting director Frank McParland will be looking for a job the next morning.

Thankfully, they are unlikely to be attending their local Job Centre Plus for too long. Within hours of the news of Warburton's imminent departure breaking in Februrary, he was already being linked with clubs like Queens Park Rangers and Fulham. Weir's Scottish connections soon saw them spoken about in connection with a move to the other Rangers, while the smart money on their next destination is now on Derby County, should Mike Ashley replace John Carver with Steve McClaren at Newcastle United. Weir, whose career in management had a false start at Sheffield United, simply knows that being successful in the play-offs will help everyone attain their goals.

"We enjoy working together and we think we have got a formula which works well but as it stands we are all leaving in the summer and we have not got a job lined up," said Weir, who first met Warburton, a former city trader, and Benham, through their work on the NextGen Series, a pan-European youth competition which Uefa subsequently turned into the Euro Youth League. "I think we are all the same in that regard. Primarily, we are focusing on this. We want to finish this job right, and we know that being successful here will benefit everybody. It will benefit us, it will benefit the players and it will benefit the club.

"Obviously Mark is the manager, he is the one who deserves the credit and the praise," added Weir, who has too much respect for the current incumbent to comment directly on the Ibrox job. "He has been linked with a few jobs and logic tells you that will be the case. Genuinely, we are focusing on getting this one right but hoping there will be something there for all of us."

The likes of Gianfranco Zola have been linked with the Brentford role going forward, but Weir is at pains to point out that he and Warburton can hardly be cast in the role of Luddites. "What I would say is that we are very open to the numbers and utilising them," said Weir. "When I came into the job, I knew what the owner did and how he worked. We enjoyed getting access to all the data and we used it. Mark used it in relation to the league and the players - as an addition to what we did already. Now the owner wants to move more towards his side of it, with less of the traditional methods. It is his club and his decision. But it has been amicable.

"This is just the industry I am in," he added. "Anyone who has been in management recently during the last couple of years has some stories to tell."

One player who hasn't been able to embellish his statistics further is Lewis Macleod. The midfielder arrived from Rangers with a hamstring problem and has been ruled out for the season, but could yet find himself following Ryan Fraser into the Barclays Premier League. "He is desperate to be involved and we are desperate for him to be involved, because we know how good a player he is," said Weir. "He is back in training now and getting closer, but this isn't really the ideal stage to throw him in when he isn't maybe quite up and running. But he will definitely be an asset to this team long term."

Perhaps the biggest success has been keeping the promotion chase together, just one season after reaching the Championship, amid all the uncertainty. Middlesbrough have beaten them twice this season but Brentford are third favourites of four to win out via the play-offs, and stranger things have definitely happened. "It is a credit to Mark how he has managed a difficult situation," added Weir. "Because the story is the football and it should be the football."

Weir has one eye on the play-offs north of the border as well, of course. Rangers travel to Palmerston Park on Saturday evening, with a Hibs side under the charge of his former Everton pal Alan Stubbs thought likely to be the main block in the road for his former side.

"It is like any playoffs, and ours is exactly the same, there's an element of risk involved, an element of luck required," said Weir. "For us, it is the next three games, for them [Rangers] it could be the next six. For players and managers, it is all a little bit random: I don't think you can confidently predict what is going to happen. You have to be impressed with the job Alan has done, while you would back Rangers to beat Queens most days. It isn't always about who finishes highest in the league. It is about who handles the situation best and who performs best on the day."