On day one in the job, as Chris Davies surveyed St Andrew’s for the first time last summer, the Birmingham City manager was struck by a damning statistic courtesy of the club historian, Malcolm McHenry: no league side had lost more matches across the previous five seasons.Birmingham were relegated to League Onea month earlier after circling the drain for a while. “When you hear something like that, it’s powerful because you think: ‘Wow, there are 92 teams,’” Davies says. “Everyone has suffered so much … I suppose I saw an opportunity to change that and this season we’ve won more games than any other team in the country.”
Talk about a turnaround. Birmingham, runaway champions, havereturned to the Championship at the first attemptand it is now 30 league wins and counting. Only Leeds have scored more goals than Birmingham this season across the top four tiers and only Arsenal, Leeds and Burnley have conceded fewer goals. “I walked into a club that was feeling down,” Davies says. “People were depressed and everybody was looking out for themselves. There was a real concern around the place but underlying that there was an optimism that there could be a reset.”
The American owner, Knighthead Capital Management, fronted by Tom Wagner, is behind the rapid renaissance but holds long-term ambitions, namely regenerating the local Bordesley area, where it plans to build a £3bn sports quarter featuring a 60,000-seat stadium which, ultimately, it hopes, will host Champions League football. For now, it is one step at a time. The decision to replaceJohn Eustace with Wayne Rooney, who wassacked after 83 days,badly backfiredbut that is an anomaly. Promotion served as a kind of redemption. The previous ownership was absent and uninterested. Knighthead addressed neglect on arrival in July 2023, spending £1m on the pitch and fixing broken dressing room showers.
Then there is the stardust. Tom Brady, the seven-time Super Bowl champion, is a minority shareholder with a 3.3% stake and this season is the subject of a behind-the-scenes Amazon Prime series which will air this summer. Brady brought David Beckham as a guest toSeptember’s win over Wrexham, another club associated with A-listers. All these bells and whistles talk to the bigger picture. “I will not rest until we are the most powerful revenue-generating club in the Championship by a wide margin,” Wagner recently said. Not that he plans to stop there. “There’s only one place to go: our ultimate ambition is the Premier League.”
Brady takes a particular interest in sports science and preparation. “We speak every week, he texts or speaks to me after every game, he’s been one of the most consistent people around me this season,” Davies says. “We talk about high performance, sport, setbacks. I can only explain it like having a world-class consultant on speed dial. He has an elite mentality. I know Tom well enough now that I know that he’ll be thinking: ‘What’s next?’ He has this unrelenting drive.”
Many clubs would clam up around talk of ambition but Wagner, the chair, has a go-to phrase which speaks to his outlook: “If you can’t say it, you can’t do it.” Which explains why Krystian Bielik bullishly said Birmingham would be a Championship club next season as early as last September. Birmingham are eyeing successive promotions and Barry Fry, their former manager and the director of football at Peterborough, believes they can emulateIpswich in soaring through the divisions.
Davies is diplomatic. “The Premier League is the golden ticket for so many clubs,” he says. “I’m convinced that under this ownership the club is going to do it. From my view, it’s a division where Birmingham have recently really struggled to be competitive, so we need to make sure that we’re competitive and grow from there.”
Birmingham had a target on their backs from the moment they dropped into the third tier. Long after the final whistle that day Craig Gardner, the director of football who finished his playing career at the club, was sitting in the stand alone with his thoughts. Then Wagner put his arm around Gardner and told him he would back the club to build a squad fit for promotion. “It was one of those ‘let’s get to work’ moments,” Gardner says. “For an owner to give you that sort of boost, that is leadership at its best. We wanted to create an identity that has no ceiling.”
Expectations were heightened after the appointment of Davies, who worked as an assistant to Brendan Rodgers at Swansea, Liverpool, Celtic and Leicester, and to Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham. Even more so after the return of Jay Stansfield in a permanent deal worth about £15m, shattering the record outlay in the division. “There is not a team in England that has had the level of expectation we have had this season, where we have been expected to win basically every game,” says Davies. “Yes, people will say: ‘Well, you’re in League One, you’reBirmingham City.’ But some big, big clubs have struggled.”
Birmingham viewed as a coup the arrival of Davies, who moved into coaching after retiring from playing at 19 at Reading owing to an arthritic foot condition. Due diligence brought glowing references and Birmingham felt the 40-year-old could implement their desired possession-based style with an emphasis on final-third entries and forward runners. Birmingham have averaged 67% possession, the most of any side in the top four divisions. “He hasn’t just been putting balls and cones out … he’s coached some of the best players in the world at top clubs, and he has led on those sessions,” Gardner says. “Chris has been there, where you’re expected to win … he went 69 games unbeaten at Celtic [between May 2016 and December 2017]. It is about how you prepare your players.”
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Relegation triggered change, with 22 players departing and 20 arriving over the course of the season. Acquiring the right profile was also crucial. Birmingham, Gardner estimates, are constantly tracking about 3,000 players in their database. “I signed three players from Rangers and one from Celtic, because they were used to dealing with that level of scrutiny every single week,” Davies says, alluding to Ben Davies, Kieran Dowell, Scott Wright and Tomoki Iwata. Birmingham fought off strong interest from across Europe to sign the Japan midfielder Iwata, who has been nominated for the league’s player of the season award. “It’s OK having money but how do you spend it and convince players to drop intoLeague One?” Gardner says. “We had a story to tell. ‘Do you want to be part of the legacy?’”
Davies, unsurprisingly, is up for the manager award. The bus journey back from Peterborough after clinching promotion, he says, was probably the best trip home of his career but a few days later theylost against the same opponents at Wembley. Almost 50,000 Birmingham supporters were in attendance. “The fans have stuck with us through thick and thin and the staff members who have been through it can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Gardner, whose final appearance for the club was at Portsmouth in 2019, the day Jude Bellingham made his senior debut.
That loss, in the Vertu Trophy final, was the first notable hiccup since November, when after successive draws they lost at the bottom club, Shrewsbury, a team heading in the opposite direction. “You often remember the defeats more than the wins, sadly,” Davies says. “I challenged the players the day after that if they won all seven of our next games in a row, they would have Christmas Day off for the first time in many years. We won seven in a row and we never looked back.”
Now Birmingham, who travel to Stevenage on Thursday, have records in their sights, namely Wolves’ 103-point haul in 2013-14 and the Football League record of 106 points set by Reading when they were promoted from the Championship in 2005-06. They could also eclipse Doncaster’s 1946-47 record of 33 league wins in a season. “We want to finish in style because I think that will show who we are,” Gardner says. “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”