Birmingham City are pretty much f***ed and it will take something special to rescue them

Ian King
Work remains ongoing at Birmingham City's St Andrews

With ownership issues, ground issues, a downgraded academy and a ghost manager, Birmingham City have a lot on their plate this summer.

 

There was a point towards the start of the season when it felt as though Birmingham City may just defy the gravity imposed upon them by their shoddy ownership. Three wins and just one defeat from their first six games lifted them to fourth place in the Championship, and those victories had included an opening day win over freshly relegated Sheffield United and a 5-0 away win at Luton Town.

Birmingham, not normally a club prone to optimism, had cause to look up on the second weekend of September.

Birmingham City ended the season in 20th place, just two above the relegation positions. Had Derby County and Reading not been docked 21 and six points respectively by the EFL – and Birmingham were docked nine themselves in 2019, so this is an area in which they have expertise – they’d have stayed up only on goal difference. Repair work on St Andrew’s, which rendered half of the ground completely inoperable for a considerable period of time and which continues to render it partly unusable, is still not done. The ownership of the ground is unclear, the manager doesn’t even seem sure whether he is the manager or not, the academy has been downgraded and, with takeover talk having curdled into a circular swirl of rumour and counter-rumour, now there are questions over the ownership structure of the club.

It’s not that Lee Bowyer has exactly been tearing things up. Birmingham won just four games throughout the second half of their league season and were knocked out of the FA Cup at home to League One Plymouth Argyle. They conceded six goals twice – to Fulham and Blackpool – and failed to win any of their last six matches. But since the end of the season Bowyer has been effectively a ghost manager, still in technical charge of the team, but with open speculation – not of who his successor should or could be, but of who they will be. Assistant manager Mark Kennedy has already jumped ship to take over at Lincoln City.

Birmingham were reported as being in preliminary talks with Mark Warburton over replacing Bowyer as manager, but this was three weeks ago and Bowyer remains in place, limping forlornly on. And while it may well be that there is a good reason why he remains in place, the big issues over this are twofold. Firstly, it’s a lack of clarity that will increasingly hamper the club as it continues. How are Birmingham supposed to recruit the sort of players they want if those they approach can’t even be entirely certain who their manager will be? And secondly, this exact lack of communication from the club is precisely what supporters have been complaining about for years. It now only seems likely to damage the club should it continue.

That sense of distance between the club and its fans has felt literal at times, too. The Kop and Tilton Road stands were closed on safety grounds in December 2020, and St Andrew’s has been operating at a reduced capacity ever since fans were allowed back in last August. Fans have subsequently been allowed back into the top tiers of these stands, but the bottom tiers remain out of service, and there is still no date by which this work should be completed. This is one area in which the club has recently communicated with fans, but while it is fair to say that there have been inherent significant logistical challenges, it still doesn’t reflect particularly well upon the club that it has taken this long and that there is still no end date.

Meanwhile, the academy has been demoted from Category 1 to a Category 2. The Professional Game Academy Audit Company [PGAAC] conducted a review in February which recommended the downgrade, which was confirmed in May. In recent years that academy has produced Jude Bellingham, whose sale may well have been keeping the club’s head above water. Losing this status means Birmingham miss out on an increase in funding from the FA and can no longer recruit nationally, which is permitted from the under-12 age, providing the player concerned is guaranteed access to a full-time education programme. For a club like Birmingham, keen to push towards the Premier League but up against parachute payments, it’s a potential income stream made significantly more difficult.

Bellingham breaking new ground beyond his rough-hewn heroes

It’s probably not an embellishment to say that the saga of the club’s ownership could fill a library. From the days of Carson Yeung, who ended up in prison for money laundering, to this very week, when Radio Free Asia claimed that Wang Yaohui, a Chinese businessman who they describe as having a ‘checkered past’, owns a significant shareholding in the club, whose on-paper owners until the end of May were a company called BSHL. They later reported that the EFL have confirmed to them that they will look into the matter, so apparently it was news to them, too. Meanwhile, former Rangers director Donald Muir has confirmed that he is out of the running to buy the club, while another group led by fan Paul Richardson and *checks notes* the former Serie A (and very briefly Barcelona) player Maxi Lopez, remains interested. The optimistic prognosis is that they buy the club and put it back on its feet, but this doesn’t seem likely to come cheap. The last set of accounts were a car crash.

Birmingham certainly no longer own their own ground. Instead, Birmingham will be paying £1.25m a year in rent to a property company based in the British Virgin Islands until 2031, and then after that… well, who knows? And this is what’s for sale, although even now there don’t seem to be any quick answers to what seem like several fairly pressing questions. The Wang Yaohui issue seems unlikely to expedite any takeover, and with the ownership of both the club and St Andrew’s shrouded in this now apparently perpetual cloud of mystery and ongoing decay, it’s fair to ask what any new purchasers would be buying, and even who they would be buying it from. Birmingham City with a Category 1 academy, ownership of a fully-functioning St Andrew’s, and their finances in order would be a very different proposition to that which appears to be for sale.

What is clear is that Birmingham need to improve if they’re to avoid falling into League One. They’ve finished between 17th and 20th in the Championship for the last six straight seasons of BSHL ownership, and that cannot continue indefinitely. And the worry is that when a club suffers a significant downturn when it is in the precarious position in which Birmingham find themselves, the crash can be devastating. Birmingham City feel like a club on the precipice of something terrible happening, and with the window of opportunity to rectify their many problems starting to close. The club needs new ownership, the stadium issues resolved and the academy’s place restored. This is how you build a successful football club: not through opaque ownership, rotting steel and ghost managers. Birmingham City cannot afford these owners any more. The weight of them long ago started to drag the entire club down.

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