Chris Davies’s dominant side has secured League One promotion but the club hope that is just the start
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 One a 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, have returned to the Championship at the first attempt and 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 replace John Eustace with Wayne Rooney, who was sacked after 83 days, badly backfired but 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 showers in the dressing room.
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.
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