Birmingham chairman on bid to rise from the ashes: ‘Our ambitions will blow your mind’

Tom Wagner has big plans for third-tier club and cannot wait for the day they play Midlands rivals Aston Villa in the Premier League

Seven-time Super Bowl winners and Hollywood superstars are not usually associated with League One football, but these are the blockbuster events Birmingham City are hoping to make the norm.
On Monday night, Birmingham face Wrexham at St Andrew’s in a clash of the super-ambitious ownerships, where the spotlight will be as much in the stands as on the field.
Birmingham’s minority shareholder Tom Brady, the legendary NFL quarterback, is flying into the Second City while Wrexham’s co-owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are also expected to be in attendance.
These are the big nights Birmingham’s owners Knighthead Capital have been dreaming of. Relegation from the Championship last season has had zero effect on their grand ambitions for the future.
Telegraph Sport has been granted an audience with chairman Tom Wagner, a shrewd American businessman who is driving the club forward in his bid to reach the Premier League by 2026.
Over the course of 30 minutes, he delivers a compelling vision for Birmingham City this year and beyond.
While promotion this season is the immediate goal, Wagner imagines a day when Birmingham is restored as one of the great football cities in Europe, where games against Aston Villa, a rivalry dating back to the 1890s, will be one of the biggest derbies in world football.
“When we can have that derby again someday I think everyone in Birmingham will be happier,” says Wagner, speaking to Telegraph Sport from a business trip in Japan.
“Manchester City and Manchester United aren’t the same without the other. If you look back all those years ago, when City was well off the position of United, that detracted from the overall attractiveness of that football dynamic.
“If we can create something similar in Birmingham with two spectacular football clubs, that’s amazing. It’s important to recognise that, ideally, what we want is two great clubs battling it out against each other every year.”
Birmingham have not faced Villa in the Premier League since January 2011, and you have to rewind more than five years since they met in the Championship.
Villa will begin their Champions League campaign this week and Wagner says the clear target is to ultimately elevate Birmingham to an equally high level.
“When we look forward a number of years in the future, those two clubs have the potential to permanently be in the top 10 of the Premier League,” he says.
“It’s a big-enough city with big-enough fanbases. I hope it’s not inappropriate to say that both clubs have very strong ownership and high ambition, and that’s good for Birmingham.”
Relegation to the third tier for the first time since 1994 was an unwanted bump in the road for Knighthead, an investment company based in New York, but the feelgood factor remains.
This summer, Birmingham have made a spectacular statement of intent in rebuilding the squad, another clear sign that Wagner & Co mean serious business.
Seventeen new signings have come through the door, with the total cost understood to be around £24 million.
Last season’s League One top scorer Alfie May, Scotland international Lyndon Dykes and Iceland’s Willum Willumsson are three particularly impressive recruits, all rejecting offers from clubs in the division above. Christoph Klarer, an Austrian centre-back signed from Bundesliga II club Darmstadt 98, has been outstanding so far.
Yet the most eye-catching signing arrived on deadline day, with Jay Stansfield returning in a record-breaking £15 million deal.
Stansfield was the No1 priority all summer, after excelling on loan last season, but there were doubts over whether a transfer could be agreed with Fulham.
Wagner takes up the story of the saga. “I made a few statements internally after relegation and I think people thought I’d lost my mind,” he says, laughing.
“I spoke about a couple of players, and one in particular, and said that guy is coming back. I said, ‘mark my ‘effing words man, I don’t know how we’re going to do it but he’s coming back’. You have to have that undefeatable optimism in order to do things that are unusual and big.
“The first thing you have to do is convince the player to come, and then convince the club they should part ways with him. Then you have to figure out how to make the finances work, and we had to get really creative to make it happen.”
Fulham insist they will receive an initial £15 million for Stansfield, plus a further £5 million in various instalments.
Birmingham are disputing those figures but there is no doubt the deal was in excess of £10 million, obliterating the previous transfer record for League One (£4 million paid by Sunderland for striker Will Grigg in February 2019).
“By signing a seven-year contract, that made the numbers work and the amortisation makes it look like a real bargain,” says Wagner.
“The payments aren’t evenly spaced, they’re heavily back-end loaded so that we have lots of flexibility, financially, on the cash flows.”
It was a deal that stunned other clubs, and raised inevitable questions from rivals over whether Birmingham are breaking rules or facing financial restrictions in the future.
To put Birmingham’s spending into some context, the transfer records of other clubs in the division include Exeter (£97,000), Stevenage (£110,000) and Mansfield (£150,000).
However, League One rules differ to the Championship, with Profitability & Sustainability replaced by Salary Cost Management Protocol – a revenue-based measure which allows relegated clubs to spend a maximum of 75 per cent of turnover on wages in the first season, with no limit on transfer fees.
A former managing director at Goldman Sachs, Wagner says Birmingham are operating very carefully.
“I’ll be lying in a chair at home on a Sunday reading through social posts and I laugh out loud sometimes at some of the things people say,” he says.
“The part other clubs tend to forget is that we’re not the football experts, but we’re pretty good at business.
“We’re working within the framework of League One rules, but also the Championship because of the three-year lookback.
“We expect to go back up, that’s clearly our ambition, and given that objective we need to look at the three-year rules in the Championship and make sure that in our forecasts every one of those years allow us to maintain proper P & S compliance.”
Wagner’s determination to grow Birmingham as a business and its revenue streams is never-ending. He says there are some “banging” sponsorship deals to be announced in the near future.
Other sources of revenue include increasing matchday attendances (season ticket sales are in excess of 17,000), growth of the women’s teams and returning the academy to Category One standard to find the next Jude Bellingham, developing young talent into valuable assets.
It is understood that, even in the third tier, Birmingham will bring in at least £20 million to £30 million in revenue this season: a figure that dwarfs the majority of the Championship outside of the parachute-payment clubs.
“Birmingham is not your typical League One club and we’ve now taken it on to put it in what we view is its rightful place,” says Wagner.
“If you were to remove the television revenue differential, and look at our revenue, we’re a top-20 club in England.
“If we’re fortunate enough to go back up this season, we will be highly competitive on a revenue basis, as compared to any team in the Championship.
“It’s a huge club that had been lying ignored by prior ownership for a long time.”
It is now just over 14 months since Knighthead completed their takeover, replacing the unpopular Birmingham Sports Holdings Limited.
For years, supporters had feared for the future of their club. Points deductions and general mismanagement were the norm under BSHL, while there did not seem to be any semblance of a plan.
Even today, Wagner shudders as he reflects on what he inherited.
“There was a lot that had been underinvested in. It was literally everything and when we saw the state of the club, we figured out 80 per cent of it, but 20 per cent was worse than we realised,” he says.
“Our fans are literally the best in the world and laugh at things like no hot water in the men’s room, but come on … this is a professional football team operating in the 21st century and that’s an inexcusable thing to have happen.
“There was no heat in the executive offices last winter.
“There was an enormous amount that needed to be accomplished and Garry Cook [chief executive] and his team have done an unbelievable job bringing the club back up to a reasonable level very quickly.”
Exciting plans for the future are already in place. In April, Knighthead acquired a 48-acre site in East Birmingham with the intention of building a new 60,000-seater stadium and a “Sports Quarter” infrastructure.
The plan is to move in by August 2029. The next stage is what Wagner refers to as “planning for planning permission” where a presentation will be submitted.
“Our ambitions are bigger than has been reported by a fair measure – it will blow people’s minds,” he says.
Now, however, the full focus is on promotion and Monday’s showdown with unbeaten Wrexham.
With McElhenney and Reynolds aboard, Wrexham are aiming for a third straight promotion.
The game is sold out and will be televised live on Sky Sports at 8pm, with the intention to clearly win more hearts and minds in the United States and beyond.
“It’s an incredible thing that Monday night football in the UK happens to be with two League One clubs, and everyone is excited about it,” says Wagner.
“For this match to attract a fair degree of global attention in multiple countries ultimately increases awareness and drives revenue.
“It’s deserving of the attention it’s getting because a lot of work has gone in to make it happen.”
Wagner arrived in Birmingham on Monday morning, and will be joined at the match by Brady, making his first visit to St Andrew’s this season.
Last week, McElhenney posted on X: “See you next Monday @‌TomBrady 😉 Should be an absolute banger.”
There is little doubt that Birmingham have got under Brady’s skin. He is close with manager Chris Davies, who was appointed in June, and Wagner admits his input is significant.
“Tom calls me every day, without fail,” says Wagner. “He asks me about every detail, even on pretty mundane topics.
“He wants to know what we’re doing in training, what the schedule looks like, what are the areas we’re focusing on. He likes to see detailed write-ups after matches about what worked and what didn’t, and most importantly why.
“Tom has been an enormous advocate of process over outcome. He wants to develop a culture of persistent winning. No single match will define our future but what we do will.”