Birmingham owner's vision could transform city but football clubs are not just balance sheets

The Guardian

12 hours ago

I grew up in a Britain coloured grey. During the 1970s, even though memories of the war had faded into the distance and rationing had long ended, scarcity still hung in the air. Clothes were handed down, treats were rare and the country felt smaller and more muted than the one talked about in history books. Geoff Dyer's memoir, Homework, captures it perfectly, a postwar Britain where Airfix models seemed exciting and front rooms kept 'for best' epitomised a place looking inwards, slightly embarrassed about its ambitions and potential.
America existed for me in a weekly burst of Technicolor on TV. When Entertainment USA arrived in the 1980s it brought news of Disneyland, Hollywood, pizzas the size of tabletops, Pelé playing for New York Cosmos, and skies that seemed permanently blue. It appealed to all the appetites of a teenage boy in Grimsby. Later, discovering Jack Kerouac, the lure deepened – open roads and adventure felt a world away, but I had to get there. One afternoon, aged 16 in the local library, I found a book on scholarships, sent out 100 letters, and received 99 rejections. That one positive reply eventually sent me to high school as an exchange student and began a lifetime of transatlantic travel that continues to this day. Over the next three decades I crossed the ocean for work, meeting bosses, pitching to investors and building businesses with an American footprint. I have always admired the optimism, scale and willingness to take a punt that seems hard-wired into the US mindset.
It was with that relationship in mind that I sat down to watch the new Birmingham City documentary on Amazon. I wanted to like it. Tom Brady is, without question, one of the greatest athletes of all time, disciplined, relentless and the embodiment of a winning mindset. I want success for Birmingham fans as I do for all English clubs, but there were moments that made me wince: the co-owner Tom Wagner giving his own team talk on the Wembley steps, Brady talking about 'shit teams' they should have beaten, and a moment when Wayne Rooney mentions getting to the ground for 9am, only for Brady to flex that his day starts at 6am. It had the swagger of Welcome to Wrexham without the same charm. Winning League One after spending £15m on a single player in a league where many clubs' entire budgets are a fraction of that feels the epitome of what Dr Pippa Grange calls 'winning shallow'.
City's ownership is split between Birmingham Sports Holdings, which retains just over half the club, and Shelby Companies Limited, controlled by the US-based Knighthead Capital Management, which owns about 46%. Wagner, Knighthead's co-founder, is the driving force, backed by significant institutional capital, while Brady holds a token minority stake but serves as the public face. His role is not governance or strategy; it is brand, visibility and ambition.
Part of that brand has been a deliberate leaning into Birmingham's global image shaped by Peaky Blinders and the fictional Shelby family. The moody visuals, the references to toughness and grit, the aesthetic of flat caps and hard stares play into a narrative of the club as an embodiment of the city's 'hardness'. The real Peaky Blinders were a violent street gang in the late 19th and early 20th century, products of industrial poverty and social fracture. Today, that history has been polished into an exportable cultural commodity, a sharp suit and even sharper turn of phrase where there was once real hardship.
The documentary reinforces this framing. It is only five episodes long, yet one is devoted to the Birmingham Zulu Warriors, the club's notorious hooligan firm from the 1980s. I do not want to sanitise the past, those stories are part of the club's and the city's history, but centring them so prominently is its own calling card. It tells you which values the storytellers and owners want to project. There is a difference between acknowledging a history and building a club's modern identity around it. Football clubs thrive when they reflect the whole of their community, not just the most marketable slice of its mythology.
Knighthead's ambitions are big, a multibillion-pound 'Sports Quarter' with a new stadium and regeneration. That kind of vision could transform parts of Birmingham. But it will be telling to see how a profit-driven approach collides with the new independent regulator for English football, whose job is to protect the interests of fans and the long-term health of the game. In a city that declared bankruptcy in 2023, it is easy to see the appeal for a private equity investor spotting what it believes is, in the language of markets, a 'distressed asset', undervalued, with scope for a turnaround and significant upside if managed aggressively. That logic works on a spreadsheet, but football clubs are not just balance sheets, and I am wary when investors want to be so much a part of the story themselves. It is not quite Michael Knighton juggling a ball on the pitch at Old Trafford, but Wagner's recent interview in the Observer, saying, 'I care more about Birmingham than I do about anything else,' does prompt the question – why?
I work with and admire US private equity and have seen the benefits of the discipline, capital and operational focus it can bring to businesses. But I do not believe it is a natural fit for football clubs. The model depends on delivering strong returns in a set timeframe and then moving the asset on. Football, by contrast, is both a business and a long-term civic endeavour. With unpredictable results, deep emotional ties and obligations to communities, doing best by all stakeholders will be a challenge.
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The best of America has always been about believing anything is possible, the scale of ambition, the optimism to keep trying, and the courage to take risks others would avoid. In business, those qualities can unlock extraordinary value. But football is not just a market to be tapped or a brand to be scaled. It is a living part of a community, with roots, rituals and relationships that cannot be accelerated to meet the expectations of investors. The challenge for Birmingham's custodians is whether they can take the best of that American confidence and combine it with the patience and care football demands. If they can, they will create something that lasts. If they cannot, all the money, swagger and narrative in the world will not be enough.
Jason Stockwood is the co-owner of Grimsby Town