Fresh from a tight five of Sky Sports schmoozing, Tom Wagner strode round St Andrew’s for what can only be called a pre-season lap of pre-honour. Fist-bump the mascots, bro-hug the players, acknowledge the adoration with a flickering wave, bodyguard at arm’s length. Two years after buying Birmingham, there’s something vaguely messianic about Wagner, the hedge fund manager somehow cast as neo-Victorian philanthropist, a 56-year-old American accountant as saviour of England’s Second City.
Pre-match, he emerged onto the Fan Park balcony with the transcendental benevolence of a royal or rockstar, 1,200 or so lovestruck grown men screaming below. Perhaps only equalled by Wrexham’s A-listers, few moneymen in English football are as popular or visible as Wagner, a natural orator and evangelist for both his club and himself.
And you quickly understand why. Ahead of Birmingham’s first match back in the Championship, against Ipswich, optimism permeates everywhere at St Andrew’s. For more than a decade, people came more out of duty than desire, but now they queue before the turnstiles open, then take their seats in near-unison 15 minutes before kick-off.
Marvin Ducksch, a rugged striker with 32 Bundesliga goals in three seasons, is unveiled pre-match. Kyogo Furuhashi (£10m) and Jay Stansfield (£15m) torment Ipswich, who steal a point only with a dubious injury-time penalty – their first shot on target of the game. The sense that something is happening here is unavoidable.
Last season, Birmingham were the best League One side ever, having spent more on transfers than any League One side ever. Wagner claims that Birmingham have tripled their revenue in the past two years (from £19.7m when he took over), the most of any Championship club not receiving parachute payments. Sponsorships have been signed with Nike, Delta Air Lines and sportswear brand Undefeated, while the club boast that average spend per fan per matchday is up 700%. Wagner used his notes to call Built in Birmingham: Brady & The Blues, the documentary released last week, one of “Amazon Prime’s top performing shows”.
Alongside Birmingham City, Knighthead owns 49% of the Birmingham Phoenix Hundred franchises and have acquired a significant stake in the Birmingham Panthers netball team. In April 2024, they bought 48 acres in Bordesley Green, the site of the former Birmingham Wheels track, for £100m, which was, charitably, a good price. Bordesley Green is among the city’s most deprived areas, with the second-highest share of working-age residents without qualifications of any Birmingham ward.
I want to make a difference in the lives of people and there are a lot here who could use some uplifting
Tom Wagner, Birmingham owner
It is now the site of the proposed Sports Quarter, which Wagner has pledged up to £3bn to develop. According to Knighthead, there will be a 62,000-seat stadium, more than twice the current capacity of St Andrew’s, alongside a 15,000 to 20,000-seat arena to be completed by 2031. It could create up to 8,400 jobs and hundreds of millions for the local economy, and of course for Wagner. At 135 acres in total, it would be larger than Manchester’s Etihad Campus. They have also secured a £2.4bn government investment in West Midlands transport, extending a tram line to reach the Sports Quarter.
For Birmingham, this is all unquestionably positive. Yet Knighthead is effectively treating a major English city as a distressed asset, and perhaps the worst part is that it is right to. Having declared effective bankruptcy in September 2023, Birmingham City Council is attempting to save £300m in two years, cutting most of that from adult social care, and children and family services. At the height of the most recent strikes, 17,000 tonnes of rubbish were piled on the streets, with litter fragments still lining every road and corner.
“I care more about Birmingham than I do about anything else,” Wagner said on Friday. “It’s important for us to demonstrate that we care about this city and the people who live and work here. What matters is that we make a difference in the lives of a lot of people and, trust me, in the area surrounding this stadium and the new stadium, are a lot of people who could really use some uplifting.”
He has spoken about investment in “one of the most deprived areas in the country” as a “moral imperative”, as if he is masterminding an ambitious social housing project, not attempting to appoint himself de facto king of Birmingham.
This is a story of state incompetence as much as the benefits and pitfalls of massive private investment. What does it mean that the government has no choice but to delegate urban planning and social development of major cities to American hedge funds under the auspice of resurrecting rotting football clubs? Given Sheikh Mansour’s long reign and shadow over Manchester, perhaps we’re just grateful this money is freighted with slightly fewer human rights concerns.
At every stage, Wagner promotes his own generosity and benevolence, happy to discuss the exact figures and details of his vast investment. It helps that he is peddling a fantasy that everyone wants to believe, selling the loose idea that massive investment will somehow transform the lives of locals mired in poverty, rather than force them out through inevitable gentrification, pushing a problem that he has no responsibility to solve further away.
There is no doubt this is all odd and grim and inevitable. This is how England functions and develops now, how football functions and develops. “The plan was always about the Sports Quarter,” Wagner told The Times earlier this year. Birmingham City’s renaissance is just a convenient byproduct of Knighthead’s vision to increase shareholder value.
And yet no one else seems to have much interest or ability in saving Birmingham from itself. As Wagner parades himself round St Andrew’s, there is little doubt that he loves this place, and that it loves him. He believes Birmingham can play in the Premier League next season. On the basis of Friday night, he might well be right. This is, in so many ways, his city now.
Photograph by Nick Potts/PA