Welcome to Birmingham City
A football team in England gets a celebrity American owner and starts spending buckets of money. Sound familiar?
David Beckham was in the owners’ box at Birmingham City on Monday night, which on its own isn’t that surprising. Becks still enjoys the footy, and when he isn’t watching the Inter Miami team he co-owns, he often pops up at games in his homeland.
But, sitting next to him was his host: Tom Brady. Seven-time Super Bowl champion, new lead analyst on the NFL on Fox, minority owner of Birmingham City FC. And good friend of Becks.
Brady bought into the club last year, after it was taken over by American businessman Tom Wagner. It continued a trend in which celebrity Americans buy a chunk of a team overseas. Retired NFL great J.J. Watt is part of Burnley’s ownership group, while Will Ferrell has a stake in Leeds United. Wagner has ambitious plans for Birmingham City, and with Brady in the fold as a high-profile owner, one might say they hope to pull a Wrexham.
As it happens, their opponents on Monday night: Wrexham AFC.
In truth there is little in common between the two clubs. Wrexham had spent more than a dozen years in English football’s fifth tier before Hollywood owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought them four years ago. Between ownership’s wealth and the club’s newfound global popularity spurred by the Welcome to Wrexham docuseries, great buckets of money were available to reshape the squad. The talent infusion brought back-to-back promotions, and Wrexham is in League One, England’s third tier, for the first time since the 1980s.
Birmingham City has been in the top flight for much of its history, but were last in the Premier League in 2011. The home ground, St. Andrew’s, holds almost 30,000 spectators, but crowds dried up in recent decades thanks to a period of semi-absentee Chinese ownership. They have been in the second-tier Championship for almost all of the past 25 years. The new American owners, in classic American ownership fashion, arrived and acted like they had all the answers. They sacked the manager last October after just four games, with the club sixth in the table, and appointed Wayne Rooney, former England captain and Manchester United star, and Beckham teammate, in his place.
It was an odd choice. Rooney had some managerial experience in England and the United States, none of it particularly successful, and it was hard not to escape the suspicion that he was brought in because he was famous and the Americans wanted a famous guy in charge. Also odd: he was tasked with transforming the club into an aggressive, attacking side, but with the same squad that played a more defensive, pragmatic style. It’s like making Connor McDavid your team’s hockey coach and assuming he can make everyone skate much faster all of a sudden.
It didn’t take. Birmingham City went in a prolonged slump, Rooney was sacked before the season ended and they ended up relegated anyway, down to the third tier for the first time since the early 1990s. Not ideal.
Undaunted, the owners hired a new manager, Chris Davies, most recently an assistant with Tottenham Hotspur of the Premier League, and spent a dizzying amount on new players in the summer transfer window. They paid a reported £15-million to buy striker Jay Stansfield from Premier League club Fulham, almost quadrupling the previous record for a League One transfer. Quite how they were able to do this without breaching rules against overspending is unclear, but if the team doesn’t immediately get promoted again they could be in serious financial trouble.
But it seems to all be going well so far. Monday’s clash with Wrexham — dubbed the Hollywood derby in the UK press despite Brady not actually having any links to Hollywood — began well for the visitors, with Jack Marriott smashing in a rebound off a corner kick for a lead within three minutes. The television cameras cut to McElhenney in the box seats, and he wisely displayed little emotion. The actor has evidently seen enough games to know that an early goal means a very long time to try to defend a lead.
Which they could not. Stansfield swooped in to poke in a rebound later in the first half, and he added a second, a deft header while at full sprint to reach a cross, to put Birmingham City in the lead after the break. The home side added a third, and the win puts them level on points with Wrexham at the top of the League One table, with one fewer game played.
Judging from the broadcast, Brady had a great time. Camera shots of him and Beckham were frequent, probably owing to the fact that the game was being shown in the United States as part of the EFL’s new broadcast deal with CBS Sports. Brady frequently jumped to his feet in excitement while Beckham played it slightly more cool, perhaps aware that he had previously been a guest of Reynolds in the Wrexham box and didn’t want to look too much of a turncoat. McElhenney, without his Deadpool partner next to him, was an afterthought by comparison.
Now the question becomes whether McElhenney’s team can keep pace with Brady’s. Wrexham is the club with the bigger global profile now after three seasons of the documentary, two promotions and a pair of successful summer tours that took them to the United States (and Canada), but Birmingham City is the bigger club with evidently a much bigger budget. Wrexham has been throwing its financial weight around for several years now in the lower leagues, but in League One that advantage has disappeared. Now it’s Birmingham City that it trying to buy a quick promotion.
On the evidence of Monday, they are on the way.