The only place to start your journey on foot to St. Andrew’s in 2025 is Adderley Park train station, a small building with a brown corrugated iron roof and steps down to the platforms.
As you take the 20-minute walk down Bordesley Green Road before turning right along Cattell Road or Garrison Lane, you pass an area of brownfield land that is derelict, surrounded by wooden fences and metal crash barriers. This is where Birmingham City’s future may lie.
That land, a 48-acre site in an area of Birmingham that no local could argue does not need some money, care and love, was the home of Birmingham Wheels Go Kart track and had out-of-service industrial buildings. In six years, Birmingham City hope that it will be transformed.
St. Andrew’s @ Knighthead Park, to give it the officially branded name, is a fascinating blend of ambition and tradition.
The corporate hospitality areas have been revamped alongside other short-term investment in the “extras”, but on matchday the ground – and its environs – still retain an emphatically earthy feel. The location helps: St. Andrew’s is squeezed between a railway line, Cattell Road and Tilton Road on three sides. For 106 years, it has been home.
Birmingham City are arguably the biggest current expansion project in English football. The on-pitch ambition is clear: in 2024-25, the most expensively assembled squad in third-tier history achieved the highest points total in third-tier history.
The goal when Birmingham went down to League One? Get to the Premier League.
This season, their owners’ intention is to land back-to-back promotions. The amount spent on transfer fees actually decreased from summer 2024, but that’s because they were building for the top end of the Championship anyway.
Still, 14 new players arrived. The free transfer arrival of Demarai Gray and loan deals for five Premier League players (Tommy Doyle, Eiran Cashin, Patrick Roberts, James Beadle and Lewis Koumas) make this the deepest squad outside the three relegated clubs.
Taking seven points from five games is deemed barely satisfactory, given the stated ambition – defeat at Stoke City on Saturday brought a few grumbles about the lack of attacking threat. This is not normal for a promoted team.
There is a theory that the Championship is a division where you are better trying to sprint through than build in, such is the impact of parachute payments. Southampton did in between 2010-2012 – why not Birmingham City? Everyone here feels that pressure and must embrace and channel it.
The aim is to make this expansion self-fulfilling: as the club grows, the team improves; as the team improves, the club grows.
Tom Wagner, the co-owner and chairman of Birmingham City, claims that revenues have almost tripled in two years. High-end sponsorship deals have been signed. Fans are spending more time and more money at the stadium. There is the now-requisite documentary series on Amazon Prime, Built In Birmingham.
The impact of Wagner (and minority owner Tom Brady) at Birmingham City, and their popularity amongst supporters, is remarkable and entirely understandable.
After the lamentable sagas during the tenures of Hong Kong businessman Carson Yeung (subsequently jailed for money laundering) and Birmingham Sports Holdings/Trillion Dollar Trophy – when for a while supporters couldn’t even tell you confidently the individual who owned the club – created a demand for something better.
Wagner fits that brief perfectly. He is bold, brash, has access to vast wealth and, in Birmingham City, has found a vehicle to invest it. All supporters wanted was for someone and something to believe in and Knighthead has answered both calls.
There are queues for seats. The atmosphere is brilliant because the team is doing well, and most can see a route to it doing even better. On matchdays, Wagner is treated somewhere between visiting dignitary, king and rock star.
But it’s away from the pitch, where the pre-match walk started, that this project has become supercharged. In April 2024, Knighthead purchased the 48-acre Bordesley site for a reported £100m, a low price for inner-city brownfield that represented its disrepair and the desperation for investment to move the needle in its redevelopment.
Wagner hopes that this will be the site of a new sports quarter. Birmingham City will get a new 62,000-seater stadium, more than double the capacity of St. Andrew’s. There will be an extra show pitch and a separate indoor arena with a capacity of between 15,000 and 20,000.
There will be a new training complex for Birmingham City’s senior and academy teams. There will be hotels, retail outlets, education centres, community sports facilities, housing and green space.
In June, the sports quarter gained significant momentum when Chancellor Rachel Reeves visited the city to announce a £2.4bn investment in the city’s transport infrastructure, which has a new sports quarter at its heart and will involve the expansion of Adderley Green station. It is reasonably viewed as a victory for Wagner’s plans.
This all forms part of a Birmingham power grab from Knighthead. They own 49 per cent of the Birmingham Phoenix Hundred cricket franchise and have also purchased a stake in the local netball team (something Evangelos Marinakis has previously done in Nottingham).
The sports quarter is heralded as a community asset, but Wagner is running an asset management firm (think hedge fund) and will look to make significant returns upon the completed project. He is not a mere philanthropist (and has never promised as much).
There is a deliberate gaudiness to this ambition that tends to sit at odds with Birmingham’s identity. This is the second city but with a reputation that has been marginalised by Manchester to its northwest.
Birmingham is struggling for money and struggling to cope. The pervading images of the city in 2025 are of mountains of refuse piled high after a dispute between the city council and the Unite union. It needs a good news story.
As such, Wagner’s presumed play is one of sport, city and power in symbiosis. Investing in infrastructure creates far fewer headlines but comes without kudos. Making a football team successful provides kudos but football clubs are an ineffective means of generating profit.
But the kudos bring with it power and influence that increases the public interest (and popularity) that greases the wheels of infrastructure investment. Do both at the same time and they become mutual accelerants.
Earlier this year, Wagner pledged to invest £3bn in the sports quarter project – it is an extraordinary figure. But his message is fairly simple: I am prepared to spend this money here and so I will expect others, by which he means Government, to meet me halfway.
It was both a committed intention and a dangled carrot laced with clever PR. Fail to meet Wagner’s requests for investment and a potential mega-project becomes less possible. That’s going to be unpopular amongst the local electorate.
This doesn’t feel ideal, or at least not how things ought to be done: a hedge fund as the new powerbrokers of England’s second city. Investment is supposed to come from the local or national government.
But then local councils are broke and the necessary investment in projects such as this is not available while the country fights economic fires. Crisis has always bred opportunity.
And it’s already happening elsewhere: see the UAE in East Manchester and Saudi Arabia in Newcastle city centre. Major football clubs in major cities are being used as the perfect entry vehicles for diversifying portfolios across wider infrastructure.
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Rather a hedge fund than a state with questionable human rights records, right? The age of the “local guy done good” as the leader of a successful football club is dying. Birmingham City supporters know that only too well after their dalliances with their previous owners.
That is why Wagner may win – because he is promising a dream and is smart enough to know that football is an effective route to power and influence. Make a club that has drifted for too long successful and doors suddenly open.
In Bordesley and at St. Andrew’s, those doors had been left ajar by underinvestment, wastage and decay. Survey the residents within a mile each way of the ground and they will tell you that vast money is the only answer.
Survey Birmingham City supporters and ask whether they are excited about the club’s future and you will get a universally positive response. Matchday here tells you that. The court of public opinion forever determines your fate and, right now, Tom Wagner is sitting in a throne.
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