Tom Brady, Wayne Rooney and relegation Birmingham: How the Blues returned to League One despite off-field change | Football news

As new investors Tom Wagner and seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady received plaudits on their first visit to Birmingham City last summer, everything finally looked rosy after years of turmoil in the B9.

A last-minute penalty had just beaten promotion hopefuls Leeds in the second of their five-game unbeaten run to start the season. After 10 games, Birmingham moved up to fifth after an impressive 3-1 win over local rivals West Brom in front of their biggest home crowd before the pandemic.

The dilapidated areas of St Andrew’s, left in such a state of disrepair that entire stands had been closed the previous season, were open again – and bright. The old broken showers in the dressing room at home were finally fixed. The players’ tunnel has been decorated with inspirational quotes and images. Finally, this house felt like home again.

“We are not here for a short period of time, we are here for the long term,” said Wagner, the club’s new president, after the first home win of the season. “All our decisions are focused on what is best for the club in the long term.”

Football is never simple. Good times rarely last too long and words are easy. But even with the unwelcome help of deja-vu, that quote would come back to haunt Wagner, Brady and Birmingham sooner than anyone could have imagined.

Despite a last-day win over play-off side Norwich, they have now been relegated to the third tier for the first time in nearly 30 years.

To paraphrase Birmingham fan Mike Skinner’s poem, how did it come to this?

That game at West Brom would prove to be John Eustace’s last in charge. It would be unfair to blame what followed solely on the decision to replace him with Wayne Rooney – but it did sew some of the seeds of their demise.

It seemed the new superstar owners had similar designs for their head coaching role, bringing in one of the game’s most recognizable faces this century. But his suitability for the main role of coaching Birmingham’s players was probably given less consideration than it might have been. And soon, the results started to show.

“The new bosses demanded patience and trust,” he recalls Sky Sports News senior reporter Rob Dorsett. “Their reasoning was clear: to compete with the big clubs, Birmingham needed to expand their commercial base, increase their revenue streams.

“Rooney, as a global sporting icon – alongside another in Brady – could help make that happen. And Garry Cook, the new chief executive who had previously been at Manchester City, along with Craig Gardner, the director of football, believed Rooney could also help take the Blues to a new level on the pitch.”

Rooney certainly did that, although not in the way the new owners had intended. One win from his first nine games, coupled with more and more public outbursts questioning the will of his players, have undermined the positive spirit around St Andrew’s. As they were soon replaced by boos, he asked for patience – but even he couldn’t deny that he understood the fans’ frustration.

“My job is to improve them as players, so in the next six months, hopefully there will be changes because you want to bring in players and players will leave,” he said after one of his worst results, a 0-0 against Rotherham – who themselves had only won twice all season.

Six months was optimistic given the rocky fall of his reign at Birmingham. The fall from fifth to 20th in 15 games was enough in the faces of Brady and Wagner that something had to be done.

There were obvious parallels between Rooney’s appointment and that of Gianfranco Zola under Birmingham’s old owners Trillion Trophy Asia. Like Rooney, he had replaced a popular manager – on that occasion, Gary Rowett – who had them fighting for promotion.

Like Rooney, Zola had been an unmitigated disaster. Rooney was out less than three months into a three-and-a-half-year deal said to be worth around £5million.

“There has been a significant easing for Rooney, who has faced a baptism of fire and a series of injury problems that have affected his squad,” adds Dorsett. “But Birmingham have turned to the safe hands of experienced winger Tony Mowbray.

Mowbray has had a heavy hand in recent roles, leaving jobs at Blackburn and, most recently, Sunderland, both on the brink of the play-offs – so nobody could say he’s unfamiliar with Birmingham’s recent plight .

He was brought in as a fireman at Coventry and then Blackburn and made an instant impact in both roles. Of course, 10 points from six games followed, including particularly sweet back-to-back wins over his two most recent clubs, which lifted them back up to 15th, a six-point cushion above the bottom three.

But then another moment – which made Birmingham’s downfall more complicated than any specific incident – struck suddenly.

Two days after being in the dugout to set up that win over Sunderland, Mowbray required medical treatment serious enough to ultimately rule him out for the rest of the season, which has yet to be publicly disclosed.

“After a difficult period where the club tried to bide their time in the hope that Mowbray would be well enough to return, the decline on the pitch continued in the absence of a permanent manager,” says Dorsett after a disastrous one-point run since six games under Mowbray’s assistant Mark Venus.

“The hierarchy had no choice but to make another managerial change, with Rowett returning to the club to take charge of the final eight games in a bid to save their season and avoid relegation to League One.”

The irony of Rowett’s return, and how he took over the same kind of ship that had sunk after the end of his first spell in charge, was not lost.

But Birmingham needed something fast and Rowett had been out of work since being sacked by Millwall in October.

Despite a spirited effort, in the end he could not keep them afloat in the championship.

“Even with relegation, there’s a strange feeling around St Andrew’s,” adds Dorsett. “If you ask most fans if they would change where they are now compared to where they were a year ago, most of them would still shake your hand.

“Last month, Knightshead unveiled ambitious plans for a brand new 60,000-seater stadium and new commercial projects, even as the team were in the middle of a relegation battle. Those development plans would continue, they said, even if the team quit. in League One.

“It’s that promise of a much brighter future that makes the short-term bitterness of possible relegation sweet enough for the fans to bear.”

Of course, only a Birmingham fan particularly excited by trips to Shrewsbury and Exeter would be looking forward to relegation to League One, but after years of misery on and off the pitch, at least one of those is looking good now.

It appears that Wagner and Brady, while perhaps premature with some of their early comments, are as good as their word. So even with their Championship tenure coming to an end, the future still looks bright for the club.