What’s big, brash, bold and costs £1.2bn?
“Welcome to the Birmingham City Powerhouse.”
As with everything associated with the Championship club these days, the unveiling of their new £1.2 billion stadium was big, brash and bold.
On Thursday Tom Wagner, the Birmingham chairman, was standing on a podium inside Digbeth Loc Studios, addressing a chilly warehouse full of business leaders, politicians, Birmingham players and media.
Many gasped when designs for the 62,000-capacity arena were revealed during a six-minute screenplay, produced by the Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, starring Jude Bellingham, Tom Brady, and the actor Paul Anderson.
Twelve giant, red-brick chimneys — a nod to the brickworks that once sat on the site — occupied the skyline. A new city landmark, at the centre of a monumental infrastructure project, that will be visible from 40 miles away.
The red-brick chimneys will be visible from 40 miles away.
| “Wow,” Bellingham, the Birmingham academy graduate and Real Madrid star, said. “You’re in for a blast,” Brady, the NFL legend and minority investor, beamed. “Holy f***,” Anderson, aka Peaky Blinders’ Arthur Shelby, added, rather summing up the reaction in the room on Thursday.
Have you ever seen anything like it? It would be fair to say that the designs – the centrepiece of a £3 billion Sports Quarter less than a mile from the club’s home since 1906, St Andrew’s – have divided opinion. When Knight, who was part of the design committee, was asked whose idea the chimneys were, he described it as a collective endeavour, yet his smile gave away the truth. “We want this thing to be a theatre of enjoyment [where people feel] the power of collective experience,” he said. “Whether the chimneys reflect something from 100 years ago or not, that’s the future.”
|
Inside the proposed 62,000-capacity stadium
| If this comes off, what a future Birmingham City have to look forward to. The grand vision of their bullish US-based owners – the $10 billion investment firm Knighthead Capital Management, of which Wagner is co-founder – has been met with a dollop of scepticism thus far.
The disastrous appointment of Wayne Rooney as manager, which precipitated Birmingham’s relegation to League One in 2023-24, Knighthead’s first full season at St Andrew’s, did not help much in that regard. “We looked like complete lunatics for saying we were going to build this, sitting in League One,” Wagner admitted on Thursday. The aim is for the stadium to be built for the start of the 2030-31 season and, one by one, reasons for doubting that it will happen are falling away. They overcame their biggest hurdle in June when (after intense lobbying) the government pledged a £2.4 billion investment in transport projects in the West Midlands over the next five years 
The ground would be the centrepiece of a 135-acre site About £400 million of that is ring-fenced for a new Metro tram line linking the city to the site in Bordesley Green, and upgrades to local road and railway infrastructure. When the nearby HS2 line is complete, Wagner believes the stadium will be the “most accessible” in western Europe. If you think the stadium design is bold, it does not even scratch the surface of the broader plans for the area. Knighthead is still hoovering up land around the east of Birmingham, but it’s estimated that the site will eventually cover 135 acres. For context, that’s 55 acres bigger than Manchester City’s Etihad Campus. With its retractable, solar-panelled roof (generating enough energy to power 100 events a year) and movable pitch, the stadium will compete for the rights to host NFL games, international men’s and women’s football matches, and the biggest music concerts. As well as being home to first-team and academy training facilities for Birmingham’s men’s and women’s teams, there will be a 10,000-seat women’s stadium, a 20,000-seat concert arena, a facility for the Blues Foundation – the club’s charitable arm – and office, retail, hotel, entertainment and residential space. The aim is for the place to be a 365-day-a-year destination. Backed by the high profile of seven-times Super Bowl winner Brady, Birmingham are already banking non-TV rights revenues on a par with mid-table Premier League clubs. When completed, this stadium and its surrounding assets would potentially catapult them into the realms of the biggest earners in Europe. Wagner’s favourite mantra is: “If you can’t say it, you can’t do it.” Birmingham’s future is something we are going to hear much, much more about. “Birmingham has a good story to tell,” Wagner said. “A story that is going to resonate with a lot of people around the world who feel a bit forgotten about. “This [project] provides a pathway to a brighter future, that is consistent with the place of a former industrial city in a modern economy. If that place is about entertainment and sport, as key components of economic growth, creating jobs and opportunity, let’s not apologise for that. Let’s embrace it. “It will transform our neighbourhood, our quarter of the city, the city itself, and make a big impact on the West Midlands and, ultimately, the country. It will show that big things can be undertaken with great success.” The Blue half of Birmingham certainly hopes so. |