Birmingham City and Wrexham are expected to bend their financial muscles this summer and are probably the biggest spending outside the Premier League as soon as the transfer window is opened.
Both clubs are ready to set up a push for the top division and both have a power on the same footing with those championship clubs that are already benefiting from Premier League Parachute payments.
Sky Sports News has been told that Birmingham and Wrexham probably focus on similar players such as Leicester, Ipswich and Southampton – and some of the smaller Premier League clubs this summer.
There are striking similarities between both the ambitions and the strategies at St Andrew's and the Racecourse Ground. Birmingham and Wrexham have both rich American owners. Both have a rapidly growing commercial basis that dwares a lot of the competition they have met so far.
Both have produced large TV documents to show their mission and to increase their global attraction. And both have a business strategy, which is specifically planning for life in the Premier League. Earlier instead of later.
Crucial is because both are promoted from League One, where the rules for financial fair play are very different from the championship, both have a lot of freedom this summer to invest in their teams.
In League One, clubs are only allowed to spend 60 percent of their total turnover to players, although this changes for the following season, to further limit the amount that rich owners can pump.
In the championship the rules say that no more than £ 39 million can be lost over a period of three years. For Wrexham and Birmingham, that gives a lot of leeway to invest in the team because a new three -year cycle is now starting.
Theoretically, both clubs were able to gamble the silver family in the coming two years, try to reach the promised land of English football, knowing that if they fail, they have a third season to claw back and still stay within the PSR limits.
It has been made clear to me that neither Birmingham nor Wrexham want to do that and “gamble” when reaching the top division. Instead, both want to turn their commercial income spectacularly, so that they have even more money to spend on players. But their purchasing power is already powerful and impressive.
Birmingham made the headlines when they broke up the League One-Opplaaves record by paying £ 15 million plus add-ons to Fulham for Jay Stansfield on the deadline day last August. Before that transfer window, the previous record costs that were paid in League One was £ 3.4 million for Will Grigg. Birmingham paid more than four times to get Stansfield.
It was a deliberate signal of intention and a Gregarious show in force. But it was also a calculated part of a much broader strategy: recruit not only players who are good enough to play in the division above – buy talent that you think it can also keep their own in the Premier League. Otherwise your team cannot keep pace with your ambition. Expect them to pursue a similar caliber of player this summer.
“Parachute payment clubs have about one in four chance to be promoted,” Birmingham owner Tom Wagner told The Times. “Non-parachute clubs have a chance of one in 16. If we can reach income at the parachute level, we are four times more likely to be promoted.
“If our income is progressing as we expect in the following season, which is in fact a certainty, we will not receive the highest income -generating club in the championship ever, not parachute payments -and we will be on the same rate with that receiving parachute payments.
“If we go a year later and we are lucky to end in the Premier League, we are a mid-table club or better in total income, first year in.”
Rob Mcelhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought Wrexham for £ 2 million in 2021. The club now has an estimated value of more than £ 100 million – a 50 -time increase in four years.
Wrexham was in value rock when the A-Listers bought the club, just after the paralyzing Covid Pandemie, and with the team in the fifth level of English football. After three consecutive promotions, their ambitions to make the Premier League do not seem so unrealistic.
The estimated turnover of Wrexham has been more than £ 27 million this season. That is a huge figure for a League One club – four or five times the turnover of the smallest clubs of the competition. Their front-of-shirt sponsor alone is told, is worth around £ 5-6 million, which is comparable to the total turnover of Burton Albion for 2023/24.
And although these values ​​are carefully protected for commercial sensitivity, it is thought that the shirt sponsor of Wrexham is worth so much as what deserve a lot of medium-sized Premier League clubs for the logo of a certain company on their shirt.
The racecourse has already been renovated. Now the club is building a new head standard of 5,500 seats that will be future-proof to make further expansion possible if Wrexham can reach a different promotion.
There is no doubt that both Birmingham and Wrexham have become worldwide. The club North Wales brought in Michael Williamson 12 months ago as their new Chief Executive, after he had been on the board of Inter Milan, DC United and Inter Miami, where he worked closely with David Beckham. A Superstar CEO with Superstar Friends.
Mcelhenney and Reynolds have invested around £ 8 million in the play team, but they have succeeded in making their fan base and commercial income grow enormously thanks to the Disney+ documentary series, “Welcome to Wrexham”, with season 4 now available.
Their sponsors include Tiktok, United Airlines and Meta Quest. The stunt that a “Hollywood” style produced that appeared, not in the Santa Monica Mountains, but on the Rhostyllen Coal Slag Heap with a view of the city, Viral went on social media in 2021. The club currently has 1.7 m Tiktok -followers worldwide.
And the American factor is the key here. Wrexham advertised the club, with a special appearance by Sir Anthony Hopkins, during the super bowl of February in New Orleans. I was told that about 65 percent of Wrexham's total income is now coming from abroad. American owners, both in Birmingham and Wrexham, repeatedly throw their product on an American and global audience. Hence the importance of international TV documentaries.
While Wrexham has produced three box sets with cash register A-Listers in Mcelhenney and Reynolds, Birmingham has done the same with NFL legend Tom Brady. The minority shareholder of the club is expected to perform strongly in the new Amazon Prime documentary series of Birmingham, which has followed every aspect of the club, behind the scenes, from the preseason to the competition title. The box set will be launched next month in 200 different countries.
When Knightshead bought Birmingham two years ago, the sponsors of the club include a local packaging company and a company that offered surgical weight loss. Now the club is supported by multinational brands, including Nike, Delta Airlines, Vertu, Coral, unbeaten and Heineken.
Instead of a last-minute hurry from the local pub before the kick-off, thousands of fans now attend the new St Andrew's Fan Park on a competition day, so that the pre-match atmosphere is canceled and a huge new range of merchandise cuts each other. The expenditure of the average fan of Birmingham, I was told, rose 300 percent last season. They currently have 18,300 seasonal card holders with 10,500 more on the waiting list.
That is the influence of the owner of Birmingham, Wagner is depicted this week with the Chancellor of the Treasury, Rachel Reeves, who heavily lobbying to support Wagner's plan for a £ 3 billion sports quarter in the second city of England. With a brand new stadium of 62,000 capacity for Birmingham City to play in.
The manager, Chris Davies, told Sky Sports News that the project is comparable to the person in which City Group dominated and regenerated a large part of Manchester. If it continues, the new Birmingham stadium would overshadow the 53,400 seats of the Etihad.
An expression that is regularly repeated around the power halls at St. Andrew's is: “It's not about the competition in which you are, it's about the club you are.” But both Birmingham and Wrexham are getting closer to the competition in which every English football club strives.