Despite only spending one season together, the fortunes of Championship newcomers Birmingham City and Wrexham have become curiously linked in the imagination of English football.
Wrexham and their fellow promoted team have lots in common. Both went up from League One last season. Both have big-hitting North American ownership with global intentions. Both are looking to build their growth on investment in infrastructure as well as in the transfer market.
They arrived in League One from opposite ends a year ago but Birminghams relegation and Wrexhams promotion their second on the bounce brought together two clubs with a burgeoning rivalry on the field but like-minded upstarts behind the scenes.
Are Birmingham finally getting it right?
Blues chairman and co-owner Tom Wagner could hardly be more different a character than Wrexham co-owners Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds but he shares their ambition to grow an EFL club beyond the borders of the United Kingdom and take it into the Premier League.
Football clubs at every level make similar statements of intent every year. Clubs in the lower reaches of non-league talk about the National League. Clubs just outside the National League talk about the EFL. Its bluster, almost without exception.
Wrexham soared from the National League to the Championship not by being smarter underdogs, but by acting like a big club and having the wealth and intelligence to live up to it. Theres probably no other way.
When NFL legend Tom Brady says that Wagner and his partners are trying to make Birmingham City a world-class team, it has the whiff of the usual bravado of over-ambitious football club owners. Birmingham supporters have cause to be more sceptical than most.
Yet it might be different this time. Brady and his modest stake are a red herring but Birminghams actual owners have passed a series of unspoken credibility tests since the Blues dropped into the third tier for a mercifully brief and straightforward stint.
Theres even an exhilarating Wrexham-style documentary series on the way. Prime Video will launch all five episodes of Built in Birmingham: Brady & The Blues on Friday, August 1 and it promises to get the clubs long-suffering supporters all hot and bothered before the start of a significant season.
Birmingham are backing up the talk for the first time in years
But thats just a distraction. Where Wrexham have constructed their progress on a similar project, Birmingham are documenting a surge thats already underway.
They were unstoppable in the third tier and are altogether better equipped for the Championship than the North Walian side.
When FourFourTwo visited St Andrews St Andrews @ Knighthead Park to give it its full name as the Blues sauntered towards promotion last season, the sense of a club finally comfortable in its own skin was palpable.
That doesnt come from talk or intentions. It cant be inspired by even the most well-intentioned regeneration plans. It happens on the football pitch, and its on the pitch that Birmingham have the edge over the Red Dragons and, it seems, the wherewithal to improve still further.
The Blues have already signed eight new players this summer. Brighton & Hove Albion loanees James Beadle and Eiran Cashin offer strength in depth while Wolverhampton Wanderers midfielder Tommy Doyle arrives on loan with an impressive reputation.
Bright Osayi-Samuel and returning local boy Demarai Gray offer higher-level experience. Former Celtic forward Kyogo Furuhashi could be a fully-fledged goal machine in the second tier.
Signings like those only happen with serious spending power but theyre also the work of former Blues and Aston Villa midfielder Craig Gardner, who is a promising technical director in the eyes of the owners and was rewarded with the director of football title earlier this year.
If Gardner is showing potential in a technical role, manager Chris Davies is taking one of footballs most turbulent gigs and making it look easy. In many regards, it is. That doesnt detract from Davies impressive start to life in the hotseat.
In FourFourTwos opinion, the 40-year-old is a switched-on and accomplished tactician who knows the game inside out and carries himself with a total but not overbearing confidence.
He was able to shape a team from an expensively assembled, talented group in 2024-25. Doing so again in the Championship will be a similar challenge, complicated by higher expectations and a greater degree of difficulty.
For all of Wrexhams upward momentum in the limelight, for all their outsized transfer clout, for all the undeniable skills manager Phil Parkinson brings to the dressing room, theyre likely to spend more time looking up the table than theyve become used to.
With Wagner at the helm, Gardner in the engine room and Davies steering the ship, the Red Dragons can expect Birmingham to be one of the teams theyre looking up at.
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