Birmingham City confirmed late on Boxing Day that their home fixture against Peterborough United on Wednesday December 29 has been postponed due to the short turn around for players to return from isolation or recover from injury. This means that Blues will have two fixtures now to rearrange into what is already a fairly tight calendar.
Birmingham City slumped to a 4-0 defeat on Saturday at Blackburn Rovers, leaving them 17th in the table. While the heavy defeat has brought out some critics of Lee Bowyer’s tenure as Head Coach, there has also been an increasing amount of talk online about how the ownership of the club might change.
Last month I wrote about the family connections between the elusive Mr King, Wang Yaohui and Vong Pech, who has the largest financial interest in Birmingham City. Feedback from that article suggests there is still some confusion as to just who this Mr King guy is, and why I’ve dedicated so much of my time to uncovering connections between him and the titular shareholders of Birmingham Sports Holding. In this article I’m hoping to rectify that somewhat.
Birmingham City blew a 2-0 lead on Saturday to draw 2-2 with Cardiff City at St Andrew’s. It was a bitter pill for Lee Bowyer to swallow, with the Blues Head Coach admitting that his side weren’t good enough in either box. With 22 games gone Blues lie in 15th place, eight points shy of the playoffs and the same number shy of the drop zone.
One of the most complex things to understand about Birmingham City is just who owns the club. While the simple answer would be to point to the Hong Kong listed company Birmingham Sports Holdings, the ownership of that company is opaque due to the number of investment vehicles incorporated in the British Virgin Islands who own stakes in the company. Throw into the mix people owning stakes in the club directly and you’ve got a mess.
The second article in my series looking at where Birmingham City have spent money in recent years focuses on St Andrew’s stadium. The stadium has been the centre of news throughout most of the current regime’s tenure due to the sale of the stadium to Birmingham City Stadium Ltd to get around P&S rules; the closure and partial reopening of the Tilton and Kop stands due to structural issues and the ground share deal with Coventry City FC.
