"Impaled On Dildos"

The story of The Blues Pt 1

This is a draft extract from Adrian Goldberg’s forthcoming book ‘Where’s The Money Gone? One fan’s football finance odyssey”

First – a bit of history.  Birmingham City have never in my football lifetime been a well-run club – with one exception.  And even then the fans hated the owners.

The club’s brief ‘golden years’ came under the ownership of David Sullivan and the Gold brothers, Ralph and David, whose wealth was founded in the porn industry before they went (sort of) legit with the Sport newspapers – the home of busty pin-ups and comically absurd headlines ( eg ‘Britain’s Fattest Woman Ate Fridge And Died’ or ‘Statue Of Elvis Found On Mars’ .)

One-time Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan who had a running feud with Sullivan and the Golds once said that if he heard their story of being “East End boys made good” one more time, he would “impale myself on one of their dildos”.

To each their own, Simon.

Yet during their 16 years in control – between 1993 and 2009 - the Sullivan/Gold axis delivered relative success to a club previously notable for its underachievement.  They had previously won just one trophy of note, the League Cup in 1963, and given the reputation of the Zulu Warriors, Blues were generally more feared for their fans than their footballers.

With Sullivan and the Golds at the helm, that started to change. There was the ‘lower league double’ of promotion from League One and victory at Wembley in the Football League Trophy in 1995. 

(I commentated on this game for BBC Radio WM which concluded with a ‘golden goal’ by Paul Tait, who promptly lifted his top to reveal a ‘Shit On The Villa’ T shirt underneath).

That was followed by years of consolidation in the Championship before promotion to the Premier League in 2002, followed by a mid-table finish, then relegation, before an immediate return to the top flight.

That might not sound much if you follow Chelsea or Man United, but for Birmingham it represented a kind of success.

St Andrews was briefly graced by French World Cup winner Christophe Dugarry, whose five goals in four matches helped keep relegation at bay in 2003.

His Gallic finesse held spellbound a fan base which had previously made a hero of Garry Pendrey’s industrial strength commitment, although Dugarry’s career in Brum fizzled out after just 30 games.

Overall, the trajectory was upwards.  Three sides of the stadium were rebuilt, with development of the fourth frustrated only by a preservation order on historic flats behind the Main Stand.

Such are the vagaries of football that although the Sullivan-Gold combo are now perhaps viewed with a degree of nostalgic fondness, they were never much loved at the time.

Sullivan was a lippy, chippy character, immensely quotable (and so loved by journalists) but a man who also made enemies with his criticisms of Birmingham City Council and local businesses for their alleged lack of support.

Chief Executive Karren Brady, appointed at the age of 23 with no previous experience of running a football club, cut an abrasive figure.

It's fair to say that as one of the few high-profile women in football at the time, Brady suffered outrageous sexism – but she also disliked because she represented the sharp elbowed approach of those who proclaim that “football is a business”. (It is, of course, but it’s also so much more than that…)

She introduced a levy on the price of tickets for away games, which were traditionally sold on a reciprocal basis.

Her argument was that by selling for another club, Birmingham City were effectively raising money for a rival business and getting nothing in return – conveniently ignoring the fact that those clubs would do the same for them in the reverse fixture.

It was a policy which punished the club’s most loyal supporters, adding to the costs of an already expensive awayday. 

And although there were sometimes well publicised marketing initiatives (£5 admission for adults, kids for a quid etc) which filled the ground for relatively unattractive Cup games, supporters sometimes bristled at tickets prices that rose (more than a decade ago, remember) to £48 for ‘premium’ games.

One reporter who criticised the club was forced to file match reports from the terraces; another said that he was screamed at by Brady and told that he would lose his house after reporting (accurately) that a player had turned up drunk for training.

Yet for all its foibles, the Sullivan-Brady-Gold partnership was financially astute. 

Although the owners were determined that that the club would strive to break even, they were willing to invest considerable sums to achieve that by improving the infrastructure and buying better players, albeit on the clear understanding that they would eventually get their money back.

That was a considerable improvement on what came before and significantly better than what appeared afterwards. 

In the 1980’s, Blues were owned by Ken Wheldon, a Black Country scrap metal magnate who tried foisting a groundshare upon Birmingham and another club he owned, Walsall FC.

Wheldon was notorious for his penny-pinching attitude, and gates plummeted to around the 6,000 mark.  As a top division side, they lost to non-league Altrincham in the FA Cup.

As their financial woes intensified, the training ground on valuable land close to Birmingham Airport was flogged off, leaving the players to practise on rented rugby pitches.

Former captain Ian Clarkson recalled that during Wheldon’s time, players were forced to queue up for their wages at 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon: “This usually involved around 40 players hanging round the main offices getting increasingly fractious, which wasn’t ideal preparation for a game on Saturday.”

Next up were the Kumar Brothers.  They ran a downmarket clothing brand and according to their critics ran the club “like a market stall”.  Their business went under when Receivers for the collapsed BCCI Bank demanded repayment of their outstanding loans, forcing them out of Birmingham City.

This was where Sullivan and the Golds saw an opening, buying the club for just £700,000.  When they sold it to Hong Kong hairdresser and Stock Market investor Carson Yeung, the price was more than £80million.

This is a draft extract from Adrian Goldberg’s forthcoming book ‘Where’s The Money Gone’.