Chris Davies Says Birmingham City Can Keep Progressing After Adding Physicality to Their Game

Birmingham City is a football club transformed. More than 20,000 season tickets have been sold for the coming Championship campaign, with 14,000 more supporters on a waiting list. Fan parks now surround St Andrew’s on matchdays, and the buzz around the place is hard to miss.

Ownership plans stretch to reconnecting England’s second city with the club that carries its name, and supporters clubs are springing up around the world, partly a product of Tom Brady’s involvement at boardroom level. All the talk is of getting the club Premier League ready.

With an ambitious ownership and a support base hungry for success, it would be easy for Birmingham to feel like they are in a hurry. Excitement brings expectation, not just inside the building but outside it too. There is a clear sense of a club going somewhere. But building takes time, and manager Chris Davies is trying to make sure the club’s growing ambition off the pitch is matched by patience on it.

A season to breathe

Looking back, last season could have been less a case of lost momentum than a chance for the club to catch its breath. You have to go back 14 years, to the 2011/12 season when Birmingham were playing in Europe, to find a better finish than the 10th place they managed in 2025/26.

“It was our first season back, which people found hard to remember at times,” Davies told Sky Sports ahead of Saturday’s season-opener against Sheffield United, live on Sky Sports. He was not talking about the supporters, who he says “have been great,” but everyone connected to the club. This is a manager carrying a lot of hopes and dreams on his shoulders.

“One thing I did learn was that I can handle it,” he said. “I can handle the ups and downs.” There were not too many downs on the way up. Birmingham won the League One title with a record-breaking 111 points the season before, their possession-based football proving dominant against lower-division opposition.

Last season asked different questions. “You can know about the Championship but to feel it is something different,” Davies said. England’s second tier tested his team in ways League One never had, and Davies did not always have the answers.

Learning to adapt

“We came up from League One playing total football, having 80 per cent possession with a lot of circulating the ball, a lot of dominating the ball. It was really effective for us because we just controlled games pretty much the whole way through,” Davies explained.

“In the Championship we were very technical in our recruitment of some smaller players, more technical players, and we tried to use that style. It had really good days and it had days where we just didn’t have enough punch, especially away from home.”

That search for punch showed itself in the opening weeks of this campaign. Birmingham won a hard-fought Carabao Cup tie at Swansea having had only 39 per cent of the ball, scoring the only goal of the game through August Priske. It suggested Davies’ side have added new layers to their game.

Priske, a physical 22-year-old target man signed in January, also scored the winning goal against Barcelona in a packed St Andrew’s last month. “Jhon Solis, Carlos Vicente and August came in at the same time and that little six months that they did have is their initiation to what English football is like, what the Championship is like, and now they are ready to go,” Davies said. “They have all done very well.”

Vicente, a combative Spanish winger, set up Priske’s goal at Swansea. Solis, who has been a popular figure with supporters from the moment he arrived from Colombia, also scored against Barcelona. Both add presence to a Birmingham midfield that Davies feels was previously missing some steel.

Building physicality into the plan

“When I reflected on the season, I thought for us to take the next step and progress, physicality is going to be really important,” Davies said. “The game now is a lot of man-to-man pressing, a lot of set-piece emphasis. You need the physical capacity to deal with it.”

That thinking shaped Birmingham’s summer business. Dael Fry, a 6ft 4in centre-back with close to 300 Championship appearances to his name, arrived to add height and experience alongside the winter signings. The plan is not to abandon the possession game that carried Birmingham to the League One title, but to build on top of it.

“As a team that can keep the ball, it is a lot easier to then move into a more pragmatic or direct style than being a team that only knows how to play pragmatic or direct football,” Davies said.

That shift actually began in the closing weeks of last season. Birmingham sat 17th in mid-April, and Davies used a brief international break in the spring to make adjustments to how his team played, pushing them toward a more direct approach.

“I started thinking about being a little bit more flexible with the shape we were using and how we were positioning ourselves, but focusing more on more direct play, more transitions and more set-pieces if possible,” he explained. “So we sort of finished the season that way.” Birmingham ended the campaign on a five-game unbeaten run, climbing to that 10th-place finish and building belief heading into the summer.

Keeping the identity intact

Davies is wary of throwing out what already works. “It is a fine balance because we don’t want to lose what we’re good at. What I won’t come away from is the pressing,” he said. “I don’t think any team last season in the Championship really played through our press consistently. I thought it was really effective for us.”

The tweaks come once the ball is won back. “I think that hopefully is something that we can have as a weapon that we can use a little bit more,” he said. “When we get the ball, just to go forward that little bit quicker, hopefully win more set-pieces.”

That last point explains another addition behind the scenes. Birmingham have brought in Scott Fry as a specialist set-piece coach, with Davies identifying dead-ball situations as a clear route for his side to become genuine promotion contenders this season.

Solis scored from a set-piece against Barcelona. Priske’s winner at Swansea came from a dead ball too, with Vicente squaring the ball across for the striker to finish. The emphasis is already showing results, and Davies has done the sums to back it up.

“We have a set-piece coach and the idea is to score more from them. We needed to score 70-odd goals really to be in among those top teams last season,” he said. That was the total managed by the top six sides in the Championship. Birmingham scored 57.

“If six or seven of those can come from set-pieces and two or three can come from counter-attacks, then you only need another two or three from your general football. So it is absolutely doable.”

Forty games in the bank

What sets this season apart from the last, Davies believes, is simple experience. “It was not just me, several players had never played in it before. Now they have 40 games in the bank. They know what it is like away at Millwall.”

At the training ground, Davies has tried to strip back the slogans that once decorated the walls. No gimmicks is the mantra now, a leaner set-up to match a leaner squad. There is more continuity than there was a year ago, and the sense within the building is that this Birmingham side is ready to push on.

Craig Gardner has left his role as director of football, though the club has played down the impact of his exit, leaning instead on the experience of Mike Rigg. Commercially, Birmingham continue to grow, and the club now generates the largest revenue of any Championship side that is not reliant on parachute payments from a Premier League relegation.

Birmingham last played in the Premier League in the 2010/11 season and were relegated to League One in 2023/24 before winning it back at the first attempt. Brady sits on the club’s advisory board alongside majority owner Tom Wagner, part of the American ownership group behind the current rebuild. That recent history is part of why last season’s stability, followed by this summer’s recruitment, feels significant to those inside the club rather than just another set of transfer headlines.

After storming up through the divisions and then stabilising, the next step now awaits Birmingham City. Davies, for his part, sounds like a man who has stopped worrying about outside expectation and started focusing purely on the work in front of him.

“I am confident that we can keep progressing. That is the big thing,” he said. “We just need to keep moving forward and getting stronger.”