Birmingham City Club Information
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Birmingham City Football Club is a professional football club based in the city of Birmingham, England. Formed in 1875 as Small Heath Alliance, they became Small Heath in 1888, Birmingham F.C. in 1905, finally becoming Birmingham City F.C. in 1943. At the end of the 2008–09 season, they were promoted from the Football League Championship to the Premier League.
As Small Heath, they were founder members and first ever champions of the Football League Second Division. The most successful period in their history was in the 1950s and early 1960s. They achieved their highest finishing position of sixth in the First Division in the 1955–56 season and reached the 1956 FA Cup Final, progressed to the final of the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1960 and 1961, and won their only major trophy, the League Cup, in 1963, beating Aston Villa 3–1 on aggregate. They have spent the majority of their history in the top tier of English football, though their darkest era came between 1986 and 2002, when they were continuously outside the top division. This period included two brief spells in the third tier of the English League, during which time they twice won the Football League Trophy.
St Andrew's has been their home ground since 1906. They have a long-standing and fierce rivalry with Aston Villa, their nearest neighbours, with whom they play the Birmingham derby. The club's nickname is Blues, due to the colour of their kit, and their fans are known as Bluenoses.
Birmingham City Football Club Ownership
Small Heath F.C. became a limited company in 1888; its first share issue was to the value of £650. The board was made up of local businessmen and dignitaries until 1965, when the club was sold to Clifford Coombs. By the mid-1980s the club was in financial trouble. Control passed from the Coombs family to former Walsall F.C. chairman Ken Wheldon, who cut costs, made redundancies, and sold off assets, including the club's training ground. Still unable to make the club pay, Wheldon sold it to the Kumar brothers, owners of a clothing chain. Debt was still increasing when matters came to a head; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) put the Kumars' businesses into receivership. The club continued in administration for four months until Sport Newspapers' proprietor David Sullivan bought the Kumars' 84% holding for £700,000 from BCCI's liquidator in March 1993.
The football club is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Birmingham City plc, listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM). The plc was floated in 1997 with an issue of 15 million new shares, raising £7.5 million of new investment. The club made a pre-tax profit of £2.7M in the year ending 31 August 2006 which, according to Deloitte's Annual Review of Football Finance, made them one of only four Premier League clubs to finish the 2005–06 season without debt.
The plc has approximately 81.5M shares in issue. On 27 June 2007, the major shareholders entered into an agreement to sell 29.9% of the company to Hong Kong-based businessman Carson Yeung Ka-shing via the company Grandtop International Holdings Limited ("GIH"), which is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The offer price of 61.331 pence per share valued the club at approximately £50M, well above any previous market capitalisation. On 16 July GIH exercised their option to purchase, which made Yeung the largest single shareholder, with plc chairman David Sullivan controlling 23.22% via two of his companies, and football club chairman David Gold holding the same amount jointly with his brother Ralph. In August Yeung stated his intention to take full control of the club once due diligence was complete, but the process became protracted, until on 20 December 2007, the day before a deadline set for completion of the deal, the plc announced that discussions had terminated with the directors "no longer confident that GIH will be able to make a general offer for the Company", though GIH claimed it was they who had temporarily shelved the bid due to Birmingham's failure to co-operate.
In April 2008, Sullivan and managing director Karren Brady were arrested and questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting in connection with an ongoing investigation of alleged corruption in English football.
Statistics and records
For more details on this topic, see List of Birmingham City F.C. statistics and records.
League positions since the 1946–47 season.
Coloured horizontal lines indicate league divisions.Frank Womack holds the record for Birmingham league appearances, having played 491 matches between 1908 and 1928, closely followed by Gil Merrick with 485 between 1946 and 1959. If all senior competitions are included, Merrick has 551, less closely followed by Womack's 515 which is the record for an outfield player. The player who has won most international caps while at the club is Maik Taylor with 39 for Northern Ireland.
The goalscoring record is held by Joe Bradford, with 249 league goals, 267 altogether, scored between 1920 and 1935; no other player comes close. Walter Abbott holds the records for the most goals scored in a season, in 1898–99, with 34 league goals in the Second Division and with 42 goals in total. Bradford holds the record for league goals scored in a top flight season with 29 in 1927–28.
The club's widest victory margin in the league was 12–0, a scoreline which they achieved once in the Football Alliance, against Nottingham Forest in 1899, and twice in the Second Division, against Walsall Town Swifts in 1892 and Doncaster Rovers in 1903. Their heaviest league defeats were 9–1, both in the First Division, against Blackburn Rovers in 1895 and Sheffield Wednesday in 1930. Their record FA Cup win was 10–0 against Druids in the fourth qualifying round of the 1899 competition; their record FA Cup defeat was 0–7 against Liverpool in the 2006 quarter final.
Birmingham's home attendance record was set at the fifth-round FA Cup tie against Everton on 11 February 1939. It is variously recorded as 66,844 or 67,341. As the current ground capacity is around 30,000, it is unlikely that this record will be broken in the foreseeable future.
The highest transfer fee received for a Birmingham player is £6.7 million, possibly rising to £8M, from Liverpool for Jermaine Pennant in July 2006, while the most expensive player bought was David Dunn, who joined from Blackburn Rovers in July 2003 for a fee undisclosed by the club, though widely reported as £5.5M. James McFadden was bought from Everton in January 2008 for a fee of £5M, possibly rising to £6.5M depending on appearances; if the full fee becomes payable, this will be the club's record purchase.
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