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Tom Brady sticks out like a sore thumb in Birmingham.
The former New England Patriots quarterback is a minority owner of Birmingham City, a working-class club in a working-class town, and seeing him in the back of a car being driven along familiar streets is a peculiar experience.
Brady was brought to Birmingham by fellow American and City chairman Tom Wagner – ‘My friend Wags’, as Brady calls him – and it was Wagner’s drive that underpinned a record-breaking 2024-25 promotion season and major regeneration plans off the pitch.
Built In Birmingham: Brady & The Blues – Official Trailer | Prime Video – YouTube
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Singing the Blues to a different tune
Naturally, Brady’s involvement means a behind-the-scenes documentary series on Prime Video.
Both Wagner and the NFL legend speak extensively across five episodes of Built in Birmingham: Brady & The Blues, which will be released on Friday, August 1.
Birmingham, the city, isn’t dressed up or shied away from, and the assortment of supporters featured in the documentary, between mercifully infrequent clips from Peaky Blinders, reflects the self-effacing gallows humour that’s part and parcel of being a Brummie football supporter of any stripe.
Built in Birmingham introduces us to folk who are exactly that.
Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders and a bred, if not born, Brummie, leads a cast of characters who are almost uniformly charming, relatable, everyday English football fans.
Birmingham City being Birmingham City, their tale begins in the doldrums and gets worse.
After generations of owners utterly unfit for the role, the club is stagnating in the Championship. The only way is not up.
Manager John Eustace appears briefly before being sacked in favour of Wayne Rooney, ranked at no.50 in FourFourTwo’s list of the greatest players of all time.
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Blues fans – whose ranks also include Dan and Paul Collins, steward Sam Pitt and vlogger Brummie Joe – are surprised.
Rooney’s tenure is a disaster, and Birmingham are relegated to League One. The former Everton and Manchester United striker’s sacking is framed in a way that appears desperate to prove that ruthless co-owners Brady and Wagner win, only win, and only care about winning.
The series ends with defeat at Wembley in the EFL Trophy final, but with the Blues promoted as League One champions and the owners accepting responsibility for the questionable decisions as well as the good ones.
Their best choice of all was to appoint Chris Davies as Rooney’s permanent replacement.
Built in Birmingham reveals a comprehensive recruitment process interrupted by the former Tottenham Hotspur coach’s immediately obvious suitability for the job.
Davies, as expected, is impressive throughout.
The Blues, not Brady, are the story
While Brady’s contribution is centred entirely on reminders that he is a winner who knows what it takes to win, the series overall is circumspect about the realities uncovered along the way, given the level of ambition involved.
The second episode takes the viewer behind the net curtain of a destiny-shifting summer transfer window and offers genuine insight into the signings of strikers Alfie May and Jay Stansfield.
Wagner cuts a determined figure, and Craig Gardner, now sporting director, is shown to be a knowledgeable recruitment head.
In episode three, a Blues team firing on all cylinders face an away fixture against Exeter City. Stansfield, a former Grecian, is the son of Exeter legend Adam, who was taken by bowel cancer when Jay was just seven years old.
He scores and Birmingham win, facts that are not overlooked as the Stansfield story is treated with respect but deftly confined to its proper football context.
Stansfield is stretchered off and hospitalised in the final episode and May is tasked with deputising.
But he’s suffering a goal drought, into which the cameras are given real personal insight.
With help from Gardner and Davies, May finds his scoring touch. “I like his juice,” Brady says earlier in the series.
Truth can be uncomfortable, and the series pulls few punches when it comes to Birmingham City’s hooligan past.
It’s addressed head-on and, unusually, not entirely condemned.
That the origins of the Zulu Warriors are excused is a surprising choice but ultimately, it’s a case of authentic voices speaking about their own experiences.
Built in Birmingham: Brady & The Blues will give Birmingham supporters a rich look into a historic season for their club, but pays the price of not being the first to take viewers behind previously locked doors, and it dabbles in rawness rather than actually possessing any.
The series is a compelling three-hour story in a five-hour bag.
It wastes a few seconds on Simon Jordan, but there’s also too much focus on Brady when he’s not in England.
He’s afforded McElhennian protagonist status even in his absence, arguably at the expense of parts of the story not told.
Viewers who are aware of the extent of Wagner’s plans for the club and the city off the pitch will realise that when the club is the focus, it’s always to do with what’s happening on the pitch and in the first team.
Highlighting some of the more infrastructural and community-based plans for the club might have better anchored the story in a city that is too often overlooked.
Built in Birmingham: Brady & The Blues is out on Friday on Prime Video.
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