How much Tom Wagner is prepared to invest in new Birmingham City 62,000 seater stadium - It's eye-watering | OneFootball

Tom Wagner has talked about the amount of money he's prepared to invest into Birmingham City's new stadium, and it's a jaw-dropping,

Birmingham City's owner, Tom Wagner, has been talking about the amount of money he's prepared to invest in a new stadium for the club.

Birmingham are still celebrating promotion from League One with a record-breaking 111 points, it is clear that the new owner's ambitions for the Blues won't end with getting back into to the Championship.

Wagner's Shelby Companies Limited bought the club in July 2023, but the new owner had a shock in store when their first season ended in relegation from the Championship.

But with Birmingham having bounced back to the Championship at the first attempt, the owner's future ambitions for the club are clear.

Wagner intends to invest billions into new Birmingham stadium

In a wide-ranging interview with The IPaper, Wagner confirmed that the amount of investment that he's prepared to put into this new stadium is a jaw-dropping £3 billion.

The land for the new site has already been acquired, around two miles from the city centre at Birmingham Wheels Park, less than a mile from St Andrew's.

The new stadium will have a capacity of 62,000, and will be part of a Sports Quarter complex which will also hold concerts, feature the club’s training facilities, and house students. The intention is for this to be ready in four years' time.

Wagner is very clear that this regeneration will be very much to the benefit of the city of Birmingham.

The new site is situated near Bordesley Green, one of the most deprived areas in the country, and Wagner forecasts that the project will generate £450 million a year, with 10,000 jobs created for the construction phase and 8,000 then employed on-site full-time.

Birmingham attendances will need to increase drastically in their new home

The Birmingham owner says that there is one thing that he needs assistance with to make this plan work.

The site of the new stadium is a forty-minute walk from Birmingham City Centre, and he says that to make the project work he will need improved public transport links between the city centre and the site.

The size of the new stadium is such that filling it will be a challenge. Birmingham's highest-ever attendance for a match is 67,341, for an FA Cup Fifth Round match in 1939. It's been half a century since they had an average home attendance of over 30,000, and even this figure is less than half the size of the proposed new stadium. The highest average attendance that the club has ever achieved was 38,821 in the 1948/49 season, the peak of the post-war attendance boom.

The club will need Premier League football in order to sustain anything like attendances of this size, but there seems little question that Tom Wagner has the ambition to try and deliver that for Birmingham City.