Birmingham City’s £1.5m Transfer Deal: The League One Cheat Code

Birmingham City have laid bare their intent of spending minimal time in League One after finally falling to relegation from the Championship alongside Rotherham United and Huddersfield Town in 2023/24.

Although Blues have been synonymous with the dreaded second-tier relegation dogfight for quite some time – they haven’t finished above 18th position since 2016 – it still arrived as a real blow for the club’s ambitious Stateside ownership, who took over last year and have displayed a fresh sense of ambition that is already translating to their League One crusade.

The early indications are that Birmingham, now under the management of ex-Tottenham Hotspur and Leicester City assistant Chris Davies, are going to be a force to behold next season. They marked a real statement of intent by hijacking Huddersfield’s move for Alfie May from Charlton Athletic, who has scored over 20 goals in each of his last three seasons in this division. The goalkeeping department has also been strengthened tenfold through the acquisitions of Bailey Peacock-Farrell and Ryan Allsop, the latter of whom had spent the previous three seasons in the Championship.

But perhaps no St Andrew’s arrival to date is more eye-catching than that of Emil Hansson, a capture that displays Birmingham’s immense pulling-power at this level.

Emil Hansson is a superb signing for Birmingham City

Hansson surfaced as Birmingham’s fourth signing of the summer window when he arrived in the West Midlands last week in a £1.5m transfer from Eredivisie outfit Heracles, signing a three-year deal.

The left winger scored five times and provided a further six assists in 24 outings last term, and it speaks volumes of Birmingham’s allure that they can swoop players from a respectable top-flight division despite now finding themselves in the third-tier. Given that Hansson impressed in the Eredivisie – a league which is largely on-par with the Championship, save for a few superior and inferior clubs at opposite ends of the table – the potential impact that he could have in League One will be frightening for opposing defenders and supporters alike.

And the season before that, Hansson was the orchestrator in-chief of Heracles’ immediate return to the Eredivisie by racking up an astonishing return of 16 goals and 19 assists, which, though at a much lower level, underlines that he can supply the directness and end product that Blues have been missing from their wide options for far too long now.

What makes the Hansson signing even more exciting is that he’s now 26, an age where players usually enter their prime. Development isn’t linear, of course, but that’s the typical trend and Birmingham have done extremely well to get someone at that juncture of their career – and with such pedigree, of course – to make the move to League One.

Birmingham City are building a League One superteam – anything but promotion is a failure

While Birmingham supporters understand that it’s all a process under their new owners, it’ll nonetheless be regarded as a failure if they achieve anything but promotion next season and that’s a reasonable expectation when you consider the quality of their squad and level of investment compared to other divisional rivals.

They’ve got a proven leading goalscorer in May and a winger with pedigree and the top-flight class that could quite easily light up the league in Hansson, and then you’ve also got numerous players from last term who should really stand out in League One too, such as Siriki Dembele – as he has before with Peterborough United -, Krystian Bielik, Dion Sanderson and even Tyler Roberts.

The jury is still out on Head Coach Davies, who is untested as a senior boss but, like much of Birmingham’s squad, possesses promising pedigree. Given that his has been honed under the tuteleage of some of the finest managers across the English game, Blues supporters should be just as excited about him as they are about some of the signings he’s made thus far.

The likes of Huddersfield, Rotherham, Peterborough, Bolton Wanderers and perhaps Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham will all share Birmingham’s designs of promotion, but Blues look a real shoo-in for the league title and, it must be said, there will need to be questions if they’re not lifting it come May.