It's Not Just Birmingham City's Men Attracting Sporting Royalty

Birmingham City also moved their women's team into a separate company this year. What happened next was different.

In February, Shelby Companies Limited — the vehicle through which Knighthead Capital Management controls Birmingham City — acquired 97% of Birmingham City Women Football Club Limited. The remaining 3% went to a group the club described as prominent female business leaders and global sporting icons. Two were named: Karen Carney, the former Birmingham and England midfielder, and Kim Clijsters, the former world number one tennis player. Eight months later, the club they bought into is playing in the Women's Super League.

Carney goes back

Carney's involvement is the part that carries weight beyond the headline.

She began her senior career at Birmingham, went on to win 144 England caps, and was part of the Birmingham side that won the Women's FA Cup in 2012 — the club's most significant honour and the high point of a period when it produced players who went on to play for England. After retiring she chaired the government-commissioned independent review of women's domestic football, which examined what the game needed structurally and commercially to grow. Few people in England have looked harder at how women's football is financed.

Her return as a shareholder at the club where she started is not a sponsorship arrangement or an ambassadorial role. She bought part of it. Clijsters brings something different: a four-time Grand Slam singles champion and former world number one, part of a growing group of athletes investing outside their own sport, and a name with recognition in markets English women's football is trying to reach.

What neither brings, on the public record, is a disclosed sum. The 3% refers to the investor group collectively rather than to either individual, and the consideration has not been published. Their participation should be read as genuine minority ownership, not as evidence of a material capital injection — those are different things, and only one of them is established.

What actually changed in the structure

The February announcement and the corporate record say slightly different things, and both are worth reading.

Companies House shows Birmingham City Women Football Club Limited, company number 08308133, with BCWFC Holdco Limited registered as its person with significant control from 16 January 2026, holding more than 75% of shares and voting rights along with the right to appoint and remove directors. BCWFC Holdco was incorporated the previous December and its first accounts are not yet due. Birmingham City Football Club Limited ceased to be a directly registered controlling entity on the same date.

So the women's club is no longer a division of the men's club. It sits under a dedicated holding company, which is the structure that makes outside investment practical — an investor interested in women's football can now buy into the women's business without buying shares in the men's one. That was precisely the obstacle Chelsea cited when they restructured, and it took them fifteen months to find an external investor afterwards. Birmingham had two at the point of separation.

What the public record does not establish is the price, or whether any new money entered the operating company. A transfer of existing shares and a subscription for new ones have very different consequences for a football club's finances, and the available filings do not distinguish between them here. It would also be wrong to assume the restructuring had nothing to do with financial regulation simply because outside investors were involved; Knighthead's full rationale has not been set out, and the two things are not mutually exclusive.

Promotion, three months later

When the investment was announced, Birmingham were chasing promotion from WSL2. On 2 May they completed it, beating Charlton Athletic 2-0 at The Valley through two goals from Wilma Leidhammar to take the title and return to the top flight after four seasons away.

The two events should not be run together. Birmingham were already in a promotion race when the ownership changed, and nothing in the public record attributes the title to the February investment. But the sequence means the new structure acquired a top-flight club within three months of being created, and that changes what it owns.

Amy Merricks's squad was strengthened over the summer with WSL experience — Sophie Baggaley, Millie Turner and Lisa Naalsund among the arrivals — and the women's team has access to facilities the wider ownership group has invested in, including the renovated Knighthead Performance Centre at Wast Hills. Birmingham are no longer a second-tier club with a promotion plan. They are a Women's Super League club with costs to match.

The numbers they arrive with

Published analysis of Birmingham's accounts for the year to 30 June 2025 reports turnover of £6.1m, a wage bill of £2.47m and a profit of £141,000, achieved while competing in the second tier.

A profit of any size is unusual in this market. Chelsea's women's company, in the same period, reported £21.3m of revenue and a £17.1m loss while winning a domestic treble, and Chelsea are the best-resourced club in the division. The comparison does not make Birmingham better run — the two were competing for entirely different things — but it does describe a club that had been operating within its income.

The caveats are real. A £141,000 profit on £6.1m of turnover is a margin of 2.3%, which a modest change in costs would erase, and accounting profit is not cash generation. The published figures establish the totals without establishing what is inside them, and in particular how much of the £6.1m came from independent commercial agreements rather than from companies in the same ownership group. A club can report a profit and remain economically dependent on its parent. What separate incorporation does is make that question answerable from filings rather than guessable — which is one of the genuine arguments for the structure.

These are also the last figures from before everything changed. They cover a season in the second tier, under the old ownership, and the accounts that describe the club Birmingham have become will not appear until 2027.

The rules in the background

Birmingham's investment arrives as the financial rules governing both divisions are being rewritten, and the treatment of women's football differs between them.

Under the Championship's new Squad Cost Rules, income generated solely by a women's team — matchday receipts, broadcasting and central distributions — is generally excluded from the calculation that sets a men's club's permitted squad spending, though qualifying sponsorship income is treated differently and can count. The Premier League's framework is more generous to women's revenue. Whether any of this applies to Birmingham is a further question, because a women's club held under a separate holding company may sit outside the men's club's reporting perimeter altogether.

The practical point is narrower than the regulation. A women's club that is developing its own commercial business, under its own holding company, with its own shareholders, is not easily measured by what it contributes to somebody else's spending allowance — and increasingly may not contribute to it at all.

The Bottom Line

The week's regulatory story has been about women's teams as assets — valued, transferred, and used to improve somebody else's balance sheet. It is a legitimate story and the regulator is right to ask the questions.

Birmingham is a reminder that the same structure can do something else. A dedicated holding company is what makes it possible for a former England international to buy into the club where she started, rather than having to buy a share of a Championship men's team to do it. Whether that produces a better-financed women's club is not yet established, and the undisclosed consideration means nobody outside Knighthead can say how much money has actually changed hands.

But Birmingham have gone from the second tier to the Women's Super League with Karen Carney and Kim Clijsters on the share register, and they arrive with a set of accounts that showed a profit. That is a more encouraging place to start than most.