On day one in the job, as Chris Davies surveyed St Andrew’s for the first time last summer, the Birmingham City manager was struck by a damning statistic courtesy of the club historian, Malcolm McHenry: no league side had lost more matches across the previous five seasons. Birmingham were relegated to League One a month earlier after circling the drain for a while. “When you hear something like that, it’s powerful because you think: ‘Wow, there are 92 teams,’” Davies says.
“Everyone has suffered so much … I suppose I saw an opportunity to change that and this season we’ve won more games than any other team in the country.”
