Birmingham City are undergoing a personnel change behind the scenes at St Andrew’s this summer, as the Blues try to rebound from a poor season.

Despite finishing in the top ten as a freshly promoted Championship team last season, Birmingham had internal hopes that they would follow in the footsteps of Ipswich Town and follow up their record-breaking League One campaign with another promotion to the Premier League.

Ambitious owner Tom Wagner stated in June that the top flight in the 2026/27 season was “certainly the goal,” but after falling short on the first try, it will be a little more difficult to reach there this time next year.

The Blues will look for a new director of football this summer after Craig Gardner quit his role. This marks the end of five years in the background for the former player, who previously served as the club’s technical director for four years.

Birmingham City fan commentator disagrees with Craig Gardner’s choice and believes that Chris Davies “is more the issue”

There has been much dispute among fans about who is genuinely to blame for an underachieving season, whether it is due to manager Chris Davies’ tactics or if the fault is higher up the pecking order.

Gardner’s function as director of football include overseeing the club’s setup across the first-team and academy sides, thus it has been agreed that he will be replaced by the Knighthead ownership rather than the man in the dugout.

Jason Moore, a Birmingham supporter, believes Gardner has been unfairly blamed for the previous season’s failures.”Someone was going to have to bear the brunt of the ‘poor season,'” he remarked. “For me, I guess you just have to thank him for his service.”To be fair, he has accomplished a great deal here. He’s worked under some extremely horrible owners, and he kept the ship steady for Knighthead. He moves on with many well wishes.”For me, it’s perhaps a little harsh. I believe Chris Davies is more of a problem. But now you go find someone with true quality, someone who has proven themselves in that capacity, which is what Knighthead advertises, isn’t it? “The best among the best.”

Finally, Moore is confidence in the ownership’s capacity to hire someone who can replace Gardner as director of football, but he believes that replacing him is a safer option than firing Davies.

Birmingham fans are still tormented by the ownership’s choice in the early days of their time at the club to fire John Eustace, with the club in sixth place, in favour of Wayne Rooney, who eventually led them on an enormous slide down the league, resulting in their relegation.

Sacking Davies, a promising young manager, could have negative consequences, similar to what Eustace experienced.Moore suggested Gardner as a safer candidate after the John Eustace disaster.He’ll depart with nothing but well intentions, but it’s definitely the wrong choice of the two for me.”

More eyes will be on Chris Davies to get it right for Birmingham City next season.

The objective for Chris Davies next season will be to get Birmingham promoted in order to keep the club on track with its overarching goal of moving to the 62,000-capacity ‘powerhouse’ stadium, hopefully by 2030.

To justify playing in such a stadium, the Blues will need to be well established in the Premier League with ambitions of expanding into Europe. For that to happen, they must exit the Championship quickly.

With a new direction above him and the expectation that the new director of football will be a significant advance over Gardner, there will be few other individuals outside the manager who can point fingers if things don’t go as planned.

The Birmingham manager has arguably more burden on his shoulders than any of his second-tier counterparts heading into the new season, and all eyes will be on whether the club can progress with stronger leadership, or if their troubles this year were due to the direction in the dugout.