Birmingham City's appointment of Man Utd icon Wayne Rooney was a disaster fuelled by a lust for PR

When Wayne Rooney was appointed as Birmingham City manager back in October, it came at the expense of John Eustace, who was fired after back-to-back wins which took the Blues up to sixth in the Championship table. 15 matches and just two narrow wins later, one of the most disastrous reigns in the history of the English second tier has come to a sorry close, and his departure comes with questions about the club’s new owners and their decision-making process – and about Rooney’s future in management.

Few expected Birmingham to be promotion contenders this season, and in truth results had been up and down – those two wins at the end of Eustace’s tenure came off the back of a bad run in September which saw them earn just two points from five games, and they had hovered precipitously over the relegation zone for most of the previous season. But the general feeling was that Eustace had a squad blessed with little more than modest talent which was nevertheless heading in the right direction, and the progress that had been made has been blown up in spectacular fashion.

It seems clear that owner Tom Wagner, an American hedge fund billionaire, wanted his own man - but also that he wanted a big name. In appointing Rooney, he focussed far too closely on the PR benefits of attaching a superstar to his project and on attracting media attention in the United States, and failed to consider whether the man he was bringing in was actually capable of managing his team. He was not.

Rooney did not come into the Birmingham job with a stellar managerial record, although some of the current commentary on his time in charge of Derby County and DC United is a little revisionist – he was broadly praised during his spell at Derby, which coincided with a 21-point deduction and which was always doomed to end in relegation to the third tier, and while his win ratio at DC United was unspectacular there were plenty of fans who were sad to see him leave the club when he failed to agree a new contract with the ownership. There were some promising signs, but not enough to cast out a manager who was getting things right.

Rooney’s career managerial record now sits at 40 wins from 154 games – a dreadful 26%. At Derby and in Washington, he had plausible excuses, but in Birmingham he inherited a solid team who knew how to play together and turned them into a total mess. Under Rooney’s watchful gaze, they disintegrated, struggling to retain or use possession and with a direly disjointed attack and defence.

It is perhaps telling that former colleagues of Rooney’s who have praised him in the past – and there have been many - have never mentioned his tactical acumen. One-time England manager Steve McClaren and Liam Rosenior, Rooney's former assistant at Derby who is now head coach of Hull City, both praised his “emotional intelligence” specifically, for instance, with Rosenior describing him as "one of the most emotionally intelligent men I've ever met." Several former players and coaches who have worked under him have also publicly acknowledged the quality of his man-management skills and his willingness to make time for individual players. But Rooney has never given the appearance of having an especially analytical mind, and the impression given by the football his teams have played since his Derby days is that he was at least somewhat dependent on the advice and strategic knowledge of Rosenior. Since Rosenior struck out on his own, Rooney’s record has been poor.

That in itself draws a tempting parallel with two of Rooney’s former England colleagues – Frank Lampard struggled in his first spell at Chelsea after Jody Morris left to manager Swindon Town and Steven Gerrard did very well in management until his highly-touted assistant Michael Beale took the number one job at Queens Park Rangers. The careers of other stalwarts of England's supposed 'golden generation', such as those of the Neville brothers, flatlined. The impression is of a generation of England stars who may well be knowledgeable about the game, good with the players or fine one-on-one coaches, but who lack the grasp of strategic nuance to succeed in modern football. It is certainly notable that almost all of modern football’s most successful managers have been extremely deep tactical thinkers.

This is not to attempt to caricaturise Rooney as a stupid man, nor as someone who doesn't grasp the basics. He has a playing style (based on direct football exploiting the flanks with overlapping full-backs) – but his comments after various defeats as Birmingham manager implied a lack of understanding of the root causes of his team’s problems. “We weren’t clinical enough”, “We have to pull together”, “We weren’t doing the basics”, and even “It’s hard to put into words – I didn’t see that result coming,” after a crushing 3-1 defeat to Stoke City at St. Andrew’s. Not that many managers use post-match interviews and press conferences to drill down into the fine details of their strategies, but Rooney’s language always suggested that he simply couldn’t grasp why his team was playing so badly.

The likelihood is that Rooney has some genuine qualities as a manager, and handles his playing staff well, but that he lacks the breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding required to succeed without the right coaches and assistants around him. In his social media post bidding Birmingham fans farewell, he asserted that his 82 days in charge were not "sufficient to oversee the changes that were needed," a comment which seems naively blind to the fact that he inherited a fully functional team that didn't require an overhaul. Perhaps he can find the right people and make a better go of it somewhere else in the future, but the evidence is that, like Lampard and to a slightly lesser extent Gerrard, he may not be cut out for top-level management. That being the case, you have to wonder why Wagner appointed him in the first place, as there was no track record of clear-cut success.

Since taking over, the American has constantly had one eye on the PR. Most dazzlingly, legendary American football player Tom Brady, who has also invested in a pickleball team with Wagner and former tennis star Kim Clijsters, was not only roped in as a minority shareholder but paraded around Birmingham on a whistle-stop tour of local pubs (with cameras aplenty in attendance, of course) – and although Brady’s role in the actual running of the club is minor at best, the club has done what it can to imply that he is heavily tied to the project, rather than its being just one of a bewildering array of investments he has made since retiring from sport.

The company Wagner founded to buy the club, Shelby Company Limited, was even named after the leading family of the BBC drama Peaky Blinders, which is set in Birmingham and which has a substantial fan base in the USA. Perhaps inspired by the success of the media vehicle Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have constructed around Wrexham, Wagner has clearly been keen to either boost the club’s profile – or his own – in his homeland. Appointing Rooney as manager made perfect sense on that score, as his global profile and time in the American capital meant that he was one of the handful of football players (or soccer players, if you prefer) who had genuine public recognition in the States. But it never made much sense from a footballing perspective.

And that is the danger of running a club as a media construct rather than as a sporting institution. There are many benefits, especially if you can turn the clicks and likes into shirt sales and matchday tickets, but Birmingham’s new owners seemed to forget that the single most effective way to boost your revenue streams and increase your public profile is to succeed on the pitch. A promotion to the Premier League would have been worth any number of Super Bowl champions in the stands. For this season, at least, they’ve blown it - but Eustace has proven that it is possible to get a tune out of this team. As long as Wagner gets his next appointment right, this may only be a brief if embarrassing detour on a longer, more successful journey.