Tom Brady has become a part-owner of Birmingham City - but what’s really so great about that?

Tom Brady is widely regarded as the greatest player in the history of American football. He’s won seven Super Bowls and three league MVP titles. He is, by any metric, one of the finest sportspeople to come out of the United States. And now he part-owns Birmingham City, and the reaction has been utterly delirious. The question is – why? And what’s in it for either Birmingham or Brady?

Details of the former New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarter-back’s new shareholding are scant. We know that he has “entered a partnership” with Knighthead Capital Management LLC, the latest American investment fund to buy out a British club via their subsidiary Shelby Companies Limited, and has become a minority owner of the Championship club – and that Knighthead co-founder Tom Wagner believes Brady brings “extensive expertise” to the table.

Quite what his undeniable expertise at throwing an oval football provides to Birmingham is unclear. In a snazzy social media video released to promote Brady’s investment, he essentially admits that he knows little about “English football”.

Will he be on the training pitches providing his athletic insights? Doubtful, but perhaps once or twice for the cameras. Will his presence in the backrooms of Birmingham (he becomes the chairman of a new ‘advisory board’) provide any sporting benefits when his own area of knowledge is so far divorced from the game in question? It’s highly questionable as to whether he brings any particular business acumen to the table – he reportedly lost $30m in the collapse of cryptocurrency trading platform FTX and is the subject of a class action lawsuit over his endorsement of the company. Hardly an especially successful early toe dipped into the world of finance.

So what exactly does Brady bring to the table? The only immediately apparent answer is that he offers the ownership a celebrity face for their own running of the club, and potentially offers a star power-fuelled boost to the company in different markets. The rapturous reception to Brady’s arrival at St. Andrew’s gives the more gray-faced, suit-and-tie investors a healthy injection of positive PR and raises the club’s profile in the United States. The investment in Burnley by another retired NFL legend, JJ Watt, has certainly done no harm to the club or its own American owners.

Meanwhile, as this relatively routine and typically cynical business deal unfolds, Birmingham supporters are entirely beside themselves. A BBC article quotes various figures around the club such as former players and podcasters describing it as “massive” and “fantastic news”, without those quoted offering any especially good reasons. Various social platforms are awash with thrilled fans going giddy. It’s a testament to the power that the mere presence of a famous face has.

Celebrity investment is not a particularly new phenomenon, of course. Lewis Hamilton is a minority shareholder in NFL team the Denver Broncos. The new (American) ownership of Leeds United includes golfers Jordan Speith and Justin Thomas alongside basketball player Russell Westbrook. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, apart from their ownership of Wrexham, are investors in the Alpine Formula 1 team. They all bring glamour to the otherwise staid and technical world of sports finance.

But what do the celebrities themselves get? Well, the deals are often sweetened for them. Hamilton’s investment in the Broncos is reported to be 0.2% - a stake valued at $9m but sold to him at a cut price of $6m. The Mail on Sunday have suggested that Reynold and McElhenney were given their stake in Alpine for free. The owners want them to become the faces of their investments, and the various celebrities themselves get what amounts to free money.

Not that every sportsperson involved in the business side of things is necessarily part of a cynical trade – NBA legend Lebron James is a seemingly very serious small investor in Liverpool, and has a string of business ventures ranging from wellness firms to pizza parlours. Great athletes can also be hard-nosed businessmen, and perhaps Brady, despite his disastrous dalliance with crypto, is keen to prove himself as having genuine financial chops as well. After all, he’s also invested in NFL side the Las Vegas Raiders, a team who can at least more feasibly benefit from his sporting knowledge. We don’t know what percentage of Birmingham City Brady lays claim to, or how much he paid. We may never find out.

And none of this is anything other than legal and above board – the question is quite why we all get so excited by these investments. Birmingham City fans have largely gone into social media meltdown over the news, despite the tangible benefits being unlikely to amount to anything more than a relatively small extra cash injection, such as any less famous investor would bring to the table. His undoubted greatness as a sportsman still has very little to do with Birmingham’s own fortunes, but somehow his simple star power has a mysterious capacity to thrill and excite, even if almost nobody would be able to give you a coherent reason.

Birmingham City will benefit from Brady’s presence to the tune of an unknown but probably not colossal amount of money. Perhaps his presence will boost their marketability in America and shift a few Lukas Jutkiewicz shirts in New England. And all of that is fine – but the notion that his position on an advisory board (which should not be confused with being part of the actual boardroom) will lift technical and sporting standards at a club playing a game Brady knows nothing about seems pretty far-fetched. He will simply sit in the director’s box every once in a while and sprinkle a little stardust about St. Andrew’s – nothing more.

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Perhaps that injection of celebrity is fun enough on its own merits for some. But so often these deals are struck not because a famous sportsman has a burning desire to be involved in a lower league club they’d probably not heard of a year prior, but simply because they’re getting a good return on investment. Hopefully, anyway. Fingers crossed that Birmingham don’t go the same way as Brady’s last business venture…