Birmingham City dodged serious £30k-a week bullet after losing out to QPR in transfer saga | OneFootball

The Blues were prepared to offer Kwame Poku a hefty salary to move to St Andrew's, but they must now be relieved to have missed out on him to QPR.

A 3-0 defeat at Watford on New Year's Day might have indicated that 2026 could be a difficult year for Birmingham City, but the team has grown wings since then.

Four wins and three draws from the seven games they've played since then have lifted Blues to 7th place in the Championship, just one position and two points shy of a play-off spot.

Getting to this point has required a lot of change around St. Andrew's.

Birmingham may have won League One with a record-breaking 111 points in 2024-25, but the Championship is a different magnitude of difficulty, and even the most ambitious of clubs would have to make significant personnel changes in order to challenge for two successive promotions in a highly competitive division.

One player that they hoped to take to St Andrew's last summer was the Peterborough United winger Kwame Poku, but the Blues were pipped to the post to his signature by Queens Park Rangers.

The evidence of the 2025-26 season, however, indicates that Birmingham may have dodged a bullet by missing out on this particular player.

Kwame Poku was being followed by a host of Championship clubs when QPR snatched him

Football League World reported exclusively last April that Birmingham City had offered Kwame Poku a jaw-dropping £30,000-a-week to make the move from London Road to St Andrew's during the summer.

At that time, Poku was seriously impressing in League One for Peterborough United and was being trailed by a host of Championship clubs.

As an upwardly-mobile club with clear intentions of making a quick ascent to the Premier League, Birmingham were presumed to be among the favourites for his signature.

But when push came to shove, it wasn't Birmingham City who secured his signature. Queens Park Rangers won his signature for a reported £900,000 plus add-ons, with compensation needed due to Poku's age despite being out of contract.

This looked like a steal for a player who scored 12 goals and registered eight assists in 27 appearances in League One for Peterborough last season, but eight months on from that transfer having been completed, Birmingham could be forgiven a sigh of relief over having missed out on this particular player.

Kwame Poku's injury struggles have returned - Birmingham City have dodged a bullet

Perhaps the biggest clue to what would happen with regard to Kwame Poku at QPR came in those Peterborough statistics from last season.

12 goals and eight assists in 27 appearances is an impressive haul in terms of his goals-to-games ratio, but focusing on this does rather overlook the fact that he missed out on 19 of Peterborough's games with a hamstring injury which kept him out of their first team from December to March.

Of course, previous injuries aren't necessarily a predictor that a player will have further injury problems in the future, but this hasn't turned out to be the case with regard to Poku.

After featuring in their 1-1 home draw against Preston North End on the opening weekend of the season, Poku suffered a recurrence of his hamstring injury which kept him out of the team until the start of November.

And when he did return, it wasn't for long. He started in their 4-1 home defeat against Ipswich Town, but yet another issue in the same part of his body kept him out for another six weeks, and after appearing for 45 minutes in the R's 3-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday on January 4, the Ghanaian attacker has not been seen since.

In total, Poku has made just eight appearances for QPR this season - of which only three were starts - and he's failed to register a single goal or assist since making his move to west London. With other injuries to attacking players, it's all amounted to a considerable frustration for the Rangers head coach Julien Stephan.

In the absence of Pokus's arrival at St Andrew's, Birmingham City had to focus their attention elsewhere.

Patrick Roberts arrived from Sunderland on loan at the end of the summer window, but made his move to the club permanent at the end of the January transfer window. And they strengthened further at the end of that window by agreeing the transfer of Carlos Vicente from Deportivo Alaves for an initial £7 million - the Spaniard scored his first goal for his new club in their 2-1 win at Norwich City.

At 24 years of age, there is still plenty of time for Kwame Poku to get his career back on track, but the persistent nature of his injury problems is a clear headache for Queens Park Rangers.

With Birmingham City not wanting to hang around in the Championship and the Premier League their clear aim, though, the Blues may well be feeling as though they dodged a bullet by missing out on this particular player.