3 managers who could replace Chris Davies at Birmingham City if Tom Wagner loses faith | OneFootball

With a lot of money having been spent and Birmingham in mid-table, Chris Davies' future could be in doubt. Here are three possible replacements.

With only one win in their last five League matches and expectations high at St Andrew's following a record-breaking League One title win, Chris Davies is already under pressure at Birmingham City.

With a 99th-minute equaliser required to salvage a point at home to crisis club Sheffield Wednesday, Birmingham's patchy start to the 2025-26 season continued at St Andrew's on Tuesday night. The Blues have now won one of their last five matches and are wedged into 12th place in the Championship table.

For many newly-promoted clubs, such a start to the season wouldn't be considered a disaster. But in terms of their ambitions, Birmingham aren't like many other clubs in this division. They have plans to build a 62,000-capacity stadium and invest heavily in their team in the summer following promotion, and all of this means that the pressure is already starting to heat up under manager Davies, who Tom Wagner was casting a watchful eye over against Wednesday.

This may feel a little harsh. The 2024-25 season was Davies' first as a manager following his appointment by Birmingham, and it ended with them running up an EFL record 111 points. But football can be an unsentimental business at the best of times, and the upshot of the Blues' mixed start to this season is that the manager is already coming under pressure.

With all of this in mind, here are three managers who the ambitious Blues could seek to replace him with, should they choose to pull that trigger.

3 Lee Carsley

The most obvious appeal of Lee Carsley is that he has been successful as a coach at a high level. Carsley led the England Under-21s to the European Championships twice in a row, in 2023 and 2025, and that's a record that can't be ignored.

Carsley also has a previous connection to Birmingham. He made 53 appearances for the club between 2008 and 2010 as a player, and joined them as their Head Professional Development Coach in the summer of 2017, taking over as caretaker manager upon the sacking of Harry Redknapp that September for three matches before becoming assistant to Steve Cotterill.

He left the club the following March when Cotterill too was sacked, but judging a Birmingham coach by the way in which the club was being run by its previous owners might not be the wisest thing that Knighthead could do. Carsley's reputation has grown enormously as a result of his work with the England Under-21s, and he could be an excellent appointment that would follow the "out of the box" thinking that led them to hire Chris Davies.

2 Danny Rohl

Given what has become increasingly evident about the state of the club as 2025 has progressed, the departure of Danny Rohl from Sheffield Wednesday during the summer was hardly a shock. Rumours that Rohl had fallen out with the club's owner Dejphon Chansiri had been circulating for several months.

Rohl's departure from Hillsborough was certainly nothing to do with his record as their manager. His first job upon arriving at Hillsborough was an act of escapology. Wednesday pulling clear from the relegation positions at the bottom of the Championship at the end of the 2023-24 season, became known as "The Great Escape", and the following season he took them to a highly creditable 12th place in the table.

Rohl is extremely highly rated. There was considerable interest in him from the Bundesliga during the summer, with Werder Bremen and Wolfsburg both linked with him, but the release clause in his contract with Sheffield Wednesday proved too onerous for them to be able to take him on. Rohl carries the considerable advantage of being available. Were the Birmingham owners, Knighthead, to take a chance on him, he could be moved into St Andrew's quickly and without any fuss.

1 Michael Carrick

The departure of Michael Carrick from Middlesbrough at the end of the 2024-25 season was something of a surprise to some in the wider footballing world. Boro had tailed off towards the end of the season to finish 10th in the Championship, but the decision to offload him felt a little short-termist, considering that over the previous couple of seasons he'd taken his club into Championship play-offs and to the semi-finals of the EFL Cup. Ultimately, he suffered at the hands of his early success.

Carrick cut his coaching teeth at Manchester United, and even had a brief spell as their temporary head coach prior to the appointment of Ralf Rangnick in December 2021. He won two and drew the other one of his three games in charge at Old Trafford, and left the club with his reputation significantly enhanced.

He was appointed at the Riverside Stadium in October 2022 and won the EFL's Manager of the Month award at the end of his first month in charge of the club, ending the season by taking them to 4th place in the table before losing to Coventry City in the play-off semi-finals. The following season, he took them to eighth. For a Championship club that isn't in receipt of parachute payments from the Premier League, that's a decent return.

Carrick also scratches an itch which Knighthead may want to address in terms of being a 'statement' appointment. As a former Manchester United star and England international, he was an extremely high-profile player and this could be beneficial to Birmingham's owners as they push for the Premier League. Carrick has managed at this level and knows the division, so his appointment would make sense for a club pushing to continue their ambitious push towards the top flight.