When Birmingham City once tried to sign Jack Grealish – he wasn’t pleased | OneFootball

Birmingham City once tried to sign Jack Grealish on loan from Notts County, but they were quickly dismissed by the future £100m man.

Jack Grealish has been a hero to many England supporters and, as a Man City treble winner, he has enjoyed an extremely impressive career, which also saw him captaining his boyhood club to promotion to the Premier League. He could, though, have played for Aston Villa’s arch-rivals, Birmingham City.

For much of the last decade, Grealish has seemingly always been in the headlines for his exploits both on and off the pitch, and for some, they are divided on how they feel about him, but what cannot be denied is the remarkable story of his career.

Having broken through as a maverick that was representing the Republic of Ireland at youth international level, the Birmingham-born attacker eventually went on to make over 200 appearances for his boyhood club Aston Villa, who offered him his breakthrough in some tough Premier League days for the club.

There may be some Villa fans still unhappy about his departure from the club in 2021, but the majority will remain grateful for the impact that he had on taking them back to the top-flight and re-establishing themselves as Premier League stalwarts.

That story of verging into legendary status of the captain at the famous and historic club he supported as a boy could have been a very different tale had Birmingham got their way back in the 2013/14 season.

Birmingham City tried to sign Jack Grealish, but he rebuffed their attempts

After a very bright start to the campaign and playing in the rough and tumble of a competitive League One for a struggling side in Notts County, Villa’s arch-rivals, Birmingham, tried to take Grealish out of his loan move and get him playing in the Championship for them.

The Blues, who had been in the Premier League during the 2010/11 season, winning the League Cup, and Championship play-off semi-finalists a year later, required a ‘great escape’ at the end of the 2013/14 season, highlighting their predicament. Yet they believed the star of their rivals’ academy could be trusted to be good enough to drag them back to somewhere near where they believed they belonged.

Grealish’s camp, though, brushed off the move and completely dismissed a step-up to City, opting to remain at Notts County, where he finished his first pro season with 12 direct goal involvements.

Having been a part of a Premier League squad at the age of 16 in the previous campaign, Grealish had moved on loan to Notts County during the 2013/14 season, and he shone for the Magpies in League One.

Under Chris Kiwomya and then Shaun Derry, Grealish was the star of a team that boasted some impressive loanees, including future Celtic captain Callum McGregor as well as Grealish’s then Villa teammate Enda Stevens.

They only just managed to steer themselves clear of the bottom four and the relegation places, courtesy of winning six and drawing one of their final nine games of the campaign, in a run of form that saw Grealish become chief creator and provide some crucial assists against Port Vale and Swindon Town.

Jack Grealish went on to become a thorn in Birmingham City’s side

Having had injury issues at the start of his career and struggled to put a full season of form and fluency together, Grealish began to thrive in the 2018/19 campaign under the management of Dean Smith.

Perhaps the most notable game from that season, in a campaign chock-full of Grealish playing as a UEFA Champions League level player in the second-tier, came in the Second City derby.

Attacked by a pitch-invading Birmingham fan in the first-half, Grealish then took the game by the scruff of its neck in the second-half to win it in front of Villa’s away end at St Andrew’s.

He was the spark for the Villans upon his return from injury in the Championship. They propelled themselves from mid-table to play-off winners in 2019, and he then established himself as one of the best attacking midfielders in the Premier League, with a growing clamour for Gareth Southgate to pick him for England.

That eventually culminated in Grealish playing a starring role for the Three Lions as they reached their first major tournament final in 55 years, losing to Italy on penalties at UEFA EURO 2020.

He went on to become the most expensive Englishman ever when he joined Manchester City for a fee of £100 million in the summer of 2021, having been arguably the key reason as to why Villa managed to establish themselves back in the top-flight in the two previous campaigns.

Villa supporters may have issues with his departure, but he is a club legend, and that is only ever more intriguing when it could have so easily been that he wore the colours of Birmingham, but chose not to.