Birmingham City: Tom Wagner told to make huge Chris Davies decision - "End the marriage now" | OneFootball

Blues fans are unhappy after a 1-0 loss at Charlton condemned their team to a third successive Championship defeat and dented their play-off hopes.

Birmingham City manager Chris Davies could be heading for hot water following a third successive Championship loss, with defeat to Charlton Athletic potentially ending their hopes of a play-off spot.

The away end at The Valley was not a happy place to be at five o'clock on Saturday afternoon. Boos reverberated around the stadium from Blues supporters after their 1-0 loss to the Addicks, which marked their third successive loss, dropping them to 12th place in the Championship table and rendering their chances of reaching the play-offs slim, with 10 games of their season left to play.

Birmingham City are an ambitious club - that much has been evident since they were bought by the American venture capital group Shelby Companies Ltd in 2023.

Their first season brought the disappointment of relegation from the Championship to League One, but they bounced back immediately with a record-breaking 111 points, and plans have been moving forward to build a new 62,000-capacity stadium as part of a sports quarter, which the club hope to have ready for 2030.

That ambition extended into their return to the Championship for this season. Birmingham made no secret of their ambition to achieve two successive promotions, and there is little doubt that their new stadium is being built with the Premier League firmly in mind. But with the team in mid-table and time now running out to close the gap between themselves and those above them, it's looking less and less likely that it'll come this season.

"The boos are more than justified" - Chris Davies blasted over Birmingham City slump

Football League World have spoken to our Birmingham City fan pundit Jason Moore about the Blues' recent downturn and whether criticism of Chris Davies is justifiable, and Jason feels that it definitely is.

"I think Blues fans are more than patient with it. It'll take as long as it takes. We're all on this journey with the club. We're all going to sit here and wait. The boos are for the performances," Jason told FLW.

"This isn't a recent thing. This has been all season, where we've been so rigid and it's just been sideways, backwards, sideways, just recycling possession for the sake of keeping possession. It's just awful to watch at times. Any creative flair has been out-coached, it's just overcoached nonsense.

"We shouldn't be performing the way we did at Charlton. We just shouldn't. That's where the boos come from. It isn't good enough. I was someone who booed Chris Davies, because for me it seems he's got Plan A, and if Plan A doesn't work, Plan B is just switching the players like for like and sticking to his system, and it's just not good enough."

Jason feels that the performances that Birmingham City fans have seen this season will not have matched the expectations that were in place at the start of the season, given the large investment in the last couple of years into Davies' playing squad, and that a change needs to be made in the dugout before things get even more toxic.

"I think the boos are more than justified," Moore insisted.

"Some people are going to say, 'What are you booing for? You've not had it that bad, you've got enough money', but at the start of the season we were told that we were going to be pushing for the play-offs - that's the aim, promotion. You're investing all this money, but in the nicest way to Chris Davies...it's crap to watch.

"Maybe you can look at the recruitment and say that it's not good enough, but for me we've got Premier League calibre players in the making. I think you've got to look at the coaching.

"A better coach would get more out of the players. That's where the boos come from. Tactically, it's just not good enough and it's just getting ridiculous to watch.

"People can moan that we shouldn't be booing, but I think fans are booing now because we're at a point where the love affair with Chris Davies is over.

End the marriage now, and let's not let it get toxic and just change it at the end of the season. The boos were 100 per cent justified. Blues fans will be right until the end, but if we're not seeing it on the pitch, they're going to get it."

Birmingham City's recent slump in form has come at the worst time possible

If nothing else, a look at the middle of the Championship table seems to indicate that there isn't a great deal between the middle-ranking clubs in the division this season, with just four points separating the eight clubs between Watford in 9th place in the table and Queens Park Rangers in 16th.

Birmingham City's recent run of defeats has come at about the worst time of the season that it could have done. With ten games to play, the Blues are now eight points off the play-off places.

At the point at which the Blues needed to kick on to make their aspirations of making the top six a reality, they stalled. But that said, two of those three defeats came against Millwall and MIddlesbrough, who are occupying two of the top three positions in the division.

This has been a somewhat surprising season in the Championship. Few would have expected Millwall and Hull City to be occupying third and fifth place in the table with ten games to play at the start of the season, while only one of the three clubs relegated from last year's Premier League are occupying a position in the top six.

Whether a style of football is acceptable to fans or not is very much an open question, but it seems reasonable to suggest that the majority will accept most styles of play so long as their teams are winning matches. But the problem with this for the managers and head coaches concerned is that, should they prioritise results over aesthetics, they run out of room for sympathy very quickly should those results not be forthcoming.

The eight-point gap between Birmingham City now looks like a yawning chasm because there are only 10 games left in which to close it. And Birmingham's recent slump has taken matters out of their own hands - they need to both get back to winning ways and hope that those above them slip up enough to let them back in.

The 2025-26 season has reached the point at which those clubs with 'ambition' need to prove it on the pitch, and losing to a Charlton Athletic team which had failed to win their previous four matches was a terrible result for a team chasing a play-off place for promotion to the Premier League.

But the Birmingham City fan reaction to this loss has demonstrated that the well of goodwill that Chris Davies had as a result of masterminding that record-breaking League One title charge has completely run dry.