Tom Brady may be incredibly famous, obscenely successful, and (formerly?) outrageously handsome, but he has never been cool. This is a plain fact, one that Patriots fans like myself overlooked during his tenure there and one that Patriots haters loved to mock him for. Since his retirement, Brady has lost the magnetic appeal of his abilities with the ball in his hands, which has made stark his absent coolness. His commentary stint has been mediocre at best and awful at worst, and his unwavering but erroneous belief in his own charm is fully insufferable without the touchdowns and wins to mask it. In place of any kind of recognizably human personality, there is nothing but coach speak and corporate speak and brand consciousness, which makes it close to impossible for him to forge any kind of connection with an audience when he's not wearing pads. That hasn't stopped him from trying, which brings us to soccer.
Built in Birmingham: Brady & The Blues is the latest attempt to humanize and propagandize Brady, and in a perverse way it succeeds at painting what feels like a true portrait of the former quarterback-turned-commentator-and-owner. This is not to say that the show succeeds in making Brady a compelling figure, or even a sympathetic one. Instead, the show—which is terrible for a variety of reasons, almost all Brady-related—proves what has been obvious for years: Post-football Tom Brady is nothing but a platitude-spouting Robotron incapable of self-awareness.
Built in Birmingham is an undisguised rip-off of Welcome to Wrexham, the FX show chronicling Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds during their takeover and makeover of Wrexham, a club that the Hollywood duo has helped catapult from England's fifth-tier league all the way into the second tier. While I have plenty of problems with Wrexham, particularly as the club and the show grew more successful, its early seasons thrived by virtue of focusing on the people who truly make up Wrexham: the fans, club employees, and players. It was charming to watch those people at first question and then come to embrace the changing fortunes of their club, and similarly to see them question and embrace the new American owners.
Birmingham, which premiered on July 31 on Amazon, has very little of this charm, and it runs into three main problems along the way. The first is that, unlike Wrexham, Birmingham is a massive city. This makes it much harder to sell the rags-to-riches transformation of club and city that is so key to Wrexham's appeal. That problem is compounded by the second: Birmingham consists of only five hourlong episodes, nowhere near enough time to flesh out any characters besides Brady and his ownership partner, private equity CEO Tom Wagner. There are the requisite fan talking-head moments, including one woman who also works as a steward at the club's stadium, but the show barely tries to establish any of them even as people, let alone consistent characters in the story it's telling. The locals merely exist as extras providing whatever each scene needs, whether that's wide-eyed optimism or gritty British skepticism. The show does take time to do promotional work for Peaky Blinders, though: The Birmingham-set crime drama gets plenty of airtime here, and its creator, Steven Knight, regularly appears as a talking head.
The comparison between the two soccer shows is never far from the surface, given that Birmingham uses similar storytelling tactics to explain the intricacies of English soccer and focuses heavily on two matches between the clubs. The comparisons do Birmingham no favors, and neither does Brady, its main star, who is abrasive to the point of cringe comedy. At one point, as Brady is flying across the Atlantic to attend one of these built-up "rivalry" games, he turns to the camera on the tarmac and says, "Let's go get a fucking win against Wrexham ... Ryan Reynolds, MaciIrey, whatever your fucking name is." Tom Brady should never be allowed to try to cook.
Brady seems stuck between wanting to be a stately figurehead, someone who bestows pearls of wisdom and steady leadership, and wanting to be a maverick badass whose revolutionary approach is going to change everything. The problem is that this too is something cribbed from Wrexham, and Brady is far less capable of selling either persona than the two guys from the other show. He might purposefully misremember the name of McElhenney, who shows up briefly during one of the clubs' matches, but Brady could take some lessons from the Always Sunny star, who channels his maniacal Philadelphia sports fandom into Wrexham and comes off looking like he really gives a shit. Brady never reaches that level, only seeming to care about the team's performance when it threatens to make him look bad, like when they get immediately relegated or when Wayne Rooney's tenure as manager proves a disaster.
It's no surprise, then, that the show only achieves a modicum of pathos when Brady is nowhere to be found. The third episode, titled "Joys & Sorrows," is by far the best, because it takes the time to humanize one of the Blues, forward Jay Stansfield. After the owners pat themselves on the back for spending €17 million on him in the summer of 2024, the episode focuses on Stansfield and his family legacy: His father, Adam Stansfield, was a striker for Yeovil Town, Hereford United, and Exeter City in the 2000s, until he died at the age of 31 from colon cancer. The episode shows how much Adam meant to Exeter City in particular, where one of the stands in the stadium bears his name, and it shows an emotional Jay returning to play against his hometown club for the first time. When he scores a penalty and points to the sky, I got choked up. These shows work best not as propaganda machines for their American owners, but rather when they use the conceit of the famous American ownership to present to a new audience what the sport and its clubs mean to people in the countries and communities that most care about them. Stansfield's story is the one time when Birmingham comes closest to that ideal.
But after that quick venture into something legitimately compelling, Birmingham gets back to The Toms Show, limping along to the finish. Loath as I am to give credit to anything related to private equity, I do have to say that Wagner comes off significantly better than Brady here. While Wagner does start the show talking about the value of negative assets and wanting to make a lot of money, by the last episode, when the Blues have lost the EFL Trophy final to Peterborough United, Wagner gathers the squad and gives a relatively rousing speech about how proud he is of their historic season (Birmingham City bounced back from the relegation to League One that opens the show, to win that league and break the total points record the following season). It's easy to trace Wagner's trajectory from cold calculator pouncing on an underperforming asset to passionate Birmingham City fan and committed owner, and while obviously self-interested, it's a transformation you can just about buy.
It's harder to see what Brady adds to anything here, besides his famous name which surely helped get the docuseries greenlit. Throughout the five episodes, his main character traits are that he says "fuck" a lot and is convinced that he, and only he, knows how to win any sport, even one he knows nothing about. Every time Brady talks to the players, to the coaches, or even just to the cameras, he unloads clichés about hard work, practicing like it's a game, and his own success. When Stansfield picks up an injury and backup Alfie May has to step up, Brady doesn't miss the opportunity to mention how he did the same thing when Drew Bledsoe got hurt in 2001.
The show tries to depict Brady as an almost mythical figure, an underdog who became the GOAT, but the man himself does not seem to have taken away anything particularly interesting from his hero's journey. The only evidence of the wisdom he purportedly attained come in the form of tired, self-regarding bromides. In Brady's eyes, he won seven Super Bowls because he was the ultimate leader, but the leadership he shows in Birmingham is a generic brand of coach speak and polished PR speak, with those "fucks" thrown in lieu of an actual personality. It's boring, and he comes off looking, to borrow a British insult, like a helmet.
Much was made of Brady's comments about Rooney, the manager he and Wagner install early on in their tenure, but the moment that stuck with me most, and the moment where Birmingham perhaps accidentally reveals how disdainful an endeavor it is, is one where Brady is in a car with his buddies. On the way to the Birmingham training facilities, they're all shooting the shit, but once they arrive and see that the facilities are subpar, Brady's friends begin to crap on the club: "This is the shit team you bought?" Brady could have defended his project and exhibited some of the visionary instinct he feigns possession of elsewhere, but instead he laughs along and cracks wise about how shitty Birmingham City is. The moment is much more revealing of Brady's perspective than all the empty speeches about hard work. Brady is involved here not because he cares about the club, or even because he can pretend to care about the club in order to burnish his image. He's here because the world revolves around Tom Brady, and only he can make everything as good as he thinks it should be.
