£81.5m Birmingham City deal will still haunt many at St Andrew's | OneFootball

When Birmingham City were purchased by Carson Yeung in 2009, a chain of events was kicked off the effects o which would last for 15 years.

It was supposed to be a takeover that pushed one of English football's great underachievers to a new level, but while Carson Yeung's 2009 purchase of Birmingham City did see them win only their second piece of major silverware, it also ended in disgrace for the owner and after-effects that would last for more than a decade.

By the time that entrepreneur and property developer Carson Yeung completed his £81.5m takeover of Birmingham in October 2009, the deal had already been a long time coming. The Hong Kong-born property developer had attempted to buy the club two years earlier, only for the deal to collapse after he failed to come up with evidence that he had the funds for it.

Furthermore, there were already unsavoury rumours about his business dealings starting to emerge. A report by The Sunday Telegraph in 2009 described him as having "a penchant for leather jackets, snakeskin boots and the company of pretty young girls", and said that "questions were being asked about how Mr Yeung made his fortune and whether he is the “front man” for other secretive financial investors".

Mixed fortunes for the Blues during Yeung's ownership

At the time, the Blues themselves had just been promoted back into the Premier League under manager Alex McLeish. They finished the 2009/10 season in a highly creditable ninth place in the table.

But the following season would bring both the best of times and the worst of times for the club. The team showed their best face in the League Cup, where they beat Rochdale, MK Dons, Brentford, Aston Villa and West Ham United to set up a Wembley meeting with Arsenal, which they won 2-1, thanks to a goal scored two minutes from time by Obafemi Martins. It was only their second-ever major trophy after having won the same competition in 1963.

But elsewhere, Birmingham atrophied in the Premier League, ending a difficult league season with relegation by a single point after losing to Spurs on the last day. They haven't returned there since. McLeish left the club that summer and was replaced by Chris Hughton.

The beginning of Yeung's decline and fall

A month after the end of the 2010/11 season, things went from bad to worse for the club when Yeung was charged with money laundering in Hong Kong over HK$720m (£55m) passing through his bank accounts between 2001 and 2007. He was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison in February 2014, and resigned his positions at the club in the same month.

Birmingham showed signs of getting back into the Premier League in the season following their relegation, though this would prove to be a false dawn. They ended the 2011/12 season in fourth place but lost in the play-off semi-final to Blackpool. The following season they finished 12th, with Hughton having departed for Norwich City and being replaced by Lee Clark.

The scars left by Yeung at St Andrew's ran deep

The scars left by Yeung ran deep. Birmingham only avoided relegation into League One on goal difference at the end of the 2013/14 season and couldn't finish above 10th in the table until their eventual relegation from the Championship a decade later.

And the suspicion remained that he might even still have been running the club from prison. In 2015, the Football League confirmed an investigation into whether he was still a person of significant interest at St Andrew's or not, even though ownership rules prevented him from doing so following his conviction.

But they never forced the owners of the club to completely sell up. A company called Trillion Dollar Asia took them over in 2016, but it wasn't until the July 2023 sale to Tom Wagner's Shelby Companies Limited that the matter was completely put to rest. The relegation to League One that had been just over the horizon for the previous decade came at the end of Knighthead's first season running the club, but they've bounced straight back this season with a record-breaking 111 points.

Carson Yeung may only have (officially) been with Birmingham for a couple of years, but it took almost a decade and a half to turn around the effects of the chain of events that his 2009 purchase of the club had set in motion. Blues fans are now starting to see the potential of their club, if it's run by the right people.