STRANGER THAN FICTION - KARREN BRADY

WORDS: NESSA O’MAHONY

If Birmingham City F.C. Managing Director Karren Brady were a character in a TV drama, you might find her plotline hard to believe. Recruited at 19 by publisher David Sullivan, she became a director of Sullivan’s Sports Newspapers Ltd within

a year and was appointed managing director of the ailing Birmingham City, which Sullivan bought in 1993, when she was only 23.

Within a year Karren had turned the football club’s fortunes around, and oversaw its £25m flotation in 1997, increasing the average gate at the club from 6,000 to a capacity 30,000.

Add to this a high media profile — she was a regular participant in the TV show Fantasy Football League in the late 90s, featured more recently on The Apprentice and was voted one of the 100 ‘Women who changed your world’ at Cosmopolitan’s Fun Fearless Female Awards 2006 — a brush with fatal illness and a more recent brush with the ongoing investigation into financial irregularities in British football and you get a flavour of the extraordinary life Karren Brady lives. But throughout her trials, tribulations and triumphs, Brady has demonstrated a steely determination to see the job through, a quality very apparent when she spoke to WMB recently.

Birmingham City has just been relegated from the Premier League to the Championship but Brady is philosophical about the likely impact. “It will have an impact on revenues but we’ve cut our cloth accordingly and we should be in a position to still buy players and operate the business in the hope of getting promotion straight away.”

So how difficult was it for her to become the first woman to run a topflight British football club? “I joined in March 1993 and I think things were very different back then. There were very few ladies, if any, involved in the game and they weren’t allowed in board rooms and all sorts of things that aren’t heard of now, so it was a challenging time. But I think being

23 it was easier for me to be able to deal with it because I think when you are young you have plenty of thick skin.”

Read more about Karren Brady in the August| September 2008 issue of WMB, on newsstands now.