2020–21 Birmingham City F.C. season
season of football team
The 2020–21 season is Birmingham City Football Club's 118th season in the English football league system and 10th consecutive season in the second-tier Championship. As with all English Football League clubs, the first team competed in the EFL Cup, in which they lost to Cambridge United in the first round, and in the FA Cup, in which they lost to Manchester City in the third round. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of Birmingham's home matches were played behind closed doors.
Aitor Karanka was appointed head coach on 31 July 2020, and was replaced by Lee Bowyer on 16 March 2021, with the team 21st in the table with ten matches left. With five wins and two draws from the next eight, Birmingham avoided relegation with two matches to spare, and eventually finished 18th.
The season covers the period from July 2020 to 30 June 2021.
Background and pre-season
With nine matches of the 2019–20 season still to play and Birmingham lying 16th in the table, football was interrupted for three months because of the COVID-19 pandemic. On 8 June – 12 days before the Championship resumed behind closed doors – the club confirmed that head coach Pep Clotet would leave at the end of the season to "explore other coaching opportunities"; after a series of poor results, he left by mutual consent on 8 July. Steve Spooner and Craig Gardner acted as caretakers for the last four matches. Birmingham accrued just three points after the resumption, extending a winless run to 14 league matches, and finished 20th, avoiding relegation on the final day thanks to favourable results elsewhere and a 12-point deduction because of Wigan Athletic's entering administration.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2020–21 Birmingham City F.C. season” is season of football team. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Birmingham, City and season, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “2020–21 Birmingham City F.C. season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.