In the opening episode of Built in Birmingham, Brady and the Blues, there is a scene where Tom Brady and two of his entourage are following Google Maps to find the Birmingham City training ground. Brady’s two flunkeys aren’t identified on screen, but the conversation is laced with frat boy joshing and Brady takes a little heat.
“You guys need to come up with a name for me that’s going to show your respect,” says Brady.
“Emperor?” says driver seat flunkey.
“Like, Your Highness,” says Brady, “or My Saviour. Any of those two will suffice.”
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Joking? Of course. Of course?
The film then cuts to Brady, sitting on his couch at home, repeating a question that has just been put to him off camera.
“What can I provide that nobody else can?” Brady says. “I think there’s a feel that I have with what I see, what I watch, what I hear. How we’re training, how we’re preparing and evaluations of our team.”
A thread of saviour complex pulses through the narrative. This is the fairy tale of Birmingham City being rescued from the ghetto of its history. Cast as the white knights are the greatest quarterback in the history of the NFL and a Wall Street financier, Tom Wagner, whose personality hits the tongue as salt and syrup.
“We’ve never been a club with glamour,” says one of the long-suffering Birmingham supporters who repeatedly pop up in the piece, playing the role of a Greek chorus. “We’ve always been gritty and hard to watch.”
Brady arrives at the training ground, and his flunkeys are tickled by the coarseness of the puddled car park. “This is the s**t team you bought?” says driver seat flunky, laughing. “This is like Delaney High School,” says back seat flunkey. “Like, written in Crayon, ‘Parking for Owner.’”
“This is the jewel of Birmingham, right here,” says Brady, remembering the script.
Since he retired from the NFL Tom Brady wears many costumes now: businessman, entrepreneur, investor, consultant, TV commentator. But being Tom Brady, the Zeus of the NFL, is still his biggest role. In the other worlds where he makes his millions now, all of Brady’s credibility is parlayed from the fantastical story of the guy who was the 199th pick in the draft and went on to win seven Super Bowls.
Last weekend, a week after all episodes of Built in Birmingham dropped on Prime Video, a statue of Brady was unveiled outside Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, where Brady won all but one of his Super Bowls.
The last thing on the mind of Jeff Buccacio, the sculptor, was understatement. The statue is 12 feet tall to reflect Brady’s jersey number, according to Buccacio, but including the granite base it is 17 feet tall, rhyming with the number of AFC East titles he won with the Patriots.
“For two decades, Tom Brady made Patriot fans feel invincible,” said the Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft at the unveiling of the statue.
That sense of invincibility was central to Brady’s shtick as a football player. How that has translated into the second act of his life beyond football is a compelling spectacle now.
Brady is about to begin his second season as Fox’s star analyst. They signed him on a 10-year deal worth a staggering $375 million, including stock options that could yet inflate that number. It was the biggest contract in the history of broadcasting but in Brady’s debut season his performances in the booth were typically humdrum.
He was clunky. His descriptive vocabulary was limited, repeatedly falling back on stock phrases. In one quarter of the Eagles-Commanders game he used some variation of the word “juice” nine times. He was criticised for not involving himself sufficiently in the action and instead waited for prompts from Kevin Burkhardt, his wingman and the pre-eminent play caller in the NFL.
On the Super Bowl rota, it was Fox’s turn this year to broadcast the biggest event in American sport and, unlike so often in his playing career, Brady couldn’t rise to the occasion. The kindest notices of Brady’s performance were that it had been pedestrian.
“There was absolutely nothing that I did that could really prepare me for what I was about to endure,” said Brady, reflecting on the challenges of his first season.
The other complication was that, after he signed the deal with Fox, Brady became a part-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders. This development forced the NFL to impose a list of restrictions on Brady that were bound to have some impact on his performance.
One of the rules is that Brady is not allowed on to another team’s facility. On game week, the commentators and play callers from the host broadcaster are given access to team practice and will have production meetings with players, coaches and executives of the teams involved. Nuggets from those conversations will always percolate into the live broadcast but Brady has been denied that access.
Around the time that he called the Lions-Commanders play-off game, two of the Lions staff were being interviewed to be the new head coach of the Raiders. Brady was part of that process. He was undeniably compromised.
Brady, though, was never likely to recuse himself from other business interests just because Fox were paying him a king’s ransom. A year after his retirement, his team filed more than 70 trademark applications and his investments portfolio is remarkably diverse. Apart from the Las Vegas Raiders, Brady also has an ownership stake in a WNBA team in Las Vegas, a Major League Pickleball team, and a powerboating team.
In the last 10 years of his playing career, Brady founded or co-founded five companies, invested in another five and through various endorsement deals became a shareholder in four others.
He co-founded a media business called Religion of Sports and entered the lucrative memorabilia market with a company called Autograph and later with CardVault. He also developed a wide range of products for the vast wellness market under the TB12 brand.
Brady’s key partner in that business is Alex Guerrero, his personal trainer for many years and the person to whom Brady attributes his extraordinary longevity as a player. Guerrero, a self-taught exercise guru, has twice been investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, according to The Guardian.
First in 2005, “for falsely passing himself off as a doctor and claiming to be able to cure cancer, Aids, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease with a dietary supplement called Supreme Greens, and then seven years later for a sports drink called NeuroSafe (endorsed by Brady), which he promised could prevent concussions.”
Guerrero has followed Brady to Birmingham City where he and his wife Alicia have become minority shareholders in the club. Guerrero has also been active with the players in a consultancy role, showing up at the club’s training ground far more often than Brady. Wayne Rooney said this week that during his 15 games as manager, Brady turned up once.
Brady, though, made it clear from the beginning that he had a “visionary” role in the club rather than an “operational one.” The fans don’t seem to be hung up on the esoteric nature of Brady’s role and have instead basked in the reflected glamour of this concocted kinship and the massive injection of capital.
When Birmingham City were relegated to League One at the end of Brady’s first season associated with the club, they spent more on transfers than any other club in the history of the third tier of English football and returned to the Championship with a record points tally.
Short interviews with Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, and a Birmingham City fan, are dotted throughout the Built in Birmingham series and at one point he says, admiringly, that Brady “has put his money where his mouth is.”
But how much of that transfer outlay came from Brady’s pocket? Almost certainly none. According to a report in the New York Times, Brady bought only 330 ‘B’ shares in the company who have a controlling share in the club, and he has no voting rights.
“The filings on Companies House suggest Brady’s 330 ‘B’ shares in Shelby Companies Ltd appear to have cost a total of 3.3 pence, giving each share a face value of 0.01 pence, although there is a chance he could have paid more than that. There is, however, no indication in the Companies House filing to suggest that is the case,” reported the New York Times.
How involved is Brady? That is not clear from the series. There are references to Zoom calls with the players and he appears to have had some contact with Chris Davis, the current manager. His interaction with Rooney, though, was minimal.
In their shared scenes, the former Manchester United striker appears reduced and almost cowed in Brady’s company. Brady and the cameras are allowed in for a video session with Rooney and the team’s defenders and the manager’s delivery is clipped and uninspiring.
“I’m a little concerned about our head coach’s work ethic,” Brady said, as he drove away from the training ground with his flunkeys. In his podcast this week, Rooney took exception to that remark. It is unknown if Brady had any role in Rooney’s sacking, although two wins in 15 matches has its own velocity.
Wagner is evidently hands-on with the project, and he says that Brady is in regular contact, but on the day when Birmingham were relegated from the Championship Brady watched the final game of the season at home, on his laptop.
A few weeks into the new season, however, Brady travelled by private jet for a home game with Wrexham, the small Welsh club that in some ways Wagner and Brady et al are trying to emulate. Owned and energised by the Hollywood partnership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Wrexham have climbed through the divisions and reached a charmed audience with their own docuseries.
Brady invites David Beckham as his guest for the evening and before the game Brady meets McElhenney on the pitch. “You’re one of the five people on planet earth,” McElhenney tells him, “that every person in every locker room will listen to.” Even though a camera is present, McElhenney doesn’t appear to be acting.
Before the game there is footage of Brady getting changed in his hotel room, finishing off his ensemble with a lavish timepiece that he describes as a “big boy watch,” as he flaunts it at the camera.
For the Super Bowl broadcast in February though, Brady wanted to knock everyone’s eyes out. So he wore an “insanely rare” Jacob & Co watch, adorned with 424 gems and retailing at $740,000.
Brady has many roles in life now. But he will always be a big-time Charlie.
