Kyogo's Birmingham Gamble Turns Sour as Exit Talk Intensifies

When Birmingham City pulled Kyogo out of Celtic in the summer of 2025, it felt like a statement. Here was a striker with 85 goals in 165 games for the Scottish champions, a proven finisher with Champions League minutes in his legs, dropping into the Championship. For a newly promoted side, it looked bold, clever, maybe even transformative.

On paper, he was the marquee signing who would light up St Andrew’s. In reality, the move never left the runway.

The plan was simple enough. Kyogo’s relentless movement and sharp finishing, dovetailing with Jay Stansfield, would give Birmingham a front line capable of unsettling any defence in the division. Instead, the 31-year-old never found rhythm. He stumbled through the opening weeks, chances came and went, and the early misfires drained belief rather than build it.

One league goal. Then the shoulder gave way.

A long-standing problem required surgery and cut short a season that had never really started. The excitement of the summer had dissolved into awkward questions.

Former Blues defender Michael Morrison, watching the situation unfold, has struggled to make sense of it.

“I can't believe why it's not working because at Celtic his movement and the chances and the goals he was scoring were fantastic,” he told GOAL, speaking in association with Freebets.com.

The movement was still there. The work rate, too. That much, Morrison insists, never dipped.

“He was getting the chances at Birmingham City but just wasn't putting them in, and that can happen. That's just a player short on confidence and it hasn't really worked out. His work rate's fantastic but you've got to have a bit more than work rate when you're a number nine. You need to score goals and he was getting opportunities and he was just rushing at them.”

The pressure told, but not in the way Birmingham had hoped. Those first few games, when a striker can write the opening chapter of a new career, passed without the defining moment he needed.

“I think if he had started there in his first few games and started scoring a lot of goals as a centre-forward, his confidence would have just gone back through the roof and he would have scored a lot of goals, but he hasn't been anywhere near it,” Morrison said.

Instead of becoming the focal point of a new project, Kyogo has slipped into the uncomfortable category of expensive dilemma.

“That's a player they could move on because he's on big money and they try to see if they can get some money for him,” Morrison admitted. “Or do they stick with him and say, ‘this season could be your season and we don't have to spend money because he should be scoring goals in the Championship’.

“He scored goals in the Scottish Premiership, so it's a difficult one. I hope he stays and I hope next season is his season, but you never know at Birmingham City because they have money - they can bring in players and move players on.”

Morrison is not alone in his surprise. EFL pundit Don Goodman, who watched Kyogo closely across those early months, saw the same story unfold: good movement, good intent, but a finish that deserted him when it mattered most.

“He started missing real gilt-edge chances in those first six, eight games and you could slowly but surely just see the confidence drain away from him,” Goodman told GOAL.

The numbers, the fee, the wages – they all sit in stark contrast to the return.

“In terms of value for money, it's gone horribly wrong with regard to that particular transfer. And it's surprising, really. I like his movement. He's energetic, he's quick. But he didn't look like he could hit a barn door, if I'm honest with you, after a difficult start.”

That is the crux of Birmingham’s problem now. Do they write off a high-profile bet after one broken season, or gamble again on the idea that a fully fit, mentally reset Kyogo can finally become the ruthless finisher they thought they were signing?

For a club with ambition and money to spend, that decision may say as much about their long-term vision as it does about one misfiring striker.