Tommy Doyle has spent this season on loan at Birmingham City from Wolverhampton Wanderers
06:00, 24 Mar 2026
Tommy Doyle in action for Birmingham City
Tommy Doyle will probably play his football in the West Midlands again next season – but will he be wearing Royal Blue or Old Gold?
The midfielder’s loan to Birmingham City from Wolverhampton Wanderers last summer was designed to become a permanent transfer. Indeed, it would have been made permanent had Blues won promotion to the Premier League as a result of an obligation stitched into the agreement.
Blues’ latest away defeat, which arrived at Derby County on Saturday, has put paid to the club’s hopes of playing in the Premier League for another year and made Doyle’s future uncertain.
Both his loan club and his parent club – Wolves are 13 points adrift of safety with seven games to play – will be in the Championship next season and so will Doyle.
“I think it’s open,” replied Blues manager Chris Davies when asked what the summer holds for Doyle, before adding: “The obvious thing would be that he would go back to his parent club. We haven’t really gone that far to discuss that.
“That’s what I would envisage happening but you never know, I suppose a lot would depend on these next six weeks.”
Davies was speaking before Blues’ defeat to Derby when there was at least a glimmer of hope that they might still make the play-offs. There isn’t now and very little depends on the next six weeks in the case of Doyle.
It really is a question of who wants the 24-year-old for next season.
Having taken time to win Davies over, Doyle became a fixture in Blues’ line-up between November and January, but a return of three points in seven games from December 6 through till New Year’s Day was more damaging for the midfielder than most.
A red card against Sheffield United ruled him out for three of those games but Davies was already coming to the realisation that the balance wasn’t right in Blues’ engine room, particularly away from home.
Davies wanted a physical presence in the middle and acquired Colombian enforcer Jhon Solis in January. Even when the midfield axis of Solis and Paik Seung-ho has been broken up, Davies hasn’t always turned to Doyle.
He’s only started one of Blues’ last 10 Championship games now.
OPINION
OPINION
Explaining why, Davies said: “He’s a player that I really like but each game, trying to get the right balance for the team and making sure we’ve got the right personnel… Solis has come in and done well, added competition to that position.
“Tommy would probably say that he would have liked to have played more minutes than he has, but he’s definitely been an important player for us and in my eyes a core player around the squad.
“He’s still got a big role to play and he’s a good character. We’ve had four or five good midfield players in the squad this season, overall I think he’s had a positive season.”
A positive season, maybe, but it hasn’t been the season Doyle would have envisaged.
Doyle chose Blues in the hope of being a mainstay in a promotion-winning team and neither has happened.
A return to Wolves looks inevitable now and they have recently made checks on Doyle. Wolves assistant head coach Paul Trollope watched Doyle’s last 90 minutes against Middlesbrough earlier this month with Molineux chief Rob Edwards wisely choosing not to attend that fixture.
Edwards will be tasked with building a team capable of winning promotion from the Championship next season and Doyle, who already has a promotion on his CV, is a relatively safe bet at this level – even if he wasn’t able to deliver it for Blues.
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