Ryan Stirk

Ryan William Stirk (born 25 September 2000) is a professional footballer who plays as a midfielder for EFL League Two club Mansfield Town, on loan from Birmingham City of the EFL Championship. He was born in England, and has represented Wales at levels up to under-21.

Club Career

Stirk was born in Birmingham, and raised in Tamworth, Staffordshire, where he attended Landau Forte Academy. His parents were both keen on football and he has two older brothers. He joined Birmingham City F.C.'s Academy in 2010, went on a pre-season tour with the under-18s while still a 14-year-old schoolboy, took up a scholarship in July 2017, and signed his first professional contract, of three years with the option for a fourth, on his 17th birthday. He was a member of the club's under-18 team that reached the semifinal of the 2017–18 FA Youth Cup, performing well against a strong Chelsea side, and became a regular in Birmingham's under-23 team in 2018–19.

When head coach Pep Clotet fielded an inexperienced team for the visit to Portsmouth in the 2019–20 EFL Cup first round, in which several youngsters made their senior debuts, Stirk was an unused substitute. The club took up their one-year option on his contract, and when the Championship season resumed after its suspension because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was named on the nine-man bench for six of Birmingham's remaining nine matches under the temporary rules, but remained unused.

Once relegation was safely avoided at the end of the 2020–21 season, Birmingham manager Lee Bowyer stated that he intended to use the two remaining matches to assess fringe members of the squad. Described by the Birmingham Mail as a "diminutive but neat defensive midfielder who reads the game well and breaks up play before inviting team-mates into the play", Stirk made his first-team debut in a much-changed starting eleven for the Championship match at home to Cardiff City on 1 May 2021, played the whole of the 4–0 defeat, and kept his place for the last fixture of the