Why Ryan Reynolds & Rob McElhenney really bought Wrexham AFC…
Yes, it’s “weird’’. Yes we are lucky. But on so many levels the Hollywood takeover of Wrexham AFC makes perfect sense. Not only that, it’s a stroke of genius.
I get it … from a distance, this looks a lot like two bored movie stars who — for a laugh — randomly pick a crap football team from a list.
A screwball comedy.
“Dude, where’s my striker?”
From a distance, they seem to be throwing a bucket load of cash at a new plaything until they get bored and move onto the next quirky project.
That narrative — a favourite of some self-appointed social media “experts” — is totally understandable, but it’s utterly wrong. Wrong, and founded on ignorance of both Wrexham, and our new owners.
First, the “why Wrexham?” question. If you haven’t lived and breathed Wrexham AFC, you can probably only see a non-league basket case; one of many rundown clubs from rundown towns.
In a football culture obsessed with the shiny Premier League product, anything lower than mid-table Championship is an irrelevance. Sink a little lower, and in the popular imagination, you find just pub teams, jumpers for goalposts and attendances of 27 plus a couple of dogs. Marry that with the unflattering image many hold of working class towns left high and dry by the end of the mining industry, and you conjure a picture of decaying mediocrity and insignificance. Not something which would attract bored Hollywood playboys.
On this reading of the situation, the only possible explanation for Deadpool’s interest is that it was completely random. A dart thrown at a board of crap clubs. And Wrexham won the lottery.
But it wasn’t like that.
I was on that Zoom call between Supporters’ Trust members, Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds back in Autumn 2020. A word kept coming up, one which has stuck in my mind. They said they were attracted to my club because it was “storried”.
Two movie men could see it from across the Atlantic, but the massed ranks of British pundits, with their prejudices and snobbery, simply could not.
At the heart of it is this: while many towns and cities see their football clubs as a nice source of civic pride, it’s different in Wrexham. In Wrexham, the football club is the beating heart. In many ways it IS the town.
And unlike most clubs below Premier League behemoth status, it represents not just a town or a county, but an entire region. Many die-hard Wrexham fans do not live in the town or the county, and never have done (myself included). The well of support is deep and broad across the whole of North Wales and the borders … a population of more than 800,000.
North Wales was one of the cradles of both international and club football. Wrexham AFC itself is the third oldest professional football club in the world.
By the twentieth century, the club had woven itself into the family history of this football hotbed, and in one instance, tragically so. In 1934 one of the UK’s worst mining disasters claimed 266 lives at Gresford Colliery. The death toll was so high because workers were doubling up shifts so they could get to Wrexham’s game against Tranmere the next day. An emotional connection was forged.
By the time I was born, the club was regularly reaching the later stages of European competition, beating giants like Porto in front of huge crowds under the floodlights. The great Bill Shankly described Wrexham as the best team ever to be promoted to what is now the Championship.
The emotional attachment to the club for generations of families across North Wales was complete, and was far stronger than many realised.
Without that emotional attachment and sense of identity, the club would certainly have died during the first two decades of this century.
The only reason this particular club could not be killed off was that working people, in huge numbers, at a scale which took many completely by surprise, fought to save it.
First, a pair of Mancunian businessmen hatched a plot to sell off the assets of Wrexham and share the proceeds. Only tenacious work by fans uncovered the truth and forced them out, but huge damage had been done.
In order to remove them, the only option was to place the club safely beyond their grasp into administration. But in that act of preservation, Wrexham condemned itself to football’s first ever financial rules punishment. A points deduction, and therefore relegation from League One, and therefore the start of the spiral into non-league.
Had this come just a couple of years earlier, that desperate lurch into administration to protect the club from its malignant owners, would have gone unpunished. But an example had to be made of someone…
In 2002, Leicester City had built a new stadium based on money it was expecting to get through TV rights and Premier League status. But a combination of relegation and the collapse of ITV Digital meant it never got the money, so couldn’t afford the stadium. It solved the problem by going into administration to write off the debts, before bouncing straight back out of administration leaving the stadium developers £5.5m out of pocket. Leicester moved on without punishment. But the next club to enter administration — no matter what the circumstances — would have to be punished to deter others from choosing the Leicester route. That club was Wrexham.
And then there were even more problems. The new owners were an improvement, but once the initial enthusiasm and goodwill died down, the debts grew. They hived off a section of the club car park to build student flats, but the club saw far less of a financial benefit than the fans expected.
Eventually the finances got so bad that Wrexham were 24 hours from not being able to start the new season. The fans started a whip-round: they needed to raise £100,000 in a day. Working people on low incomes pledged more than they could afford, in order to keep this slice of their family’s heritage intact. People queued for hours to write out eye-watering cheques. Some stood in line with their pocket money, their wedding fund, the deeds to their house. They succeeded against the odds. That emotional connection became even stronger.
But years of mismanagement had seen the club slip, battered, bruised and wounded, out of the Football League.
The fans had rescued the club for a second time, but now they had to take over the running of it themselves. They made a decent fist of it. In 2012 a brilliant Wrexham side racked up an astonishing 98 points. In any other year, in any other league that would have been comfortably enough for promotion. But they were up against future Premier League megastar Jamie Vardy, who almost single-handedly promoted Fleetwood ahead of Wrexham with 105 points.
After that, money was tight. The Supporters Trust had done some astonishing work in getting the club into the black, turning a profit, but they simply couldn’t compete with the finances of bankrolled clubs like Forest Green Rovers, Fylde and Salford. Our best players and managers had to be released before they could ever complete the job.
Year after year Wrexham finished mid-table, with the occasional near miss in the play-offs. That in itself would have been the death knell for some clubs. You would be forgiven for expecting a decade of stagnation in non-league to result in dwindling attendances and a long, strange death. But not at Wrexham. The club remained the beating heart of the town. It kept that emotional link.
Even as some of the worst teams to ever wear the Wrexham shirt, served up some of the worst performances ever seen at the Racecourse Ground, and delivered the lowest league finishes in our long history, the fans still turned up. Attendances were higher than most in League Two, and on a par with most in League One. We were still getting sell-out crowds to local derby matches even as we became a firmly established non-league non-entity.
Any Wrexham fan under 20 won’t know anything other than scrappy football against Wealdstone or Lewes or Tamworth; no glorious European nights to think back on, no FA Cup memories to keep them sustained through the bad times, no League tussles against giants of the British game.
But there they were still; young supporters, week in week out, in the same numbers and with the same enthusiasm as other clubs who had reached the Championship playing the likes of Leeds United and Aston Villa week in week out. Why? It was that strong emotional, regional connection.
Even our one moment of glory in this century wasn’t easy. Our first appearance at a Wembley final coincided with some of the worst weather in North Wales in living memory. Towns and villages were cut off, and police were advising locals to stay in their homes for their own safety. Yet nearly 20,000 ignored that advice, digging themselves out of snowdrifts, and walking miles across fields in the early hours of the morning in order to catch buses and trains to Wembley.
Their grandparents and great-grandparents had yearned for this moment — they were damned if they were going to let anything stop them from being there to witness it on their behalf.
That is what is meant by the word “storried”. And it’s so apt for this club. McElhenney and Reynolds have not bought a decaying small town football team. They have bought into a history, a fanbase and a passion which would not look out of place many leagues higher.
Other millionaires who have spent their way into the Football League with village teams or new startups in recent years, have found the hardest part was building a fanbase and whipping up enthusiasm. No need for that here. There are thousands across North Wales with the history and tradition of the club coursing through their veins, set and ready for the ride.
Which brings us to the true genius of this takeover.
When people discover I am a Wrexham fan, one of the first questions I get is “how much money has Ryan Reynolds spent so far?” When you look at Wrexham’s eye-catching activity in the transfer window, it’s not an unreasonable question.
But despite our big spending, the Hollywood duo appear to have spent relatively little of their own cash. And that’s a good thing.
There are broadly three types of football club ownership; the billionaire who writes out cheques for the love of it, the businessperson who lends the club money in the expectation of getting it back, and the Manchester United model of a “leveraged” purchase where new owners borrow a fortune against the value of the brand.
But at Wrexham there is now a new model, totally unique to British football. McElhenney and Reynolds are leveraging their own fame to pay for Wrexham’s development.
I haven’t seen the financial books, but it’s likely the biggest injection of cash came from the shirt sponsorship deal with TikTok. On its own, the deal is rumoured to be worth more than double our playing budget last year. That’s before you even start counting up the other sponsorship deals with Aviation Gin and Expedia, or the other revenue streams.
To understand this, you need to understand the unique power of Ryan Reynolds’s stardom. Reynolds wasn’t on TikTok before the deal. He now has 7million followers on the platform. TikTok would have happily handed over the cash just for that. As it is, Wrexham Football Club now gets a slice of that cash benefit.
And then there are shirt sales. To get just one photo of Reynolds or McElhenney wearing your clobber would be priceless to any organisation. Now, we get it all the time. As a result, club shop orders are flying in from all over the world.
And then, ticket sales. The increased interest and expectation has driven season ticket sales up to a level more usually seen in smaller Championship clubs.
And of course that much vaunted Disney+ documentary. On top of the fees it is also a massive advertising platform to push the club’s brand well beyond North Wales.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without Rob or Ryan. But it’s not technically their money. It’s technically money the club has generated itself. So, it’s sustainable.
And if we get into the Football League that would give us an advantage when it comes to financial fair play rules. We are not getting unsustainable handouts from a profligate owner. Our money is fairly earned income through sponsorship and merchandise, so would be allowed.
Even our summer signings point towards building a sustainable future. The club hasn’t been tempted to splash out a fortune on big names at the end of their careers in order to get some bums on seats. The two biggest signings are not household names to anyone who doesn’t watch League Two football. But they are both in their mid twenties, on long contracts, and could comfortably operate two or three levels higher. If things go well, we have the option to make some decent money on transfer fees further down the line .. whilst not being reliant on it for survival.
In short, our two fabulously wealthy owners are not recklessly throwing cash at the team. They are investing decent sums, but the main focus seems to be about using their own profiles to help the club earn that fortune on it’s own accord.
I am not naive. I know that many stars have had to align for the huge slice of luck which brought Wrexham to this point. But I reject the notion that we are about to ride on the coat-tails of others thanks to unearned riches.
The fans have earned this position themselves. It has been earned through building up a passionate culture and tradition, through saving the club not once but twice in the space of five years, through careful ownership and balancing the books, through sticking with the club in numbers despite apparently being trapped in non-league football forever.
When McElhenney and Reynolds glanced in our direction, they saw a club which was debt-free with money in the bank, rich in tradition and meaning, with a big, dedicated fanbase and massive potential for growth.
Hard work, passion, and sacrifice over 150 years achieved that.
Wrexham supporters have earned their luck.
