Wrexham under Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have become a tale of history, future and difficult questions for football
Triple promotion puts Wrexham in the record books but what does it say about the direction of the game
In the end, it was oh so comfortable. Leyton Orient’s win over Wycombe Wanderers meant a point in the late game against Charlton Athletic would have been enough to confirm Wrexham’s promotion to the Championship.
Wrexham were 2-0 up inside 20 minutes at the Racecourse Ground. There’s nothing like strutting over the line on your own turf. Premier League champions Liverpool did it the next day.
But the Red Dragons were entering uncharted territory as the first team to achieve three successive promotions from the fifth tier to the second, the culmination – maybe – of the unique and evidently effective ownership of Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds.
Hollywood duo McElhenney and Reynolds have revolutionised the football club. They installed Phil Parkinson as manager and have backed him with the resources to jump three rungs up the ladder in three years.
The Racecourse Ground has been spruced up and plans to develop the Kop are moving forward. The owners ponied up for a performance gym at the ground and are building a brand new academy training ground. The promised first team facility is also on the horizon.
Wrexham’s women’s team was integrated into the club more or less immediately and their set-up is benefiting from the same improvements away from the glare of the spotlight.
In Welcome to Wrexham, the Disney+ documentary series that’s underpinning Wrexham’s rise, the club’s owners took viewers into their discussions about the challenges they faced in the National League and League Two. Their biggest tests are still in front of them.
The club’s owners are making bricks-and-mortar contributions to Wrexham as a town but their biggest civic impact is testament to the power of our sport. When a football club is unified – team, owners and whatever various supporter factions existed before – its effect on the community can be powerful.
McElhenney and Reynolds have achieved that unity. Success on the pitch helps and genuine affection for the place is the icing on the cake.
But the outcome is a team who have thundered through the divisions at breakneck speed and, now more than at any point in the last four years, shaken the foundations of English league football.
That’s no bad thing and it doesn’t take away from Wrexham’s successes under Parkinson. If anything, it amplifies them. But they’re shaking the foundations nonetheless and football is necessarily changed by that.
Everything about the Wrexham revolution is different. Building a Championship football club by mashing up a television documentary and a listing giant of lower league football was a path untrodden.
Content is the fuel. Stardust is the unmistakable heat source. Marketing is the oxygen. As much as McElhenney was the man who started the fire, Reynolds’ marketing smarts and clout fan the flames.
Aviation Gin. United Airlines. Wrexham Lager. TikTok. Ifor Williams Trailers. Hewlett-Packard. Four Walls. Gatorade.
That’s not a normal list of partners for a Championship club, never mind a League One club, nor is it a comprehensive list of Wrexham’s partners as it stood on the day they were promoted.
They’re not normal partnerships either. Whether Reynolds or McElhenney or both are owners, endorsers, spokespeople or just the men who signed the deal, Wrexham and their brand partners twist around one another, through one another, in ways that are new to English – and Welsh – football.
It’s not just Wrexham’s financial heft that makes them different from what came before them but the whole concept, the whole idea, behind what they’re doing. It shares spiritual roots with what good football club ownership has always been but the execution is novel.
Yet McElhenney, Reynolds, Parkinson and Wrexham are still operating within the walls of the edifice they’re rocking from the inside. Without extreme investment far beyond what even they have made so far, there is a ceiling to what can be achieved.
In all probability the very uppermost limit of what was possible for Wrexham as they were structured even a few months ago was exactly where they are now, recently promoted to the Championship.
The pace of their ascent alone is enough to give any football club the bends, never mind the club that’s risen faster than any other.
Wrexham supporters can be reassured that their owners were smart enough to recognise this. If their ambitions for the club are boundless then McElhenney and Reynolds are bound to honour its right to a future beyond them.
Can Wrexham really reach the Premier League?
Time will tell whether it’s better to do what’s necessary to keep climbing than tap the brakes and stay in close control of the club’s direction, but Wrexham’s star owners have taken steps to prepare for a tomorrow too rich even for their blood.
In October, an investment was made into the club by Red Dragon Ventures LLC, a “joint venture formed by the Allyn family and Wrexham AFC co-owners Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds focused on driving growth and success in and around Wrexham.”
The Allyns, Wrexham’s new minority investors from central New York State, are, theoretically, wealthy enough to allow McElhenney and Reynolds to keep laying down the track in front of their North Walian locomotive.
The Red Dragons could stay up. They could even go up to the Premier League. The second tier is that kind of division, there’s no doubt about that. Whether they’re ready for the Premier League or even the Championship is another matter altogether.
For better or worse, the Red Dragons are changing the game
For all the tangible good McElhenney and Reynolds are doing for the town, all the positivity and promise they're engendering in its football club, the success of their ownership leaves football with some uncomfortable questions.
Wrexham have spent well, made some sharp decisions along the way, and won three promotions in a row. This season in particular, Birmingham City and Wrexham threw themselves into promotion by force and won.
Money has always defined success in football to a degree but it’s new for wealth in the Football League to come with global ambition built in as standard. Global ambition doesn’t settle for the Championship.
Somewhere along the line the impulse to keep up gripped football and didn’t let go. Bad money and bad ideas follow good. Future club owners will try to spend their way to copying Wrexham without realising that what Red Dragons’ rise actually proves is that spending isn’t enough.
If lower league clubs become mere shells for moonshot projects, what happens when the owners don’t connect with the community in the same way as McElhenney and Reynolds?
What happens to the transfer market when clubs – Wrexham and Birmingham now, Salford City and Crawley Town in the past, any copycat projects that spring up elsewhere – can and will pay enough to pull players down the divisions?
Wrexham’s owners have asked awkward questions too
McElhenney and Reynolds aren’t just disturbing the expected order by buying players, winning matches and climbing up the ranks.
They’re posing tricky questions directly, questions that sit badly with traditionalists but tickle the nerve-endings of a national football psyche that loves growth and progress and success and power but would never, ever, admit it.
Whether we like it or not, it’s healthy to be questioned.
Back in the National League, Reynolds railed against the “truly baffling” streaming ban imposed by the league on its clubs. Sure, it was primarily a matter of self-interest but the fact of the matter is the National League did and does have some pretty puzzling rules around match coverage.
After seeing off their enjoyable rivalry with Notts County, Wrexham found themselves in the third tier with a kindred spirit. Birmingham’s new ownership shares their global mindset and, with Wrexham, have already tested the international waters.
Wrexham and Birmingham asked the American question. Football gave the English answer: no, you can’t play your games overseas even if you both agreed to it. The question will be asked again, repeatedly, as long as these two clubs or any two like them share a division.
Birmingham are part of the same story. They both fully intend to throw a grenade into the second tier and it wouldn’t be all that wise to bet against it.
Given the state of the promotions and relegations between the top two divisions at the moment, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if these two teams in a pod were part of the promotion picture.
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Great article, if they do manage to get to the Premier League I'd really hope they could break the current cycle of promoted teams all going back down (if it doesn't get broken next season)