Promotion, community work, and putting Wrexham on the map: Theo Chapman takes a deep look at how Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s sporting fairy-tale has changed the town.
It’s springtime in North Wales. The leaves are beginning to blossom, the foliage is returning to its usual shade of luscious green, and the temperature has risen ever so slightly. Hopefulness has begun to permeate the town, as it has done at this time of year for the past few years. The sun is beginning to break through the blanket of clouds, the final few games are right around the corner, and Wrexham AFC fans are ready for a promotion party once again.
‘Joyously relieved’ would be the easiest categorisation of the mood around the Racecourse ground going into the final stretch of the season, a huge promotion race finally secured. Historically, the club had been a consistent football league team, before dropping into the national league where they lay, stagnant for 15 years.
Enter Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
Reynolds, who rose to fame through his lead role in the ‘Deadpool’ series, and McElhenney, famed for his highly successful sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, bought the club in November 2020 – and have since funded their much-anticipated return to the English football league, after winning the National League title in April – and achieving back-to-back promotions after their emphatic 6-0 win over Forest Green Rovers, for the first time in the club’s history.
No matter how dark things have become for this particular set of fans, they’ve always stuck by their club throughout the years, no matter how bleak the situation for the club on and off the pitch, they’ve stayed true to their team.
But now it feels different.
Rob and Ryan haven’t just given hope to a football club, they’ve given hope to an entire town. The pair are practically worshipped in North Wales. Were you to ask a member of the public who the best football owners in the world are, they wouldn’t hesitate to declare it’s the pair from over the pond.
It’s admittedly a little a little unsexy to describe what enabled the once irrelevant Wrexham AFC to go from laughingstock to a legit football league team as ‘two people buying one club’, but that’s essentially what it’s owed to.
In all fairness, it’s been done in an admirable way. Unlike most owners who live in the US, the pair didn’t just waltz over and strip Wrexham of all its values. You could tell how passionate they were about developing Wrexham from sleeping giant to a proper household name – and they’d clearly done their research. They knew it wasn’t going to be easy to win over the trust of the fans, who had suffered from an owner seemingly insistent on destroying the club, leading to the supporter’s taking ownership prior to the ‘Hollywood takeover’.
So, after a fan vote in which Reynolds and McElhenney were given ownership of the club, they instantly got to work – proving to the town that they meant business.
Acknowledging their slightly below par football knowledge, they hired experienced footballing personnel, Sean Harvey and Fleur East, to make the right decisions on their behalf – instead of becoming the type of omnipotent owners that insist on having complete control over everything.
They showed their fighting intentions on the pitch too, employing ex-Sunderland manager, Phil Parkinson, and spending over one million pounds on transfers in their first season, including the now infamous signing of talisman striker, Paul Mullin.
In their first full season of ownership, Wrexham finished second place in the league, made it to the final of the FA Trophy at Wembley, before a record-breaking second season at the helm which saw Mullin finish as the FA Cup top scorer, a nail-biting title race with Notts County, and eventually winning the league with 111 points – the highest ever by a team in the top five leagues. This year, they had their sights set on automatic promotion to League One, which they secured with two games left of the season.
And it’s not just the football aspect in which Ryan and Rob have made such a positive impact – they’ve done so much for the town, community, and showed their generosity across the wider footballing picture, too.
Just recently for example, a small charity from promotion rivals Mansfield began an almost 90 mile walk from Field Mill, Nottinghamshire, to the Racecourse Ground, Wrexham, to raise money for mental health awareness – in which Reynolds and McElhenney donated £15,000 under the alias ‘Wade Wilson and Mac’ – their on-screen names.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, too. When full-back Anthony Forde’s wife was diagnosed with a brain tumour, who got them an appointment with a top doctor to rule out cancer? Ryan did. Who donated £6,000 to a fan with Cerebral Palsy for renovations to make his daily life easier? Rob did. Who developed an Emmy winning documentary, raising the profile of the entire town and attracting international tourists? Rob and Ryan did.
The interest the pair have generated is astonishing. During Wrexham’s ‘title deciding’ crunch clash with Notts County last season, the match up registered over 61,000 twitter interactions, almost 200 more interactions than Liverpool’s clash against league leaders Arsenal that same day – Wrexham’s full-time announcement that afternoon receiving almost 11 million views, nearly twice as many as Liverpool and Arsenal’s full-time announcements, combined.
With that level of interest since the documentary, it’s no surprise that local businesses have received an exponential increase in attention, with visitors travelling in from all over the world to visit the town, sometimes when there’s not even a game. Andrew Hunt, an American tourist who came to Wrexham for their 4-1 win against Barrow earlier in the season, said:
“It’s crazy popular over in the States – loads of my friends have watched the documentary and we’re all obsessed. Me and my son were planning a trip to Europe and a Wrexham game was our priority.”
A club that was once completely unknown to most people in the UK, let alone abroad, is now a destination ahead of other European attractions for some tourists. Wild.
For some business owners, it’s been life changing. The owner of The Turf, a pub next to the stadium, which was featured in the documentary, Wayne Jones, said in an interview with The Athletic: “Everything that happens around the owners seems to get crazier and crazier. A good crazy if that makes sense. It’s brilliant for Wrexham, another positive way to put the town on the map.”
Wrexham has always been a family – hopefulness used to be all that permeated through the town. Now, it’s a lot more than that. Everything that that the community used to dream of, is coming true. It’s a town that’s inspired, one excited to see where this sporting fairy-tale can take them.
