A football fairytale: When Hollywood bought Wrexham AFC

The idea that a football club can stand for something more than winning and wealth, that it isn’t just part of an investment portfolio, or a pawn in a game being played by nation-states, and that you can be a supporter instead of a customer, may feel like an increasingly idealistic position – especially if your loyalties sit with one of the big clubs in the Premier League.

Meanwhile, every season, lower down the pyramid we see another contender emerge for ‘football’s worst owner’; a familiar story that starts with him (ownership is still a man’s world) looking measured at his first press conference, only to leave the club in financial disarray following an expensive and ego-driven attempt at winning promotion.

And players joining clubs in Saudi Arabia for extraordinary sums this summer reinforces a view that while we think they’re doing the best job in the world, they simply see it as a job. Our loyalty can’t be bought, but theirs can.

As a consequence, when a pair of actors decided to buy a football club who come from a world where everything is stage-managed, rehearsed and scripted, perhaps it’s not surprising that it was met with cynicism.

‘They’ve only bought Wrexham to make a documentary’ was a conclusion some ‘experts’ jumped to when Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds formally took control of the world’s third-oldest professional club in January 2021.

Instead, they have executed a campaign that hasn’t just revitalised a football team but also the town itself. Their communication with supporters has been open and honest. Reynolds even sat down recently with Rishi Sunak to talk about urban regeneration. And, yes, they made a documentary series as well.
 

STARTING FROM ZERO 

The first time McElhenney and Reynolds appeared together was to talk via Zoom to members of the Wrexham Supporters Trust (WST) in November 2020. As they put forward their case to take over from WST and become the new owners they readily admitted they knew nothing about football. Plus, there’s a consistency in how they’ve engaged with fans.

“They’ve always been direct and upfront from the start,” says Andy Gilpin a former member of WST and who sat in on that Zoom call. Back in the day, Gilpin reported on Wrexham for local and national media and is now an associate sports editor at the Daily Star. He’s also one of the people behind the Wrexham fanzine and podcast Fearless In Devotion, which recently interviewed their A-list owners. It was meant to last 15 minutes but ran to 40, and there’s a rare moment towards the end when they seem visibly annoyed that anyone would think they weren’t in this for the long run.

It’s a world away from when Gilpin covered stories on a succession of questionable characters who tried to buy Wrexham, including a pornographer, a gangster and a disgraced former solicitor, until WST saved it from oblivion in 2011, before handing over the club to Reynolds and McElhenney.

“When WST ran the club everything had to be done by committee. And I can remember when Rob and Ryan came in, I went to Wrexham’s media guy and said ‘Who’s going to do their PR?’ And he said ‘Don’t worry, Rob and Ryan will do their own PR,” Gilpin recalls.

“It is a unique ownership model for a football club because it exists on brilliant marketing and PR."

“What really works is when Rob and Ryan freestyle it. If they decide that they see something on Twitter that they want to support, they don’t make a big song and dance, they just do it.

“There’s a guy called Aiden Stott who has cerebral palsy. Aiden set up a GoFundMe page because he needed a specially adapted bathroom. He’s also a big Wrexham fan. Rob and Ryan donated six grand to his fund. They didn’t announce it, didn’t make any fanfare.”

But, of course, people spotted it, and it became a story.

They also made a deliberately lo-fi ad to promote Wrexham shirt sponsors Ifor Williams Trailers, while also announcing they had formally become new owners.

Even though global brands like TikTok, Expedia, United Airlines and HP have all become sponsors since then, the Ifor Williams logo still adorns the team’s shorts.

They’ve managed to strike a balance between looking like the innocents abroad, and the smartest guys in the room. In acting they would probably call it rehearsed improvisation.

GOING STATESIDE 

Gilpin spent his summer following Wrexham on their tour of America. He got talking to Stateside sports fans and observes that “Their sport stars are absolutely untouchable. They earn millions, they live in big mansions, and the only thing you ever get to see or read about them is what they want to put out on their Instagram. You won’t meet them in the street.

“When US fans watched (the docuseries) Welcome to Wrexham they saw professional sports people who are accessible. You wouldn’t get LeBron James plastering his spare room but you see goalkeeper Rob Lainton doing exactly that. And I think it resonated.”

That’s not to say everything has worked. The club was clearly underprepared for the number of shirts people wanted to buy – demand continues to outstrip supply. The price of a kid’s Wrexham replica kit has also come in for criticism. 

And there will be other growing pains as the club’s fanbase expands.

But even if, as Gilpin says, this is a unique model of club ownership, that doesn’t mean other teams and owners can’t learn from the Wrexham experience.

Communications expert Chris Haynes is the owner of Gillespie Road Communications. He was previously Director of Communications for the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and spent more than two decades at Sky Sports including 13 years as its PR Director.

“There are three things I consider important to the story of Wrexham,” he says. “It sometimes gets forgotten that for most football fans the game is about entertainment and belonging. Yes, at certain clubs there is that constant expectation for silverware such as Man City and Real Madrid but go lower down the leagues and the expectations change.

“Second is the danger of assuming, whatever the sport, that results are everything and reputation will follow.

“Thirdly, fans can smell hype and feel when something's not right. What’s been interesting about Wrexham’s journey so far is that sense of community and the authenticity in the communications from the people that who purchased the club. 

“I also think it’s interesting that the from very first post about the purchase of the club to recently hitting the million landmark on Instagram, they have shown a certain humour, humility, and self-deprecation, which is brilliant.

“They have prioritised specific platforms like TikTok, and Instagram, rather than what some other clubs have done around Facebook or their own website, they are creating engaging content that makes people interested and want to come back for more, follow the story, and, crucially, to follow the longer-term journey.”

Of course, no matter how good you are at storytelling, and they are very good, you can’t script a football match. But the way events have played out since they arrived - narrowly missing the playoffs, then narrowly missing the play-off final, and then finally securing promotion - they’ve been fortunate in being able to take fans, both old and new, on that journey to promotion with them.

But what has most impressed Haynes, aside from growing a sizeable fanbase in America from scratch, is what they’ve done to reinvigorate the town.

“You get a virtuous circle of increasing attendance, increase in commercial opportunity, the club’s promotion, and reinvestment into the club, which should allow for sustained growth of the club through the divisions, all done with integrity.”

Or as one Wrexham fan said to me before their recent match at AFC Wimbledon, “These owners have done more for the town of Wrexham in three years than any public body has done in my lifetime.”

The second season of Welcome to Wrexham launched on September 12 and, as Gilpin explained, continue to build on telling a wider story about the town and its people “including Millie Tipping, a teenage fan who has autism, and the Miners’ Rescue Station, which is a beautiful brick building in Wrexham, that fell into disrepair.”

Wrexham began this season as favourites to win promotion from League Two. But even if they fail on the pitch, Haynes says they’ve already won.

“I love the fact that to me Wrexham feels like that perfect marriage of entertainment, belonging and integrity – which is what all true sports stories should be.”