Wrexham A.F.C., the Welsh football club owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny, was recently promoted to the EFL Championship. The club and town of Wrexham itself have been transformed under the American ownership, which many critics viewed as a doomed Hollywood stunt.
It has proved to be anything but a stunt as Wrexham made history as the first club to accomplish back-to-back-to-back promotions. When the Americans took over the club in 2021, the task at hand seemed insurmountable. Wrexham has been languishing in the National League, outside of the English football pyramid, for many years, but then, in a few short years, they turned it all around.
The job is certainly not finished, as the toughest test is yet to come in the form of the Championship. The club, even under recent ownership, is not free of shortcomings. The club did not get out of non-League football in Reynolds and McElhenny’s first year in charge. They lost in a grueling and heartbreaking semi-final to Grimsby Town in the 21/22 Season. Their failures and successes are compounded as well by the ongoing docu-series that has brought the club so much fandom abroad.
The club’s unprecedented rise has all been on camera, which is phenomenal entertainment, but dangerous for football. Wrexham losing that semi-final against Grimsby Town, however, may have been the best thing for casual fans who viewed the docu-series, because it was the most realistic.
Football is a cruelly beautiful game, and that is why it is so remarkable that Wrexham so quickly achieved what they set out to do. It rarely happens, especially when the cameras are on. Take Sunderland, a historic English football club that has experienced a sharp decline since the early 2000s. They were the subject of the very popular Netflix series “Sunderland Till I Die.”
That series, fortunately, shows some high points, but also all the disappointment that begets football. Sunderland experienced negative results much of the time during the filming, something that the Wrexham docu-series does not have to show much of. Similarly, Leeds United, which recently won promotion back to the Premier League, lost their playoff match when being filmed for Amazon’s series “Take Us Home: Leeds United.”
These clubs serve as examples of a crucial but sad and surreptitious fact about football: there is a lot of luck involved. A player could get injured, a referee makes a controversial call, or the ball might just not hit the right way. Luck is an extremely important part of the game because it comes with the random and exciting chaos of the football match. That exact principle, that luck determines a team’s destiny just as much as the quality of the players or the preparation of the coaches, is what makes Wrexham’s winning dangerous.
While McElhenny and Reynolds may be among the most immediately successful American celebrity owners, they are by far not the only ones. Tom Brady, JJ Watt, and Larry Nance all have recently purchased stakes in Birmingham City, Burnley, and Leeds, respectively. All those teams have successfully achieved promotion this season but had been relegated the season prior.
Wrexham’s three-peat promotion should be celebrated as the exceptional achievement that it is, but it shouldn’t trick fans into thinking football is easy. Better teams than Wrexham have been knocked down, and the EFL Championship is a massive step up. Luck will play its role in Wrexham’s future, but the docu-series may not always have a happy ending from now on.
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