I still think about him all the time, and I was thinking about him again last weekend. You might remember him, too, since I wrote about him a couple of years ago.
Back in 2015 or ’16, I was playing in a coed soccer game on a Thursday night in Los Angeles. There were very few — if any — other former collegiate soccer players in this league, so I always clocked the handful of other players who stood out. We were winning by a lot, but this other team had one midfielder, a stocky, shaggy-haired dude dressed all in black who was pretty good on the ball and at least made it hard for me to find space and push the ball forward.
The ref blew the halftime whistle, but as everyone else walked over to the sideline, this guy removed his shin guards. He then jogged over to give me a high-five and a half-hug. Confused, I accepted and said, “Game’s not over. It’s halftime.”
Then he said three words I’ve never forgotten — “‘Deadpool’ premiere, bro” — before walking straight off the field and into the parking lot.
I haven’t seen Ryan Reynolds again since that moment, but he had to be celebrating last weekend, right?
That was when Wrexham became the first team in the history of organized English soccer to earn three successive promotions. Just a couple of years ago, they were a semiprofessional team that no one in America had ever heard of. Now, they’re co-owned by the guy who plays Deadpool.
Wrexham have become one of the most popular European soccer clubs in the United States because of the docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham” (stream on Disney+) that the team was built around — er, that was built around the team. And they’re just one more promotion away from the Premier League.
Reynolds and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star Rob McElhenney bought the club for around £2 million in 2021, and now it’s estimated to be worth upwards of £150 million. How did they do it? And what can we learn from their unprecedented achievement?
As one owner of a large European club told me when I asked him the first question: “Spend lots of money and get promoted.” And when I asked Tim Keech, who founded Clean Sheet Capital, a firm that advises clients interested in buying professional sports teams, what lessons Wrexham might hold for the larger soccer world, he put it plainly: “Virtually none.”
How Wrexham made it to the Championship
Back when I wrote about the club’s promotion from the National League to League Two, the driving factor was pretty simple. They were paying their players around £3.5 million in wages, while the average National League club was spending £1 million. If you spend more than three times what your opponents do on talent, then you’re going to win a lot more games than your opponents.
Soccer is a complex, dynamic game, but it gets pretty simple when you have that much more money than everyone else. Countless studies show a very strong relationship between wage spend and performance.
The relationship weakens at the very top of Europe’s five biggest leagues, meaning, say, your 80th point will cost a lot more than your 50th point. But further down the competitive ladder, Wrexham are in a spot where brute-force spending can quickly lead to wins.
In League Two last season, Wrexham had just been promoted, but they still managed to lead the league in payroll, spending just south of £6 million on player salaries, per the site Capology. They also spent €390,000 on transfer fees, more than double any other club in England’s fourth tier, per the site Transfermarkt.
This season in League One, they’re spending about £10.6 million on player salaries — third most in the league. And they’ve spent nearly €5 million on transfer fees. The only club to outspend Wrexham on both salaries and transfer fees is Birmingham City, and they’re the only team ahead of them in the table, too.
Of course, spending doesn’t automatically equal success. Paying the guy who plays Sunday league and works at your favorite coffee shop a League One salary doesn’t suddenly turn him into a League One-level player. Wrexham have had to at least be competent at team-building and player identification to experience all the immediate success — and they’ve probably been better than that.
1:23
Why Wrexham’s rapid rise would hit a wall in the Championship
Mark Ogden explains why Wrexham would find it difficult to take the next step to the Premier League, if they were to achieve League One promotion this season.
“The club have invested heavily in salaries for experienced players,” said Keech, who also founded MRKT Insights, a data consultancy that helps clubs make better decisions.
“The squad is much older than average. They have purchased players who are too good for the level in the National League and League Two. Having said that, I have been very surprised at how easily they have gone through League One. They aren’t overpowered for the level, unlike Birmingham City, so I would say this is a genuine footballing achievement rather than just pure cash.”
So, what is their football identity? “A strong physical team, very good at set pieces, and crossing,” Keech said. “Solid with good box defending. Not glamorous at all but very effective.”
This is also a marked shift in approach. Back in the National League, Wrexham won matches by blowing teams off the field and being good-but-not-great defensively. However, analysis from the consultancy Twenty First Group has found that the successful promoted teams tend to be balanced in the other direction: super strong defensively, good enough at goal scoring.
In League One, only Birmingham have allowed fewer goals, while seven other sides have scored more. Wrexham’s improvement is driven by money, but also by a tactical evolution.
Twenty First Group maintains a global ranking of every professional club in the world. As of today, Wrexham rank 527th — right around the Los Angeles Galaxy and Barcelona‘s second team. Among clubs in the English leagues, they’re 41st.
“Since January 1, 2020, they rank 17th among roughly 4,100 teams worldwide for performance improvement, second only to Nottingham Forest among English clubs,” said Aurel Nazmiu, senior data scientist at Twenty First Group. “A truly remarkable achievement.”
Why no one else can do a Wrexham
Buying a soccer team is a bad idea.
In, say, Major League Baseball, the cartelized structure with its revenue sharing, salary penalties and no promotion-relegation ensures massive revenues for all 30 teams regardless of how they perform. For all the talk about the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets “ruining baseball” by handing out large contracts, every owner is sitting on a billion-dollar-plus asset. The teams that aren’t spending more are capable of spending more, they just choose not to spend more.
In European soccer, the only way the business model could be worse is if each home team burned a stack of cash before each game as a tribute to the Soccer gods. The valuations of clubs and their revenues fluctuate massively from year to year, with the specter of relegation and the promise of promotion. And player salaries take up a far bigger chunk of revenue than they do in any of the major American sports.
“The fundamentals of most investments are awful,” Keech said. “Even with Wrexham’s multiple promotions and huge commercial income, the club will lose significant money on day-to-day operations.”
For the 2023-24 season, Wrexham posted revenue of £26.7 million, which is believed to be a record for League Two. The season prior, they brought in £10.5 million. Before Reynolds and McElhenney bought the club, its revenue in the National League was £1.15 million.
“This works purely because of the fact they have Hollywood A-lister owners who are hugely charismatic and have used their celebrity to raise commercial income to unheard of levels,” Keech said. “This isn’t an option available to most owners; even bringing in a celebrity as a [very] minor shareholder will not have any impact in most cases.”
And even with the revenues driven by the famous owners and a popular television show about them (and the team), estimates suggest that Reynolds and McElhenney have lost around £20 million since purchasing the club. And although that seems as if it would be offset by the astronomical growth in the value of the club, a large part — nearly all — of the valuation is pinned to the fact that Reynolds and McElhenney own the team.
“If the owners cashed out 100%, what would a purchaser be buying?” Keech said.
The reality for Reynolds and McElhenney is that they’re going to have to keep losing money (or diluting their ownership shares) to achieve what they’ve openly stated to be their goal: reaching the Premier League. Per the last reporting year, Championship clubs lost a combined £314 million in 2023-24.
Let’s say that Wrexham double their estimated payroll next season, taking it up from £11 million to £22 million. Per estimates from Twenty First Group, that would give them about a 10% chance of getting promoted if they got better than average player performance from their spending. With average player performance, they’d need to spend closer to £25 million. To get their promotion odds up to 25%, the club would need to increase its payroll into the £27 million to £34 million range.
Not only will they have to spend more, but they’ll also have to spend differently. It’s unlikely they can continue to get by with older players in the Championship, and younger players are something of a double-edged sword: You get peak performance, but you’re also more likely to lose them to a bigger club. Added transfer revenues will allow them to spend more, but the club hasn’t had to play the player-trading game yet. They’ve been paying transfer fees and barely receiving any.
They also haven’t had to look very far. Twenty-four players have featured in at least 100 minutes for Wrexham in League One — and they’re all from England, Wales, Scotland or Ireland. Thanks to various squad-construction rules, these are the most expensive players in the Championship and the Premier League, and it’s highly unlikely Wrexham will be able to afford the best British and Irish players.
The three relegated teams from the Premier League will be receiving parachute payments worth £39 million — that’s on top of all of the other revenue streams available to everyone else in the Championship.
“The problem will be that for the first time they will be up against superior technical players who are physically as good as them,” Keech said. “It is possible to get promoted to the Premier League on a low-end Championship budget. Luton did it. But realistically, Wrexham will be paying at most a quarter of the amount the likes of Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich will.”
Given where the club was just a few years ago — scuffling along, outside the Football League system — and where they’re headed — the Championship, for the first time since the early 1980s — this has to feel like a miracle to all of the lifelong Wrexham fans. It has to feel like an inspirational triumph, a true underdog story.
But so far, it has been a fundamentally modern progression: The power of celebrity, the power of television and the power of money come together to create an unstoppable force. By no objective definition have Wrexham been underdogs at any step of their journey up the ladder. That is, until now, as they enter a league where almost everyone will have better players and more money than they currently do.
If, somehow, they manage to stay up and one day reach the Premier League, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing. I’ll walk toward that proverbial parking lot. And I’ll mutter those three words to myself: “Wrexham promotion, bro.”
