By Karl Quinn and Lachlan Abbott
It’s an odd time to be alive.
Donald Trump is US president, again. Australia’s media has become obsessed with mushrooms in Gippsland. And, perhaps most perplexingly, Welsh minnows Wrexham – a once obscure and hapless soccer club – just played Melbourne Victory in a marquee match at a 53,000-seat stadium in the self-proclaimed sporting capital of the world.
Wrexham AFC manager Phil Parkinson takes a selfie with fans ahead of the match with Melbourne Victory at Marvel Stadium.Credit: Getty Images
All professional sport is a form of entertainment, but when Wrexham AFC are involved the dial is turned up to 11. Celebrity ownership and a documentary series on Disney+ (four seasons and counting) has turned a down-at-heel soccer team from north Wales into one of the hottest sporting brands on the planet in just under four years.
From near bankruptcy to a sponsorship and revenue dream, the revival of the club has been an object lesson in what can happen when Hollywood gets involved.
When Ryan Reynolds and the artist formerly known as Rob McElhenney (he officially changed his name to Rob Mac recently) bought the club in November 2020, they paid just £2 million (worth roughly $3.6 million then, and $4.1 million now).
In May, Soccernet’s resident stats guru Ryan O’Hanlon wrote it is now “estimated to be worth upward of £150 million”. The club’s shirt used to be sponsored by local firm Ifor Williams Trailers. Since the takeover, it’s been graced by Tik-Tok, Expedia and United Airlines.
Wrexham owners Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds celebrate the club’s promotion in 2023.Credit: Jan Kruger
More than half of the club’s revenues – $55 million last year – now come from territories other than the UK, with Australia its third-biggest market. And that’s why Wrexham AFC are on a pre-season tour here, playing three games against A-League teams.
The Red Dragons’ revival under the ownership of Reynolds and Mac has both been spurred by and charted in Welcome to Wrexham. And its rise has been truly phenomenal – three promotions in three seasons, a first in the English game, have seen the club rise from the fifth-tier National League to the second-tier Championship.
Mark Glaubitz and Kylie Welbourne, from Traralgon, were among those at Marvel Stadium on Friday night whose interest had been sparked by the series.
“It has just been a wild ride for them,” said Glaubitz, “and we’ve been happy to watch them do it.”
Wrexham fans Kylie Welbourne and Mark Glaubitz outside Marvel Stadium on Friday evening.Credit: Lachlan Abbott
Pre-season tours to Australia are typically carried out by teams at the very top of the game: Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Real Madrid, Manchester United and LA Galaxy (in its David Beckham era) have all visited. Wrexham are not in that league (yet), and without the show, it’s doubtful more than a handful of diehard fans would have turned up to watch this game. Or, in fact, that it would have taken place at all.
As it happened, 37,020 people turned up at Marvel. For reference, Wrexham’s Racecourse ground has a capacity of around 13,000. The entire city has a population of just under 45,000.
Wrexham beat Victory 3-0.
Both teams had chances in the early stages before the Welsh side got on top, the opening goal coming after a dangerous cross from fan favourite Ollie Palmer forced Victory goalkeeper Jack Duncan – who had made two good saves prior – to punch the ball into the path of Tom O’Connor, who duly finished with a delicate half-volley from the edge of the box.
Half-time brought wholesale changes: Victory fielded much of their youth team, who are in the middle of their NPL Victoria campaign, while Wrexham brought on the likes of captain James McClean and new signing Ryan Hardie.
The difference between the teams from then on was particularly stark. Hardie’s darting front-post run brought his first goal for Wrexham, getting onto the end of a Ryan Barnett cross. George Evans scored Wrexham’s third, using the Australian rules signal for a goal as his celebration.
In football terms, this was little more than a training run for both sides.
And as fodder for the next season of Welcome to Wrexham, it might amount to a minute or two of screen time at best. But Brand Wrexham is much more than the team. As the series has made clear, it’s about a club as the focal point of a town defined by struggle, resilience and community.
Welbourne said it was the stories of regular people spotlighted in Welcome to Wrexham that had helped her develop an attachment to this club on the other side of the world.
“We got hooked,” she said. “It’s not about Rob [Mac] and Ryan [Reynolds]; it’s about the whole town of Wrexham and Wales itself.”
“It has just made celebrities out of normal, everyday people,” said Glaubitz.
A promotion brings with it extra revenue (mostly from TV broadcast deals, but also from increased attendance at games and shirt sales). But it costs money to get there. As O’Hanlon wrote in May, the club spent more than three times the National League average on wages when they won promotion the first time (£3.5 million versus the £1 million most of their opponents did). The wage bill in the following year rose to almost £6 million. In the season just finished, the club spent almost £11 million on player salaries, and almost £5 million on transfer fees.
James McClean takes a selfie with fans after his side’s clash at Marvel Stadium.Credit: Getty Images
There’s another cost, too: many of the players who were there at the start of this journey are now gone. Of the 31 players currently listed on the club’s website, only five pre-date the Mac-Reynolds (and coach Phil Parkinson) era. Big man Ollie Palmer, seemingly discarded in January, was in Parkinson’s starting 11 on Friday night. But fellow striker Paul Mullin – once hailed by fans as “super” and “f---ing dynamite” – has been sent out on loan to Wigan Athletic. Fan favourites Steven Fletcher and Jordan Davies are gone too.
“That’s been the hard thing,” Welbourne said, “because you get attached to certain players.”
Melbourne Victory are a team in transition too, having lost the likes of Ryan Teague and Daniel Arzani after losing the A-League grand final in late May.
If Wrexham have bought their way to success (and they have), they’ve done it on the back of their celebrity owners’ money. But they are now in the clear: the club announced in its 2024 accounts that it had repaid £15 million in loans to the Mac and Reynolds-controlled RR McReynolds Company LLC.
Parkinson and McClean alongside Victory’s Jordi Valadon and Arthur Diles.Credit: Getty Images
Now, the English Premier League, the richest on the planet, is just one more promotion away. But in truth, simply surviving in the Championship will take some doing.
Unprecedented though the Wrexham story seems, we have been at this nexus of celebrity and sport and a phoenix-like rise from the ashes before.
In 1976, Elton John took over as chairman of lowly Watford Football Club, vowing to take the team to the first division (the top tier of English soccer until the formation of the Premier League in 1992), just as Mac vowed to take Wrexham to the Premier League back in 2021.
Two years later, Watford won the fourth division title, under the stewardship of Graham Taylor, who would go on to manage England. Over five years, the club was promoted three times, reaching the top tier at the end of the 1981-82 season.
They started brilliantly, briefly sitting atop the league, and finished the season in second place, behind Liverpool. But by the end of the 1988-89 season, they were relegated. They have been up and down ever since, and last season finished mid-table in the Championship, the division in which Wrexham now find themselves.
The point of all that is that fairytales can happen, especially if you have the cash flow to bankroll them. But in sport and entertainment both, every dream ends eventually, and reality bites again. Just ask Paul Mullin.
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