- Dragons acquired in 2021
- Promotion secured in 2022
- Big plans for 2023 and beyond
WHAT HAPPENED? Hollywood superstars completed a stunning takeover of the Dragons in February 2021, with considerable funding pumped into the club and local community since then. A return on that investment is now being seen, with two men that boasted little knowledge of how British football worked upon their arrival now passionately committed to the collective cause in North Wales. That process all started during lockdown in the United States, as a documentary focused on events at Sunderland convinced McElhenney that he should acquire a club – with Deadpool star Reynolds then talked into coming along for the ride.
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WHAT THEY SAID: Wrexham executive director Humphrey Ker has told Sports Pro of how Wrexham came to be one of the most talked about clubs on the planet: “What happened was, in LA, we were told we’re going to be locked down for two weeks. That was the idea. You know, at the start of March 2020, there was this sense of this is strange, this whole Covid thing. But it should blow over quite soon. I was working at the time as a writer on an Apple TV show called Mythic Quest and we all went home for two weeks thinking, this is going to be a short sort of break/holiday type thing. We exchanged a lot of ‘you should watch this programme, or read this book, or here’s a sourdough recipe’, or all of those things that people did at the start of lockdown.
"For Rob, I said ‘you should watch this documentary Sunderland Til I Die’, because he’d made a lot of fun of me loving football. He’s a big sport fan, but like many Americans [he said], ‘they all pass sideways and it’s boring, there’s not enough points and they don’t do enough this, that and the other’. I said ‘watch that and you’ll understand the relationship that we in the UK have with our football teams’ – and arguably in Europe. It’s a very different thing, I think, to American sports fandom, where you are often spreading your love around multiple different teams. ‘Watch this, it’s all about football’.
AND WHAT'S MORE: Ker continued: “He came back and said ‘we should do this, we should buy a football team’. My response was like ‘hahaha, sounds cool, I’d love to do that one day’. He said, ‘no seriously, how much would it cost?’ So that’s what sort of got the ball rolling. I had nothing else to do, so I go and do some research. I started to look around and I was like, well, I suppose a National League club you could get for sort of between zero and a couple of million pounds, probably. He’s like, ‘well, we can do that all right’. Then he went away and spoke to John Landgraf, who’s the head of FX, which is a channel over in the States, and sold two seasons of a documentary and was like, ‘right, what team are we buying?’ So then it became my job to kind of trawl through all these many great storied clubs in British football and work out which one was the best fit for us, which was Wrexham.”
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THE BIGGER PICTURE: Success was not immediate for the Dragons, as they suffered FA Trophy heartache at Wembley and a play-off defeat in 2022, but a record-breaking haul of 111 points carried them to the National League title in 2023.
IN THREE PHOTOS:
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Getty ImagesWHAT NEXT? Having clambered back into the Football League for the first time in 15 years, ambitious plans are being drawn up at the Racecourse Ground – with McElhenney and Reynolds working on rebuilding one of the stadium’s stands while also investing in more on-field talent in the next transfer window.