Is Wrexham a “fairytale” or unfair competition? – The post

Actor Ryan Reynolds’ football team has just been promoted to the English third tier and many around the world have become passionate about its story thanks to a docu-series, but for others it has too much more money than its rivals

Last week the Welsh football club Wrexham achieved promotion from the fourth to the third tier of the English championship, Football League One (some Welsh teams play in the English leagues). It is the second promotion in two years and there is a lot of talk about it because from 2021 the owners of the club are the well-known American actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, and because the team became famous with the docu-series Welcome to Wrexhamreleased in Italy on the Disney+ streaming platform (for the moment they have made two seasons, but the third has already been announced, about this year’s championship).

The arrival of Reynolds and McElhenney and the success of the TV series, which followed the team in the last two championships, brought great popularity not only to Wrexham (today the team has many fans and supporters around the world, especially in the United States States), but also to the city of Wrexham. It is an industrial town in North-East Wales and in recent years it has become a tourist destination: people go there to go to the stadium, or even just to see the locations of the docu-series live.

The success was also sporting, because as mentioned Wrexham obtained two consecutive promotions, moving from the fifth to the third series: they had not played in Football League One since 2005. Not everyone, however, is happy with Wrexham’s sudden rise, especially among its opponents, because the economic availability and visibility it has today are out of scale for the lower divisions of English football, and its appears to many as competition unfair, given that he plays against much less wealthy teams. The specialized site The Athletic he asked himself whether what is presented as “the fairytale” of Wrexham is a good or a bad thing for football, and even before that whether it can be considered as such, given the money that the two new owners have brought in (who nevertheless place themselves in pleasant manner and are very involved in the team’s affairs, and therefore generally appreciated by the public).

In sport, stories that start from unfortunate premises or disadvantaged conditions and then become successful and successful are often called “fairy tales”. despite it all. The history of Wrexham on the one hand can be seen as that of a team from a small village unknown to most who became famous throughout the world, redeeming a sporting history of a mostly provincial level. On the other hand, however, it is also the story of how ample economic availability can quickly rout the competition and how central money is in today’s football, where the mechanisms that aim to give teams similar starting conditions to increase competitiveness – such as the so-called financial fair play – are very lacking and regularly circumvented.

In the 2022-2023 season, when Wrexham was still playing in the National League (the fifth English series), its wage bill (i.e. the total expenses for player salaries) was 8 million euros, an unprecedented figure for that level, higher even than all the teams in the fourth division and most of the third division. Almost half of the teams in the Italian Serie B, for example, have a lower wage bill. After all, between TV series, merchandising (Wrexham shirts are often unobtainable, given how many people buy them), television rights and sporting results, last year the club recorded over 12 million euros in revenue, another number outside scale for that level.

The scene of promotion to Football League Two, achieved last season

In recent years the team has presented itself as underdog (team not used to winning) due to its less than glorious past and to make neutral fans as enthusiastic as possible, but with this financial availability it cannot be considered an underdog team. After Wrexham’s promotion Andy Holt, the owner of Accrington Stanley (a League Two team) wrote on X: «Congratulations Ryan (Reynolds, ed), I honestly don’t know how you did it. Fantastic result!», an evidently sarcastic and annoyed compliment.

On the other hand, however, even Wrexham’s opponents and the whole of English football in general are having positive consequences from this story, because greater attention to Wrexham also means greater attention (and therefore more money) to the league in which they play , which otherwise, especially abroad, not many people would watch. Last May the English Football League, the league that manages the three championships below the Premier League (from the second to the fourth division), signed the largest agreement in its history for the sale of television rights to Sky Sports: the equivalent of one billion euros until 2029 (in general television rights in the United Kingdom are sold at much higher prices than those we are used to in Italy). It is difficult to establish a direct relationship between the value of the rights deal and Wrexham’s success, but it is quite clear that his notoriety contributed to similar figures.

The celebration for the recent promotion to Football League One (Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)

Wrexham Association Football Club is a club with a very ancient but not particularly prestigious history. It was founded in 1864, making it the third oldest football club in the world. Its stadium, the Racecourse Ground, opened in 1807 as a racecourse and is now considered the oldest international football stadium still in use. In its history, Wrexham has played at most in the second division: it has never reached the English first division, what is now called the Premier League, where Reynolds and McElhenney would like to take it in the coming years.

Continue on the Post