Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt’s tweet was dripping with Lancastrian sarcasm.
“Congratulations Ryan, I honestly don’t know how you do it! Fabulous result. “Good luck with the highs,” she reads.
He was responding to Wrexham co-owner Ryan Reynolds’ celebratory post following his team’s second consecutive promotion.
Holt is one of the most intriguing characters in English football and is as controversial as the team he is assigned to. Wrexham are the Marmite club of the British game – fans of other teams love them or hate them – and following their promotion to League One alongside Stockport County last weekend, the debate has returned with new fervor.
Congratulations Ryan, I honestly don’t know how you do it! Fabulous result 👏👏👏
—Andyh (@AndyhHolt) April 14, 2024
You can forgive Holt, a local businessman who made his fortune in the plastics industry and has invested heavily in his hometown club since taking control in 2015, for his wry response to Reynolds. It was congratulations as they took out an exquisitely ironic dig at Wrexham’s achievements given their sizeable budget for a fourth-tier club.
There’s also the fact that Holt has a history with Reynolds and Wrexham’s other Hollywood star co-owner Rob McElhenney. They didn’t always see each other the same way on issues such as streaming revenue and ticket prices. Maybe there’s something to be said about standing for the moral high ground, about taking a deep breath in times like these and rising above it. But this is football, an industry that thrives on small grudges.
Most neutrals are aware enough to recognize a degree of jealousy when looking at what Wrexham have achieved since Reynolds and McElhenney took over in 2021.
Aside from the investment, the international exposure and the obvious respect they both have for the North Wales club and the city they represent, the actors are annoyingly hard to dislike. Their self-aware nonsense, such as when they tried to learn Welsh in the documentary series Welcome To Wrexham, and their witty social media posts they make it much harder to be cynical about their intentions.
They are public-facing in a way that allows for accountability, going against the tide of too many absent or elusive owners in the EFL. They showed touches of class in the Gresford Colliery mining disaster memorials, surprise charitable donations and fan involvement. New big-name international sponsors have arrived, including Expedia, TikTok and United Airlines, along with big plans for new stands at the racecourse. And on the pitch they had clear success. Manager Phil Parkinson oversaw a record points tally on the way to winning the National League title last season, lifting Wrexham out of the fifth tier of the English football pyramid after 15 years.
Fan culture in Europe and the United States continues Atletico
And now they’ve done it again, achieving consecutive promotions for the first time in the club’s 160-year history, once again with the Welcome To Wrexham cameras in tow. The series attracted new fans and attention to the EFL, particularly from the United States. And this, in part, has led to record national and international TV contracts, worth £935 million ($1.2 billion) over five years and £148 million over four respectively. EFL.
So what’s wrong? What harm is Wrexham’s history doing to football?
If you ask most other fans in England and Wales, quite a lot. This is where the bubble bursts if you believe Wrexham is an against-all-odds story.
Wrexham are not losers, at least not in the league. There is a case to be made for their underdog status in their FA Cup series which saw them face Blackburn Rovers, Sheffield United and Coventry City, three teams much higher up the domestic football pyramid in the last two seasons. But when a team has more money in the division, it has an advantage over the others. Wrexham are not the first club to use their financial strength to advance in the Championship. They won’t be the last.
Stockport have been on a similar journey to the National League and bring with them one of the highest wages in League Two this season. Fleetwood Town, now an established club, did the same in 2012 and 2014. This season’s National League champions Chesterfield have spent big to return to the EFL.
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Wrexham’s latest set of accounts, covering the 2022-23 season, show their wage bill was £6.9m, with losses of £5.1m. Both figures were 1) records for the National League and 2) higher than all teams in League Two that season and even most of League One. This is an unprecedented amount of money to spend in the lower leagues and, as a point of comparison, Accrington lost £785,000 in the same period, when they were a third division team.
There’s no shame in spending big, especially when it works and when your income is as big as Wrexham’s last year (£10.5 million – again, more than any other team in the National League fifth division or of League Two). More money helps attract better players and so the rankings often reflect each team’s spending. Only when a club goes through a bad season or feels the constraints of the EFL’s Financial Fair Play rules (usually once they reach the second tier) is there cause for concern.
Where Wrexham have done much good at football, the gradual increase in wages in the lower divisions has been a serious concern for clubs constrained by much smaller margins but looking to compete.
Wrexham’s financial clout and subsequent easy progress through League Two is to be expected and it probably won’t be until they reach the Championship – or their owners run out of money or enthusiasm for the project – that we will see what this type of growth really. it means. The reports are hard evidence: Wrexham is a good story, yes, but it’s not a fairy tale. This clip on CBS and the responses perfectly sums up how divisive they have become.
“Wrexham and their TV show are doing as much for soccer in America as MLS is doing right now.” 🏴 dir
A (now) third-tier football club from North Wales have achieved back-to-back promotions and the Morning Footy team couldn’t be happier 👏 pic.twitter.com/bFIy6G3Prq
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) April 15, 2024
What irritates so many fans of League One and Two and the National League is that, while the story of a post-industrial city falling on hard times with an underperforming/downtrodden football club has captured global attention, it is a story that applies to bands of the EFL. You could replace Wrexham with Grimsby Town, Wigan Athletic, Hartlepool United, Newport County or Accrington. None of these clubs mean anything less to their community just because there are no cameras to show it.
Perhaps all of this says more about fan culture in the UK than we want to admit.
The healthy position in all of this is to sit somewhere in the middle. For every moment of admiration for what Wrexham are doing, a hint of awareness of their wage bill or a hint of cynicism around the narrative that they are “the only club like this in the world” should provide a perfectly seasoned perspective.
But balance? A healthy attitude towards what other teams in your division are doing? Anything other than contempt for new ideas, new fans and a barrage of media attention for a club other than yours? You won’t find that in the EFL. You’d be better off trying Disney+ instead.
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Welcome to Wrexham… in League One: what happens next?
(Top photo: Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)