Ryan Reynolds is spending his Saturday the same way he has spent many Saturdays since February 2021, waiting to find out what Wrexham AFC has done.
Today the wait carries more weight than almost any match in the club’s 160-year history.
Wrexham sit sixth in the EFL Championship, one position inside the playoff places on the final day of the season, hosting Middlesbrough at the Racecourse Ground in a match that will determine whether the Hollywood actor’s football experiment reaches its most improbable destination yet, the Premier League.
The financial stakes are enormous. Sports finance expert Dr Rob Wilson has calculated that missing the playoffs entirely costs Wrexham approximately £15 million in immediate revenue.
Missing promotion to the Premier League costs them an opportunity worth approximately £120 million.
The total figure, £135 million, is a number that captures what Reynolds and his co-owner Rob McElhenney, his friend and the creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, have been building toward with every player signing, infrastructure investment and documentary episode since they arrived in Wales.
How Two Hollywood Stars Ended Up Owning A Football Club In North Wales
The story begins, as most great stories do, with an improbable decision that seemed absurd at the time.
In February 2021, Reynolds and McElhenney completed the purchase of Wrexham AFC for approximately £2 million. Wrexham is a city of about 65,000 people in northeast Wales.
Its football club was founded in 1864, one of the oldest in the world, and had spent years in the National League, the fifth tier of English football, after being relegated from the Football League in 2008.
The club was fan-owned, beloved locally, and entirely unknown to anyone who had not grown up within driving distance of the Racecourse Ground.
Neither Reynolds nor McElhenney had prior experience owning a football club. McElhenney had said publicly that he had barely watched football before deciding to pursue this. Reynolds is Canadian, a country not known for producing avid EFL National League supporters.
When asked why Wrexham specifically, McElhenney described watching a documentary about the club and feeling a connection to the community and the history.
Reynolds described a phone call. Between them, they agreed to spend £2 million on a sleeping giant of Welsh football and see what happened.
What happened was one of the more remarkable stories in modern sports.
The Documentary That Made The World Care
Before the first ball was kicked under the new ownership, Reynolds and McElhenney made the decision that would define the entire project: they commissioned a documentary.
“Welcome to Wrexham,” which launched on FX and Hulu in August 2022, became the organizing principle of everything that followed.
The show’s genius was structural. It was not a sports documentary about whether the team would win games.
It was a human documentary about what happens when two wealthy men who don’t fully understand what they have taken on begin to understand it.
Reynolds and McElhenney were not presented as visionary owners. They were presented as two people who had walked into something bigger and more emotionally complex than they anticipated, the actual lives of Wrexham players, their families, the fans who had supported the club through fifteen years outside the Football League, and the broader community of a Welsh city that needed something to believe in.
The show won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program. More importantly, it made Wrexham AFC one of the most globally recognized football clubs below the Premier League.
American fans who had never watched English football before began following Wrexham. Wrexham shirts became some of the most sold in the United States.
Tourism to north Wales increased measurably.
Brands including TikTok, Expedia and Vistaprint signed sponsorship deals with a team that was, when Reynolds and McElhenney arrived, competing in the fifth tier of the English football pyramid.
Three Promotions In Three Years
The business story is remarkable. The football story is genuinely unprecedented.
Under Reynolds and McElhenney’s ownership, with investment in players and infrastructure that was extraordinary for a club at that level, Wrexham have been promoted three consecutive seasons.
In 2023, they won promotion from the National League to League Two. In 2024, they won promotion from League Two to League One. In 2025, they won promotion from League One to the Championship.
Three tiers in three seasons. From the fifth division to the second division in the time it takes most clubs to negotiate a single promotion at any level of the pyramid.
The documentary has captured each promotion in real time, Reynolds and McElhenney in the stands, the celebrations, the disbelief, the immediacy of genuine emotion from two men who set out to make a show and ended up genuinely invested in the outcome.
Reynolds’ reactions to key goals and promotion-clinching moments became cultural moments themselves, shared across social media by people who had never previously expressed an opinion about EFL football.
Now there is a fifth season being filmed. The Championship is tier two of English football.
The Premier League is tier one. One playoff campaign separates Wrexham from completing one of the most extraordinary climbs in the history of the sport.
What Has To Happen Today
The mathematics of today’s final day are complicated in the way that final days at the bottom of a table often are, but the principle is straightforward.
Wrexham need to win. They also need Hull City’s result against Norwich City to go in their favor.
Wrexham currently sit sixth, one position inside the playoff places. Hull City sit seventh, one point behind. Hull have a one-goal advantage over Wrexham in goals scored, which is the secondary tiebreaker after goal difference.
If both teams win by the same margin, Hull advance on goals scored. If Hull win by a wider margin than Wrexham, Hull advance on goal difference.
The only way Wrexham guarantee sixth place is by beating Middlesbrough by a wider margin than Hull beat Norwich.
There is also a nightmare scenario that mathematicians and football fans have been circulating since the table was confirmed, if Hull win 2-0 and Wrexham win 3-2, both teams end level on points, goal difference and goals scored, and Hull would prevail on head-to-head record having beaten Wrexham twice this season.
Derby County remain a further variable, they could leapfrog both if they beat Sheffield United by a sufficient margin.
Reynolds and McElhenney are watching all of this play out on the day that may define the entire investment.
The Financial Reality Behind The Team
The “Welcome to Wrexham” narrative, two Hollywood stars, a fairy-tale club, consecutive promotions, has always had a financial reality running underneath it.
The investment required to achieve three consecutive promotions has been substantial.
Players signed to Championship-level wages, infrastructure commitments including plans for a new training ground and expansion of the Racecourse Ground, all of it adds up.
Dr Wilson’s analysis makes the situation clear. Championship revenues are now approaching £50 million annually.
The spending has been calibrated toward Premier League revenue, not Championship revenue.
The gap between what it costs to build a Premier League-ready squad and what the Championship pays is the fundamental tension of the club’s financial model.
“Wrexham are OK for now and are managing things,” Wilson told OLBG, “but it’s clear from the money investment that the goal is the Premier League, and if they don’t get there soon, there will eventually be consequences.”
If the play-off campaign produces promotion, those consequences become irrelevant, Premier League revenue of approximately £120 million transforms the financial picture entirely.
If it does not, the club faces a reckoning that Reynolds and McElhenney’s celebrity cannot indefinitely defer.
The Show Must Go On
Whatever happens today, “Welcome to Wrexham” will document it. That is part of what makes this ownership story different from any other celebrity sports investment of the past decade.
Reynolds and McElhenney did not buy Wrexham and then hire a communications team to manage their image.
They committed their actual emotional journey, the learning, the mistakes, the genuine heartbreak and genuine joy, to a documentary camera.
Reynolds has spoken about how the project changed him. He has described attending matches in Wrexham, meeting supporters, understanding what the club means to people for whom it is not a hobby but a central fact of their lives.
The show captured him crying after significant results. It captured McElhenney similarly overwhelmed.
Whether that was performance or reality is something each viewer decides for themselves, but the three promotions and the global community that has formed around the club suggests that whatever the two men are doing, they are doing it sincerely enough to produce genuine results.
Today Wrexham host Middlesbrough. Reynolds is presumably watching from somewhere, or he is at the Racecourse Ground, which holds 11,000 people and will be absolutely full.
The match determines whether five seasons of work ends in the Championship or in the Premier League. Either way, it ends up in the documentary.
