"Nobody has what they have, because they have created a cultural icon around their club." That's Landon Donovan — USMNT legend, not a PR intern — and he's not wrong. Wrexham are one win over fourth-placed Middlesbrough on Sunday from all but securing a Championship playoff spot. Three straight promotions. From the National League to the Premier League's doorstep. It would be the most improbable climb in modern English football.
And the cynics are running out of rope.
When Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought the club in 2021, plenty of people wrote it off as a vanity project — Hollywood money dressed up as romance. Four years later, Wrexham have delivered back-to-back promotions, built a genuinely global fanbase, and are now three playoff wins from top-flight football. The documentary won 10 Emmy awards. Over half of the club's 2023-24 annual turnover came from the United States. Around 40 percent of the 51,000 fans at their 2023 Chelsea friendly were Wrexham supporters — for a team that was in the National League at the time.
The American connection is more than merchandise
It would be easy to dismiss Wrexham's US appeal as surface-level celebrity fandom. The numbers say otherwise. Deals with United Airlines and SToK Cold Brew. A Macron global merchandise agreement. A Liverpool fixture at Yankee Stadium this summer — days after the World Cup final in the same area. Paramount+ hasn't released viewership figures, but they chose to broadcast every single Wrexham game last season and again this year. Broadcasters don't do that out of charity.
Brett Johnson, who owns USL Championship's Rhode Island FC and holds a stake in Ipswich, has a clear-eyed view of what Wrexham built: "It's a case study in a lot of things, but not the least of which is the incomparable beauty of promotion and relegation." He's also found a direct commercial benefit. Wrexham fans in Rhode Island, he argues, will eventually start showing up to RIFC games. "Whatever the gateway drug is to get you hooked on the sport I'm a fan of, I'm an advocate of. What those two guys have done, it's not a fluke."
Walk down 40th Street in midtown Manhattan and you'll find a Wrexham flag hanging off the facade of Printers Alley, a bar that has made itself the de facto home of the Red Dragons in New York City. "We have Wrexham coming in like every day of the week," says barman Ed O'Doherty. "They're walking by, they see the flag outside, they know about the place." The bar now serves Wrexham Lager. The regulars are a mix of Welsh expats and converted American fans. That's not a marketing exercise — that's genuine community.
Whether the football holds up is the real question
Donovan is also clear-eyed about the limits of the fairytale framing. "It's not a miracle. It's not a miracle that they were spending three times as much as everyone in League Two and get promoted." Fair point. This isn't Cinderella; it's a well-resourced project that has been executed smartly. The spending is real. The $40 million in new talent this season is real.
But the Championship is a different animal. Geoff Shreeves, Paramount+ analyst and someone who has watched this league for decades, frames the challenge bluntly: "That's a huge jump. The players that bring you up aren't necessarily the players to get you to the next stage." Paul Mullin — 110 goals in 170 games — is now at Bradford City. Ollie Palmer left for Swindon. The core of the early Reynolds-McElhenney era has largely moved on.
And yet. After a shaky start to the season — Nigel Reo-Coker said they "looked way out of their depth" early on — Wrexham went nine unbeaten between October and December. They've ground out results when it mattered. A playoff spot now is genuinely earned, not gifted.
A jump to the Premier League would require outside investment beyond what Reynolds and McElhenney have already put in — two minority stakes have already been sold. The financial architecture of that next step isn't fully built yet. But if Wrexham beat Middlesbrough on Sunday and make the playoffs, those conversations get very serious, very fast. Promotion odds will shift accordingly.
"You can't change your football team," Shreeves said. Wrexham have spent four years making sure a lot of people — in Wales, in New York, in places that couldn't have found the city on a map in 2020 — feel exactly that way about them.
