Is the Wrexham ‘fairy tale’ good or bad for football?

Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt’s tweet drips with Lancastrian sarcasm.

“Congratulations Ryan, I honestly don’t know how you do it! Fantastic performance. Good luck with the treble,” it said.

He was responding to Wrexham co-owner Ryan Reynolds’ celebratory post after his side’s second successive promotion.

Holt is one of English football’s most intriguing characters, causing about as much division as the team on the receiving end of his post. Wrexham are the Marmite club of British football – other teams’ fans either love them or hate them – and following their promotion to League One last weekend, along with Stockport County, the debate is back with new impetus.

Congratulations Ryan, I honestly don’t know how you do it! Fantastic performance 👏👏👏

Good luck with the treble❤️👍 https://t.co/IidWw4KeX0

— 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 over in 2015, for his tongue-in-cheek response to Reynolds. It was congratulatory as they made an excellent tongue-in-cheek dig at Wrexham’s performance, given their considerable budget for a fourth-tier club.

There is also the fact that Holt has history with Rob McElhenney, the other co-owner of Reynolds and Wrexham. They haven’t always seen eye to eye on things like streaming revenue and ticket prices. Perhaps there is something to be said for staking out the moral high ground, for taking a deep breath and rising above in times like these. But this is football: an industry that thrives on petty grudges.

Most neutrals are self-aware enough to admit a degree of envy when they look at what Wrexham has achieved since Reynolds and McElhenney took over in 2021.

Apart from the investment, the international exposure and the obvious respect both have for the North Wales club and the city they represent, the actors are hard to hate. Their self-aware jokes, such as when they tried to learn Welsh in the documentary series Welcome To Wrexham, and their funny social media posts make it much harder to be cynical about their intentions.

They are publicly focused in a way that allows for accountability, and goes against the grain of too many absentee or elusive owners in the EFL. They have shown a touch of class around memorials to the Gresford Colliery mine disaster, surprise charity donations and fan involvement. New major international sponsors, including Expedia, TikTok and United Airlines, have arrived, along with big plans for new stands on the Racecourse grounds. And on the field they have clearly had success. Manager Phil Parkinson oversaw a record number of points on his way to winning the National League title last season, taking Wrexham out of the fifth tier of the English football pyramid after 15 years in charge.

Fan culture in Europe and the US continues The Athletics

And now they’ve done it again, achieving back-to-back promotions for the first time in the club’s 160-year history, once again with the Welcome To Wrexham cameras in tow. The series has brought new fans and attention to the EFL, especially from the US. And this has partly led to record domestic and international TV contracts – worth £935m ($1.2bn) over five years and £148m over four years respectively. EFL.

So what’s not to like? What damage is the Wrexham story doing to football?

If you ask most other fans in England and Wales: quite a lot. This is where the bubble bursts if you think Wrexham is an against-all-odds story.

Wrexham are not underdogs, at least not in the league. There is a case for underdog status in their FA Cup matches, which saw them play Blackburn Rovers, Sheffield United and Coventry City, three sides who have been much higher up the domestic football pyramid in the past two seasons. But if a team has the most money in the division, it has an advantage over the rest. Wrexham are not the first club to use their financial strength to move up the league. They won’t be the last.

Stockport have had a similar journey compared to the National League and have one of the highest wage bills in League Two this season. Fleetwood Town, now an established league club, did the same in 2012 and 2014. Chesterfield, this season’s National League champions, have spent big to get back into the EFL.

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The latest set of Wrexham accounts, covering the 2022-2023 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 League Two teams that season and also most of League One. It’s an unprecedented amount of money to spend in the lower leagues and by comparison, Accrington lost £785,000 in the same period when they were in the third tier.

Stockport also celebrated promotion this weekend (Jess Hornby/Getty Images)

There’s no shame in spending a lot of money, especially if it works and your income is as great as Wrexham’s last year (£10.5m – again more than any other team in the fifth tier of the National League or League Two). More money helps attract better players, which is why the rankings often reflect each team’s spending. It is only when a club is having a poor season or is feeling the constraints of the EFL’s financial fair play rules (usually once they reach the Second Championship) that there is cause for concern.

While Wrexham has done a lot of good for football, the gradual increase in wages in the lower divisions has been a serious concern for clubs limited by much smaller margins but still trying to compete.

Wrexham’s financial might and subsequent easy progression through League Two were to be expected and it will probably not be until they reach the Championship – whether their owners run out of money or enthusiasm for the project – that we will see what this kind of growth really is. resources. The stories are the hard evidence: Wrexham is a good story, yes, but it is not a fairy tale. This segment on CBS and the answers perfectly illustrate how divisive they have been.

“Wrexham and their TV show do as much for soccer in America as the MLS does now.” ��

A (now) third tier football club from North Wales has staged back-to-back promotions and the Morning Footy crew couldn’t be happier 👏 pic.twitter.com/bFIy6G3Prq

— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) April 15, 2024

What confuses so many League One, Two and National League fans is that while the story of a post-industrial city that has fallen on hard times with an underperforming/downtrodden football club has captured global attention, it is a story that applies to parts of the world. the EFL. You could swap Wrexham for Grimsby Town, Wigan Athletic, Hartlepool United, Newport County or Accrington. None of these clubs mean less to their community just because there are no TV cameras to show it.

Perhaps all this says more about fan culture in Britain than we care to admit.

The healthy attitude in all of this is to sit somewhere in the middle. For every moment of admiration for what Wrexham do, a touch of awareness of their wage bill or a touch 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 your own? You won’t find that in the EFL. You’re better off trying Disney+ for it.

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(Top photo: Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)