Even by the standards of modern football, and even though he has co-owned the club for two and a half years now, there remained something deeply incongruous about seeing Ryan Reynolds applauding Wrexham off after their FA Cup fourth-round tie a week ago. Presenters, used to speaking to the most famous names in football, are visibly starstruck interviewing the star of Deadpool. What is he doing running a fifth-tier side in north Wales? And what does it mean?
Reynolds was brought into the project by Rob McElhenney, co-creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. McElhenney, who grew up in Philadelphia, says he saw similarities between Wrexham and his hometown, and was attracted by the story of the club’s struggle to regain Football League status after relegation in 2008. The duo bought the club in September 2020, since when they have invested heavily in players, and are rebuilding a stand at the Racecourse Ground. Attendances have doubled to around 10,000. For years, Wrexham had been battling to survive. One former owner tried to evict them. Even before the FA Cup third round win over Coventry and the draw against Sheffield United (both three divisions above Wrexham), Reynolds and McElhenney were regarded as saviours.
Other clubs may feel resentful of their financial resources, and there was a certain amount of schadenfreude about their defeats in the finals of both the promotion play-offs and the FA Trophy last season. But Reynolds and McElhenney appear to be what they claim to be: two blokes with money who fancied buying a football team. There has been no self-aggrandisement and, as far as possible, a sensitivity to the habits and customs of the British game that has been notably absent from, say, the US billionaire Todd Boehly at Chelsea. They seem genuinely invested in Wrexham, the club and the town, and that they are making a documentary about their experience feels natural enough. They are, after all, film-makers, and the series, Welcome to Wrexham, can only raise the profile of the club — already this season, they’ve sold 24,000 shirts. Yet the presence of Reynolds and McElhenney raises the issue of what a football club is and who its owners should be.
In Britain, where modern football began, clubs were initially societies for enthusiasts, and competitions were then invented to provide structure and significance to their matches. When it became apparent that thousands of people would pay money to watch, the dynamic changed. Liverpool, for example, came into being in 1892 because the owner of Anfield needed a team to play there after Everton relocated to Goodison Park, and Chelsea were founded in 1905 because the owner of Stamford Bridge needed a team to play in his athletics stadium. Even in football’s pioneering early days, finance was never too far in the background. But whether they were founded for love of sport or for monetary gain, football clubs soon took on a symbolic role. They were somehow representative of their town or region, or of a section of society within their area. As Jonathan Meades observed in his 2009 documentary The Football Pools Towns, swathes of places are known almost entirely because of their presence in the Saturday evening litany of classified scores.
Outside the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, built on the crook of the river where the Monkwearmouth Colliery once stood, there is a bronze statue depicting a family dressed in ragged Thirties clothing. Behind two children, a mother holds up the arm of a flat-capped father, face creased by hardship, presumably a miner. “All generations come together at the Stadium of Light,” reads the plaque. “A love of ‘The Lads’ has bonded together supporters for more than 125 years and will for many more years in the future… Supporters who have passed away have their support carried on by today’s fans, just as the supporters of today will have their support continued through family and friends.”
Perhaps it’s trite. Perhaps it’s a skilful piece of emotional manipulation from a club that, in 1997, was desperate to sell the move from Roker Park to sceptical fans. But it seems also profoundly aware of the role football clubs have come to play as repositories for memories of home or family, a means of achieving a continuity with the past, a sense of belonging in a world in which other institutions are breaking down. And in the case of Sunderland and other post-industrial towns, the football club is also a means of memorialising a past in which the city mattered. They may not have won the league since 1936, but Sunderland are the seventh-most successful club in English history because the town used to have mines and shipyards whose owners used their profits to entice the best professionals from Scotland.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe