Wrexham, exemplar of the 'disruptor' clubs, could fail as easily as the rest surely will
Hollywood glitz has propelled the Welsh club from the non-league to the cusp of the Championship and a shot at the Premier League. But the future could be precarious.
There has been no confirmation, yet, that the FX / Disney+ documentary Welcome to Wrexham will be renewed for a fifth season.
It is “virtually guaranteed” that it will happen if Wrexham, currently second in League One, go up to the Championship, as they and most of their fans expect they will.
That final push for the Premier League could be TV gold, whether they defy the odds and make a serious Championship challenge, or even better in dramatic terms for neutrals, if they crash and burn.
The Championship will bring its own challenges, as we’ll explore, not least the requirement - if top-flight football is wanted soon - for an enormous increase in funding to buy players fit to challenge in that division and to pay a rapidly surging wage bill. The numbers are below, in detail.
If they don’t go up, then quite possibly there won’t be much interest in a fifth season of the documentary. And without the global profile the show has brought, the massive commercial revenues it has helped to generate could fall off a cliff. Again, the numbers will follow.
Such are the perils of being a “disruptor” club in the English league pyramid, trying to take an unconventional route to the top with a unique selling point narrative.
Today I’ll explore the stories of five “disruptor” projects of recent years, and explain why, ultimately, I think they will all fail in their stated aims of getting to the Premier League, at least in the foreseeable future, and some of them will fail much quicker than others.
Each of these “disruptors” come with a USP that gives them, or supposedly gives them, a strategic advantage that is apparently going to “redefine club ownership” (or some other similar bollocks). Common to them all is the idea that you can take a minor club, from the fourth division or lower, and steer it to the PL, aka the promised land.
The five, in descending order of where they are currently placed in the English league pyramid, are:
Wrexham, currently second in League One, and owned since February 2021 by Hollywood A-listers Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney (R&R from now on).
Crawley Town, currently in 22nd place in League One, owned since April 2022 by WAGMI United LLC, a consortium of American “crypto bros”, with "WAGMI" standing for "We’re All Going to Make It," a phrase popular in cryptocurrency circles.
Salford City, currently in 11th place in League Two, owned between 2014 and 2024 by key figures from the “Class of 92” - Gary and Phil Neville, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Nicky Butt, and latterly David Beckham - and the Singaporean billionaire Peter Lim. In August 2024, Gary Neville bought Lim’s 40% stake.
Real Bedford, currently top of the Southern League Division One Central (the equivalent of England’s eighth division), bought in 2022 by bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack, and now co-owned by McCormack and the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, famous for successfully suing Mark Zuckerberg over the formation of Facebook, and for rowing in the Olympics and the Boat Race, and for being crypto billionaires who have invested £3.6m in Real Bedford.
FC 100,000, a project that founder Michael Brady calls “a social enterprise”, with the aim of attracting 100,000 or more people to pay a £5-a-month subscription to buy a lower-league or non-league football club (the identity of which remains unknown because there is no money yet) and fund it up the divisions. You’ll find my full opinion on this below, but, blimey, what a load of cobblers. Scunthorpe are one club who have already rejected Brady’s advances.
Wrexham have become the exemplar among the disruptor clubs and it’s really not difficult to see why. The peak years of Wrexham’s history so far were the four seasons from 1978 when they reached England’s second tier, then cunningly named the Second Division.
They then meandered around the lower divisions until 2008 before relegation to the non-league, and spent 15 years in that wilderness until, under the ownership of R&R, they made it back to the EFL.
Season 1 of Welcome to Wrexham documented R&R’s first full season at the helm, the 2021-22 campaign when Wrexham agonisingly missed out on getting from the non-league to the EFL by losing in the National League play-offs.
Season 2 showed the successful campaign of 2022-23 as they went up to League Two. Season 3 was all about a second successive jump, to League One. And Season 4, which will document the current League One campaign, will be on our screens soon.
Below I’ll lay out the case why each of the five disruptors above will fail. Wrexham clearly have the best chance of proving me wrong, not least because of their utterly spectacular financial results of recent years, which I will delve into.
But should they achieve promotion to the Championship in the next few weeks, as I think they probably will, then I think they will then run into a brick wall, and the owners and their investment partners (whose level of ownership and control remains opaque for now) will be confronted with a huge dilemma.
Either they will spend big (10 years of data from promoted Championship clubs shows how big that will need to be) in the hope that a gamble pays off, but knowing it will cost them tens of millions in losses each season if it doesn’t. Or they will try to tread water, and risk going down, and losing their invaluable documentary exposure, and face a return to whence they came.