Wrexham have been making unbelievable progress on and off the pitch under Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds.
Wrexham remain in the hunt for a spot in the Championship with just six games of the League One season to play.
Phil Parkinson watched Wrexham draw 2-2 with Cambridge United on Tuesday night, still sitting second in the League One table.
Wycombe Wanderers may have a game in hand, but Wrexham will be confident of securing an automatic promotion spot.
Wrexham have also posted incredible financial data from the 2023-24 season, showing how the growth under Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds continues.
McElhenney and Reynolds have inspired enormous sponsorship money at Wrexham, the kind of numbers that will make some Championship clubs a little envious.
Wrexham investor on Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds
Success on and off the pitch is not solely down to McElhenney and Reynolds, but their vision for the club is becoming a reality.
Wrexham took on new investors in the Allyn family earlier this season, landing additional funding as the club look to continue this incredible journey.
Other investors are involved at Wrexham too, including American Sam Porter, a Limited Partner at Wrexham.
McElhenney and Reynolds invested in Necaxa last year, whilst Colombian side La Equidad have joined the McElhenney and Reynolds portfolio.
Porter is involved in all of the clubs and has now spoken to Front Office Sports about the Hollywood duo and life in football.
Porter highlighted that McElhenney and Reynolds were already at Wrexham when he joined forces with them on Necaxa, so they felt confident in launching a ‘Welcome to Wrexham‘ style series.
Investor Porter noted that some celebrities don’t want to be heavily involved in the clubs, but McElhenney and Reynolds ‘like to get involved’.
Celebrity ownership is becoming increasingly common now, and Porter made it clear that he never wants to push any of them to do more than they are comfortable with in terms of visibility in their ownership.
McElhenney and Reynolds are very visible in the Wrexham project, even on the other side of the world, with Porter highlighting that the connection to clubs cannot be faked.
“I would say with our celebrities – Ryan, Rob and, notably, Eva Longoria – they [McElhenney and Reynolds] were already in Wrexham before they joined us, so they knew what the football investment space looked like, and also we knew how they were going to interact with it,” said Porter. “So we are all producing a show on Necaxa right now, that is the Necaxa version of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’, ‘Bienvenidos a Necaxa’.
“It’s a case by case; not all celebrity owners are going to be the same. These guys do like to get involved. Now, they aren’t talking to us about every player on the roster and what we’re going to do in every transfer window. Eva, for instance… we hired a new coach [at Necaxa] a few months ago, Eva interviewed some of the candidates and got into it.
“For us, we want our celebrity investor to do what they want to do, what they feel comfortable with. It’s never ‘hey, as part of this deal, you have to do X, Y and Z’, it all has to work organically and everybody has to feel comfortable with it, because we’re not looking to push anybody to do more than they want to do, we’re looking for a very positive, mutually-beneficial relationship, that is everybody actually being into the clubs.
“If you’re not really into it, it’s not going to come through the right way. You can’t fake it, I think with sports fandom and connectivity with clubs, you just can’t really fake it,” he added.
Sam Porter praises ‘Welcome to Wrexham’
McElhenney visited Necaxa last weekend and may well make the trip to Mexico a little more regularly, especially with a TV show on the way.
Porter has watched ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ and studied its success, undoubtedly hoping to replicate the magic with Necaxa.
Porter praised the way in which ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ explains certain terms or aspects of the game that may not be common to foreign fans.
American sports do not feature promotion and relegation, so ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ really had to emphasise its importance – especially early on as Wrexham attempted to get out of the National League.
Porter thinks that fans across the world connect through that attention to detail, something that some shows don’t always capture.
“I think that, what you see with ‘Drive to Survive’ or ‘Welcome to Wrexham’, they allow the team or the property to connect with fans who maybe didn’t grow up with the access to this, maybe have just not heard of it, and it gets it into a direct funnel to their pipeline, to their eyeballs to watch it and engage it.
“One of the things when I watched the first season of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’, I thought they did a really good job on that show – this was before we had a business relationship with those guys – of explaining how does promotion and relegation work, because a big part of season one was getting out of non-league football.
“If you come to F1 or European football as a novice and you didn’t grow up with it, and you start hearing terms like ‘relegation’ and ‘promotion’ and F1 has got it’s whole own vernacular that a lot of people just aren’t familiar with, and those shows, if they take a minute and just kind of say ‘we’re going to explain this, here’s what this word means, here’s how the system works, here’s how the season works, here are the different competitions, here’s how we get points’, I think all of that connects with people and they want to learn, and they want more of this kind of content,” he added.
A new season of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ can’t be far away now and will continue to be a standard-bearer when it comes to sporting documentary series moving forward.