Ryan Reynolds & Rob McElhenney: ‘Why Wrexham? The inside track on the Hollywood takeover’

It has been the question all of football has been asking. Just why did two Hollywood stars end up buying a non-league football club?

Perhaps fittingly for two of showbusiness' leading comedic talents, the journey that eventually led Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney to becoming owners of National League side Wrexham all started with a joke.

Or a tease to be precise - and one at the expense of British comedian and writer Humphrey Ker, the third man in the takeover that almost seems too good to be true.

"I'm laying claim to the fact (Rob's) interest in football derives from several years of teasing me for watching football during our lunch breaks at work," Kerr explains of his time as a writer on the show Mythic Quest. "Until eventually, just by pure osmosis, I got him interested in the game to the degree that he decides to buy a football team."

That team being Wrexham with Ker the Hollywood pair's 'man on the ground' in north Wales.

"Where with a lot of people the journey would have ended with he and I exchanging text messages and me saying 'Ha ha, sounds great, I'd always said I'd do that if I won the lottery, but then within a month's time we had Ryan on board, we had found a football brokerage team in New York and we were in the process of trying to find a football club," Ker added.

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney were revealed as Wrexham's potential owners in September 2020

"And that sort of breakneck speed has not really changed for the last eight or nine months - and so here I am."

With the deal to purchase the club from its supporters trust - and immediately inject £2m into its bank account completed this week, Ker has been appointed executive director. Essentially, he is the proxy, the man who signs the cheques and okays the plans while the owners are the other side of the Atlantic and a time zone or two away.

He was also the man charged with picking the right club, which again prompts the question: Why Wrexham?

Ker says a list of criteria were drawn up having settled on wanted a side in the English system (Scottish and Irish teams were discussed due to McElhenney's heritage) with Wrexham standing out with its fanbase and tradition both of a standing much bigger than their current National League status.

"It wasn't about glamour, it wasn't about commercial viability," Ker says. "And it wasn't the bright lights of, 'Oh, let's buy a team in Cannes, or Saint Tropez United FC' or whatever it may be, it was purely a desire to find a place that wore its heart on its sleeve as a football town and that needed a bit of a helping hand. Because that's what we felt like we could give."

History plays its part too, Wrexham with its 156 years of it making them the third oldest professional club in the world at the oldest international ground in the world. A handy hook for the much-talked about documentary that began filming in December after the deal was approved by supporters.

Though the deal for the film is bound to bring in money, the plan is for it also to help boost the profile. Shirt sponsorship offers have already been coming in, Ker says, is just one example of the greater sustainability they want for an idea that may have formed from jokes, but is being taken very seriously.

They are closing in on the appointment of a new chief executive, want a recruitment team in place well ahead of the new season and want to help existing staff by giving them the resources, support and infrastructure a club who have spent 13 years in non-league football are clearly going to be without.

Work has already been done in making sure the community buys into the ideal, with Ker admitting the jeopardy in all this is effectively the bad PR for their two high-profile owners; the pair may have enough in the bank to reassure this is not a money-making scheme, but they cannot afford to look bad.

"Rob and Ryan have been already canonised there, there are statues going up around the town," he says. "But there's no point in having two rich famous owners if we don't maximise all of that to deliver results on the pitch, and results in the community. Because those are those are the two things that we prize above all others by being here.

"We're not tearing down the Racecourse and building a supermarket there for one and they are not there to make a quick buck - because there are many other easier ways of doing that and less fraught with potential for bad refereeing, a player getting injured, or any of the many ways in which a football season can be derailed that is completely outside of your control."

More famous than the club they've bought, Ker mentions there would be no chance of these overseas owners disappearing into the night if things went awry.

Ker calls that the "grimly practical" reason why those hoping the feel-good nature of this script doesn't take a plot twist, with the romantic version being that they feel they can make a difference to "a sleeping giant".

Yet there should be no rush for Gareth Bale's name being printed on shirts and the talk of becoming a global force is also measured with more realistic goals.

Money will be spent on players, but not excessively, and the focus will be on improvements rather than the Racecourse becoming home of the Harlech Globetrotters.

"One of the dangers we will always face is that there's this element of a comedic bent to this whole project because you've got two people globally famous for being funny at the helm," Ker says.

"Listen, we encourage the fan base having their day in the sun and taunting rivals with all the wonderful things that are coming down the line, but we want to go about this in a serious way because we recognise that the stewardship of this club is an incredibly serious thing.

"So our first objective is promotion but we're not going to spend £5m next year, dig out every journeyman from a higher league and say we'll blow everyone away - we want to build a structure that almost means that inexorably we can't remain in the National League, because the level of facilities and the professionalism that we've instilled."

"If I was very being very confident I would say our expectation is to get into League One and to thrive - and, if we get to the very top of our of our projected trajectory, then the Championship is not unreasonable."

Once there, Ker says they might find other investors "willing to flush £200m down the loo" to reach the Premier League because - short of that lottery win - even A-listers don't have those resources.

"But I think that if we do everything right, we grow the fan base, we use the documentary to get people all around the world buying Wrexham scarves and hats and shirts, we should have the muscle to get back to where we once were."