Rob McElhenney & Ryan Reynolds: Why SPFL clubs don't fit Hollywood takeover template

Humphrey Ker, right, is executive director at Wrexham and explains why Scotland wasn't an option for their takeover

Imagine Dick Campbell heartily greeting Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney at the gates of Gayfield Park.

The Disney cameras catching every dressing room takedown and witty barb from the legendary Arbroath manager, who could suddenly spend big on Steven Fletcher.

'This is Arbroath' would have been a documentary worth watching. It's a prospect that seems distant, and it is, although perhaps not quite as much as you might think.

Humphrey Ker, the British actor and comedian who facilitated Reynolds' and McElhenney's takeover of Wrexham in 2021 before becoming executive director at the club, explains that Scotland was somewhere they considered picking a club from.

"So right at the jump, Rob [McElhenney] said, well, what about a club in Ireland? Because his family are from Ireland, or from Northern Ireland, or from Scotland," Ker told BBC Scotland's Sacked in the Morning podcast.

"And I'm afraid to say that I was a bit of a party pooper on that because my feeling was the ceiling in the English game is that much further away.

"My flatmate from university was a Red Lichties fan, so I have to go to Arbroath for my Scottish football club of choice.

"So ultimately, I said, if you went to Arbroath and we injected money and built that team and you got into the Premiership pretty quickly, you would then run up against Celtic and Rangers."

So there it is. Scotland was briefly considered, but the competitive imbalance held back these particular investors.

Not that everyone would welcome a Wrexham-style takeover of their club anyway, but it does pose an interesting question about how many other investors may have been deterred.

Not that those issues are necessarily unique to Scotland either. Small countries mean fewer teams and fewer ways to keep progressing from the lower reaches, as Wrexham have started doing with their promotion to England's League Two.

"[When] I lived in Edinburgh, I used to go to Hearts games," Ker continued.

"There was that period where all the Lithuanian players came over and it was like it would be a genuine challenger to that big two in Glasgow.

"[But] the speed at which you would get from Arbroath now to a sort of mid-table Scottish Premiership team would be quite quick. And then you would have this problem where you just get hammered all the time by the big boys there.

"It would just be tricky. And to take Ireland, for an example. If you go with Dundalk or someone like that, very quickly you would become the unassailable champions of the League of Ireland.

"And then what do you do? You go into the Champions League and get battered in the Champions League by a Greek team and then that's sort of the cycle year on year.

"So, ultimately, we were like, we've got to do England or the English system."

You can listen to Sacked in the Morning with Humphrey Ker, Craig Levein and Amy Irons here