This summer, the U.S. will welcome its new favourite British club for the first time: Wrexham, who were recently promoted from the National League, the fifth tier of English football.
On their preseason trip, Wrexham will face Premier League giants Manchester United and Chelsea, plus local side LA Galaxy II – who will play host at Dignity Health Sports Park on July 22.
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Credit for turning the fortunes of a Welsh club, the surrounding town and community on its head falls gratefully on Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds after the Hollywood pair bought Wrexham for around £2 million ($2.5m) in late 2020. Since then, Wrexham have won promotion to League Two at the second time of asking, the English Football League’s fourth division, making transatlantic stars of manager Phil Parkinson, Wayne Jones, the landlord of The Turf Pub and Paul Mullin, Wrexham’s star striker and talisman.
Despite amassing a record-breaking 111 points, it is difficult to assess precisely where Wrexham place within global football at this point of their surreal transformation. They’re rich by National League standards; they have a quality manager by National League standards; and they have a goal machine in attack who has scored 134 of his 137 goals in English football’s fourth-best league or below, but they are still technically a non-league club.
Underpinning their record points total, Wrexham have scored 116 goals, one fewer than title rivals Notts County but 13 more than the previous league record of 105. Their 34 wins is a league record, beating Crawley’s total of 31. Between October and April, they also recorded a 28-game unbeaten league run.
All will agree they are not Premier League standard, given the enormous wealth and quality throughout the most-watched football league in the world, but will they be favourites for promotion from League Two next season? Would they, as currently constructed, be a top-half League One side? Could they even compete to survive in the Championship? Fans of Sheffield United, who watched their team score in the fifth minute of second-half injury time at Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground to rescue a replay in the fourth round of the FA Cup, might argue they could.
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“What I would say is that the players that are currently on our squad are far better players than those usually found in the National League,” Wrexham board advisor Shaun Harvey told The Athletic. “And as such, we believe we will be able to compete very comfortably at the next level inside England. But it’s always different. It’s always difficult to compare.”
The club are not afraid to be ambitious. With the backing of FX, who will air season two of the “Welcome to Wrexham” series in the United States later this year, Wrexham continue to grow into a unique football-club-meets-reality-television-show phenomenon.
“We feel that the sky is the limit for Wrexham,” Humphrey Ker, the club’s executive director, said. “You look at the crowds we had in the stadium all season, the crowds outside the stadium (on Saturday), people couldn’t get a ticket.
“It gets more challenging further up the pyramid we go, but we have real faith and confidence in the people we have in the football club to take us in the right direction.”
But how would Wrexham fare if they left the English pyramid and went Stateside, becoming MLS’ first international expansion team?
“I don’t know,” Chris Klein, LA Galaxy President told The Athletic. “That’s why you’re looking forward to them playing our second team, who are in the third division in the United States. You’d like to think that they would struggle in MLS, because of how far we’ve come as a league, but you wouldn’t really be able to tell that unless you were able to see them over a 34-game season. But I would like to think that our first division here in the United States is a higher level, but it’s an interesting concept, that debate.”
As currently constructed, Wrexham would have to significantly overperform their squad quality to compete in America’s top flight. According to Opta, Wrexham are ranked as the world’s 1,880th-best team with a rating of 63.6, 919 places lower than MLS’ poorest team by Opta’s metrics, D.C. United. Opta’s Power Rankings use a hierarchical Elo-based rating system to measure the strength of each team. The algorithm used analyses match results from over 2,500,000 games since 1990 to assign a rating to each team comparable across leagues, countries, and continents. Following a game, the teams’ Elo ratings are adjusted based on the outcome, with the home team gaining the same amount of rating points that the away team loses (or vice versa). For instance, if the home team’s Elo rating increases by 20 points, the away team’s Elo rating will decrease by 20 points. If the home team has a higher Elo rating than the away team, they are expected to win the game. If they do, they will gain a smaller number of Elo points than if they were to lose or draw. The opposite applies when an unfavoured team beats a team ranked higher by Opta’s metrics.
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Goalkeeper Ben Foster is Wrexham’s most decorated player, with eight appearances for the England national team (one during the 2014 World Cup) and experience in the Premier League and continental competition with Manchester United, Birmingham City, West Bromwich Albion and Watford. While he is now 40 years old with his prime years behind him, his impressive displays in a Wrexham shirt since signing a short-term deal in March suggest he could still compete in MLS. Outside of Foster, Wrexham’s squad lacks experience above League One, England’s third tier.
In January 2022, Ollie Palmer became the club’s record transfer after joining from AFC Wimbledon in League One. Before that, he had spent most of his career in the lower reaches of English football. Relatively high-profile signings Aaron Hayden and Ben Tozer represented coups for a fifth-tier side after strong seasons in higher divisions, but the overall strength does not compare to MLS clubs.
D.C. United, for example, have a roster boasting former Liverpool, Aston Villa and Belgium international striker Christian Benteke, Poland international Mateusz Klich and Lewis O’Brien, a key player for the Huddersfield Town side that reached the Championship play-off final last season.
LAFC, the current MLS Cup holders, are littered with players with top-five European league experience, including Giorgio Chiellini, a nine-time Italian Serie A winner with Juventus and European Championship winner in 2021 with Italy.
By Opta’s Elo-based metrics, the National League ranks 186th in the world while MLS is the 27th best league, detailing the disparity between the quality of opposition Wrexham could expect to face in MLS compared to English football’s fifth tier. Even the USL Championship, the professional league placed below MLS in the U.S. hierarchy without promotion or relegation, is considered a higher-quality league. In theory, fifth-tier Wrexham should be a relatively similar level to their pre-season opponents Galaxy II, who play in the MLS Next Pro reserve league, but Wrexham are arguably the best National League side in history.
“I suspect we’ll be at a slightly higher level,” said Harvey. It depends where (Opta) draw these comparisons. If they’re comparing the average team that finishes in the middle of division, that’s one thing, but we won the National League with a record number of points. So I suspect the statistics are probably slightly misleading. But having seen MLS Next Pro sides, I do imagine we would be extremely competitive in the game against LA Galaxy II.”
But if Wrexham were to join MLS, other factors would help boost the club’s already supercharged growth. For example, they’d enjoy even more of a financial influx, allowing them to build a side ready to compete with the first-teams of their North American counterparts.
According to their latest accounts covering the year to June 30, 2022 – the first full year of McElhenney and Reynolds – Wrexham spent £1.2m on players during the financial year, a sum that includes transfer fees and agent fees – up from just £10,000 in 2020-21. In comparison, MLS paid $175m in transfer fees in 2022, setting a new high for transfer fees paid for the fourth consecutive year at an average of $6.25m per team. As the league’s first international expansion team, benefitting from closer proximity to mainland Europe and England, a larger budget would offer Wrexham relatively free rein over a market that has traditionally been challenging for MLS clubs to shop in.
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The increased financial pot would also allow Wrexham to offer larger wages. As mentioned in “Welcome to Wrexham,” the club have had to pay a premium to get players who would otherwise have stayed in the EFL to drop down to the National League. Wrexham operated inside the £3-3.5 million ($3.7-4.4m) bracket this season, considerably more than the £2 million average in League Two. Conversely, according to figures released by MLS Players Association in 2022, Atlanta United and LA Galaxy spent more than $20 million on player salaries, highlighting the true depth of the disparity. The average guaranteed compensation per team following the close of 2022’s primary transfer window was $14.06million – more than three times Wrexham’s total outlay. So given that pay disparity, Wrexham’s current Opta rating is closer to those of their MLS counterparts than one might expect based on financial data alone.
In joining MLS, they would be on level footing with the rest of a league proven to attract exciting young talents, like Atlanta United did with World Cup winner Thiago Almada, and decorated legends, like LAFC did with Chiellini and Gareth Bale, who Reynolds and McElhenney recently tried to recruit to Wrexham on social media after he retired following his MLS Cup-winning half-season in Los Angeles.
The earnings from the FX series (aired on Disney+ in the United Kingdom) are not accessible in last season’s accounts, but it is expected to contribute significantly to the most affluent and influential fifth-tier side in modern history. As well as this, in MLS they’d be plugged into the league’s revenue sharing model, the new Apple TV broadcast deal (would “Welcome to Wrexham” run afoul of the Apple deal? Maybe, but McElhenney has good relations with the company — one of his shows, Mythic Quest, airs on Apple TV+ — so surely something could be worked out there), worth $2.5 billion over 10 years, and the Adidas kit manufacturing deal, worth around $700 million to the league over the next six years.
And it is not as though Wrexham are coming without a reputation. Arguably, their profile is as big, if not bigger, in the U.S. than any other MLS club. According to the club, Wrexham’s following on Twitter has grown from 79,589 in February 2021 – the month Reynolds and McElhenney completed their takeover – to more than 513,000 followers as of April 30, 2022. No team in MLS can match their rapid growth in attention, and only Atlanta United and the Galaxy have higher Twitter followings, with Wrexham on their way to passing Galaxy’s total (535,000) before long.
No other teams in the National League could pull Tozer, who was voted into the 2020-21 League Two side after winning promotion with Cheltenham Town before taking a competitive step down to join Wrexham two divisions below. Mullin is another to turn down offers from higher divisions to join the Hollywood project after winning promotion to League One with Cambridge United in 2020-21. Joining MLS would permit the owners to sign three designated players (again, with almost carte blanche over the British Isles), offering them the opportunity to build a brand in the States and beyond similar to Mullin and Foster, who rejected Premier League high-flyers Newcastle United under a year before signing a short-term contract in north Wales.
In Mullin, Wrexham have a legitimate star and goal machine. “I genuinely think in his own head he actually means that at that moment,” Mullin said of McElhenney’s claim he is a world-class player. “(They) say, ‘You do not understand how famous you are in America – only outside of Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and some Premier League players.’ I don’t believe them and say, ‘Give it a rest. When I walk in a shop here, only two people say something to me.'”
Bradley Wright-Phillips makes a helpful comparison as a case study to assess how Mullin might fare in MLS. Before joining New York Red Bulls in 2013, Wright-Phillips was loaned to Brentford, who were then in League One, after struggling to break through into the team of his parent club Charlton, who were playing a division above in the Championship. In his half-season at the club, he appeared in 15 league matches, scoring five goals, before being allowed to depart Charlton on a free transfer in the summer. He then joined New York and scored 108 league goals in 195 games, becoming the club’s all-time leading goalscorer and sixth-highest in league history.
While MLS is considered a stronger league overall now than a decade ago, there were fewer teams with a higher concentration of quality, and he shone, despite struggling in the lower reaches of the English pyramid. With Mullin’s consistent goalscoring output across the past three seasons (96 goals in 129 league games) and proven ability to score against Sheffield United, who will be in the Premier League next season, in the FA Cup, it would not be surprising to see him succeed in MLS.
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“I watched the show and saw when they got promoted with the two world-class goals he scored,” said Klein. “If a player can finish like that, you would certainly think would have a place (in MLS).”
Outside of Mullin and Foster, however, Opta’s metrics demonstrate they do not have a team ready to consistently compete with D.C. United, the side with the least quality in America’s top league. Still, with a bigger pot to spend on transfer fees and wages, combined with the proximity to mainland Europe and the British Isles, Wrexham could become a force if they were parachuted into MLS.
As America’s new favourite team, the possibilities seem endless.
(Photo: Leon Bennett/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images)
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