For the first time in almost 25 years, Wrexham AFC are the highest-placed Welsh club in English football. At the time of writing, the gap is only five points. That’s as much as a mile when you have waited a quarter of a century to crow like this.
Then, Welsh football was in a state of malaise. In 2001, Wrexham finished 54th in the pyramid to lead the way, with Cardiff City in the fourth tier, Swansea City heading there and Newport County mid-table in the Southern League Premier. No club football team in Wales averaged more than 8,000 at their home games.
Now, two of them are riding the celebrity train. Five days after I watched Swansea City beat Wrexham in their final match before Christmas, US lifestyle guru Martha Stewart joined rapper Snoop Dogg as a Swans investor and they’re not even the Welsh club with the famous owners. As one headline read in July: “Snoop Dogg unveils Swansea kit in dig at Ryan Reynolds and Wrexham”. By no measure are these normal times, but non-normal is here to stay.
While Swansea assemble a new team of celebrity minority investors (that also includes Luka Modric), Wrexham are now entering the second age of their own project. There is no doubting the speed or success of their rise under the R.R. McReynolds Company.
The plan was always to reach the Championship and see what happened from there, but nobody expected the ascent to be so swift. In 2025, Wrexham became the first team in the history of English football to go from the fifth tier to the second in consecutive seasons.
Off the pitch, Wrexham’s revenue went stratospheric thanks to the Disney documentary series. In April, Wrexham announced annual revenues of £26m, up £16m year-on-year. For the first time ever, more than half of the revenue of a club in English football was generated outside Europe.
That is the brilliance of this project: global revenue streams underpinned by an understanding from those in charge that hyperlocalism is the secret. You help a football club and a town to grow bigger and better and engineer more pride and that becomes the plot of the documentary coverage because North America likes nothing more than a perceived underdog story and small English towns and cities.
Wrexham have coped well in the Championship. Currently, they are the highest-placed promoted club. Fears that rapid promotion may produce an inability to cope in the second tier appear entirely unfounded, partly due to investment in the playing staff and partly due to Phil Parkinson’s gritty realist tactics.
But the Championship also provoked a shift in strategy. This was always the plan, eventually, as with Reynolds’ other ventures: you grow the business before inviting outside investment, staying on as the face but enabling continued growth led by other experts.
Earlier this month, Wrexham announced – although with no concrete financial details yet – investment from Apollo Sports Capital, the sports and entertainment arm of a global investment firm that has around $800bn of managed assets. Apollo is the new majority owners of Atletico Madrid so, yes, this is not small-fry stuff.
Apollo’s initial role will be to provide capital to Wrexham AFC to increase their playing budgets but also overhaul the Racecourse, the world’s oldest surviving international football stadium, and the facilities around the stadium that will become an asset of increased community value.
Apollo is also going to get some help. In November, it was announced that Wrexham AFC would receive almost £18m in non-repayable Government grants to fund the redevelopment of the stadium and local transport centres. That figure, ostensibly paid by the taxpayer, is nine times higher than state aid received by any other club detailed in disclosures.
Stefan Borson, a football finance expert, has questioned why such projects would be an appropriate use of public money given a) Wrexham’s own valuation, b) the wealth of the majority owners and c) the forthcoming investment from one of the biggest asset managers in the industry.
“This looks like an £18m non-repayable subsidy to a privately owned business now flirting with a £350m valuation,” Borson said at the time.
“Its existing owners are US-based and very wealthy and liquid private individuals. The club, and its owners, will benefit from the stand for the next 50 years, yet at no point would the taxpayer be repaid or directly profit from the club’s rise.”
You can see the point, particularly at a time when local government budgets are diminishing, councils are struggling and services are crumbling. But then that is the dilemma here: the growth of Wrexham AFC, and their newfound dominance over everyday life in the local area, is almost unprecedented.
Whether or not you agree that a handout is appropriate, the economic uplift to the city is undeniable. Wrexham and Wrexham AFC are tied together like never before. This is more than a football club.
On one point we can all agree: Wrexham are not going to slow down. Internally, there is an acceptance that they could never skip through the Championship as they did the other two EFL divisions because of parachute payments and lingering Premier League budgets.
But this club has become wedded to relentless self-improvement on and off the pitch. The invitation to a major investment portfolio is proof that ambition never sleeps here.
Fairy tale? Ask that question and you get a dozen different answers across a spectrum. Some are fuelled by jealousy, others by the sense that a media darling is being helped along the way; multimillion-pound grants only pour fuel on that fire. It is a question asked across English football with varying inflections: “Why them?”
But honestly, who really cares? English football is the playground of the rich. To be a millionaire owner in the Premier League is to be a pauper. If that’s utterly depressing and unsustainable, go shout at late-stage capitalism rather than a club in north Wales. Spending time in the place on matchday, as someone who came here before, is to see a place transformed beyond anybody’s expectations.
They’re not bothered anyway; there’s a new series of Welcome To Wrexham coming out in 2026. There is building work to be done. There’s a new highest mountain to climb.
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