"Nobody has what they have, because they have created a cultural icon around their club." Landon Donovan said that. And the man knows a thing or two about building football from scratch in a country that wasn't sure it wanted it.
Wrexham need one win. Beat fourth-placed Middlesbrough on Sunday and they are all but into the EFL Championship promotion playoffs — three games from the Premier League. Three games from a journey that started in the National League four years ago when Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a club most Americans had never heard of and decided to film it anyway.
The documentary has 10 Emmy awards. Season five is filming now. The club played in front of 51,000 fans at a friendly against Chelsea, with 40 percent of the crowd there to support the then-National League side. More than half of their annual turnover comes from the United States. United Airlines sponsors them. So does SToK Cold Brew. This summer, they play Liverpool at Yankee Stadium — ten days after the World Cup final in the same metropolitan area.
The hype is real, but so is the football
Here's what sceptics keep getting wrong: the money angle doesn't invalidate the story. It complicates it, sure. Donovan himself put it plainly — "it's not a miracle that they were spending three times as much as everyone in League Two and get promoted." Fair point. But spending heavily doesn't guarantee anything in English football's lower leagues. Plenty of clubs have tried to buy their way up and gone backwards fast.
Wrexham were written off at the start of this Championship campaign. "At the start of the season, Wrexham looked way out of their depth," CBS Sports analyst Nigel Reo-Coker said. They went nine unbeaten between October and December. That's not a press release. That's a result.
The squad has changed significantly from the early promotion years. Paul Mullin — 110 goals in 170 games, the heartbeat of those first two promotions — now plays for Bradford City. Ollie Palmer is at Swindon. The faces that made the documentary compelling are largely gone, replaced by players at a different level entirely. And yet here they are.
What it actually means beyond Wales
The ripple effects are real and measurable. Rhode Island FC owner Brett Johnson — also a shareholder at Championship rival Ipswich, which tells you everything about how American sports owners approach allegiance — credits Wrexham's rise with helping his own club's growth. "If I've got fans of Wrexham now in Rhode Island who love to watch Wrexham, by extension, at some point, they're going to start to gravitate to the local product," he said.
Walk down 40th Street in midtown Manhattan and you'll find a Wrexham flag hanging outside Printers Alley bar. It serves Wrexham Lager. The regulars include Welsh expats who get "a few hours away from the missus" to watch the match. Hardcore fans, not tourists. That matters for any club trying to build something durable abroad.
Paramount+ broadcasts every Wrexham match and won't release viewership numbers, but they've renewed the commitment two seasons running. Nobody does that for content that isn't performing.
A jump to the Premier League would require serious outside investment — Reynolds and McElhenney have already sold two minority stakes. Whether the ownership structure holds at that level is a genuine question. But even if the playoff run ends on Sunday, even if Middlesbrough hold them off and the dream stalls for another year, something durable has already been built.
"You can change your friends, your surname, your politics. You can change anything. You can't change your football team," Geoff Shreeves said.
Wrexham's American fanbase didn't exist five years ago. Now it does. That's not nothing — whatever happens at the Riverside Stadium on Sunday.
