Ryan Reynolds stood in Wrexham in October 2021 and half-jokingly told a room full of sceptics he'd take the club to the Premier League. They laughed. On Saturday, May 2, Wrexham host Middlesbrough needing a win to secure a Championship playoff spot. Nobody's laughing anymore.
Four years ago this was a semi-professional club sitting in the fifth tier of English football. Three back-to-back-to-back promotions later — a sequence no club in English Football League history had ever achieved before — Wrexham are 90 minutes from keeping their promotion push alive in the second-richest league in the world.
What a playoff run would actually mean
Win the playoff final at Wembley, and Wrexham are in the Premier League. That's not a thought experiment anymore — it's a genuine scenario being planned for. The EFL Championship playoff final is the most lucrative single match in club football, worth north of £170 million in broadcasting and commercial revenue to the winner. For a club that had £38 million invested across the entire men's squad since Reynolds and Rob McElhenney took over, that number is almost absurd to type.
Critics who've pointed to celebrity money distorting the competition miss the context. Ipswich, Southampton, Birmingham, Norwich, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United — all spent more on players last summer than Wrexham's total outlay across three seasons of ownership. A £30 million transfer window is now routine for Championship contenders. Wrexham are still punching well below that weight class.
The Championship is not a friendly environment for sentiment. It's notoriously relentless — 46 games, packed with clubs carrying Premier League infrastructure and squads full of top-flight experience. Wrexham finishing their debut Championship season in playoff contention was not the script anyone wrote at the start of August.
The documentary angle — and what it means for the odds narrative
FX dropped the season 5 trailer for Welcome to Wrexham this week, timed deliberately around Saturday's fixture. The show has already won 10 Primetime Emmys. FX has renewed it for three more seasons. Whatever happens at the Racecourse Ground on Saturday, the cameras are rolling.
But the show's legacy — and the betting markets around Wrexham's playoff run — will look very different depending on one result. A win against Middlesbrough and Wrexham's promotion odds sharpen considerably. A loss, and the fairytale has a cliffhanger ending that no scriptwriter would dare submit.
Manager Phil Parkinson has been quietly exceptional throughout this. Getting Wrexham from the National League to the Championship playoff picture in three years is the kind of CV entry that earns a person cult status in English football. Reynolds got the laughs. Parkinson did the work.
Four games. That's all that separates Wrexham from the Premier League. Three years ago they were playing in front of crowds that some League Two clubs would find embarrassing. That's the gap they've crossed — and Saturday is where the next chapter starts.
