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Wrexham Director Drove Hollywood Pair Away From League Of Ireland

Wrexham Director Drove Hollywood Pair Away From League Of Ireland
Eoin Harrington
By Eoin Harrington
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The story of Wrexham's progress under the stewardship of Hollywood owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney has been extraordinary, and put the small Welsh town on the map worldwide.

Wrexham fell out into non-league football in 2008 after years of financial hardship, and their relegation would be followed by years of struggles in the National League, before the arrivals of McElhenney and Reynolds in 2020.

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Since then, the club has been on a consistent upward trajectory, and returned to League Two with promotion last season.

Reynolds and McElhenney have made a connection with the people of Wrexham and, despite their slightly rocky start to life in the Football League, the general mood around the club continues to be positive.

Many clubs are looking on from afar at the positive influence of the Hollywood investment in Wrexham - and the club's executive director Humphrey Ker revealed that McElhenney initially wanted to invest in a League of Ireland club, rather than one in the English league system.

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Wrexham director explains why Reynolds and McElhenney steered clear of League of Ireland

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Rob McElhenney was convinced to invest in a football club after conversations with actor Humphrey Ker, a Liverpool fanatic and actor who starred alongside McElhenney in Mythic Quest.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Ker persuaded McElhenney to watch Sunderland 'Til I Die, which helped his fellow actor grow an affinity with football. McElhenney then asked Ker to scout out a club that he and friend Ryan Reynolds could look towards purchasing.

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Though the rest is, as they say, history, it appears based on Ker's comments this week that the whole endeavour could have ended up with messrs McElhenney and Reynolds at Oriel Park rather than the Racecourse.

Humphrey Ker - now Wrexham's executive director - appeared on the BBC Radio Scotland's 'Sacked in the Morning' podcast this week, and revealed that McElhenney - whose ancestors came from Ireland - first wanted to find a club in Ireland that he could invest in.

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Ker went on to further reveal that he was the one who steered the Hollywood duo away from the League of Ireland, due to what he saw as a lack of opportunities in the league:

At the jump, Rob said, 'what about a club in Ireland?' - he has family in Ireland - 'or from Northern Ireland? Or Scotland?'

I'm afraid to say that I was a bit of a party pooper on that.

My feeling was that the ceiling in the English game is that much further away. I've got to be careful here, I don't want to be rude about Scottish football.

Ultimately, I said, if you went with Arbroath...if we injected money, built this team, got into the SPFL pretty quickly, you would then run up against Celtic and Rangers and the challenge there is...the speed at which you would get from Arbroath now to a mid-table Scottish Premier League team would be quite quick. Then you would have this problem where you would just get hammered all the time by the big boys there. It would be tricky.

Ireland, for 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 you get battered in the Champions League by a Greek team and then that's sort of the cycle year-on-year.

Ultimately we said we had to do England.

The comments are unlikely to go down well with fans of League of Ireland fans, but it appears as though McElhenney and Reynolds were swayed away from Ireland rather than making the call themselves.

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We can only dream of a world where the Disney+ series was called Welcome to Wexford rather than Welcome to Wrexham.

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