“People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.”
– President Andrew Shepherd, “The American President” (1995)
Let’s just get this out of the way: Are you kidding me, Herc and Seb?!?!
It’s almost laughable that I have to bring this up, but last week the soccer pundits Herculez Gomez and Sebastian Salazar and actually tried to put England’s new National League champions, Wrexham AFC, on par with Major League Soccer.
To be clear, they didn’t compare Wrexham to just one club or two MLS clubs, but to ALL of Major League Soccer. And not on par, but BIGGER!
Is ESPN really THAT hard up for clicks?
Hey, I get it. Wrexham are the flavor of the month. The Red Dragons, one of the oldest professional football clubs in the world, were purchased post-pandemic in 2021 by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. If you know about Wrexham, it’s because the club and their telegenic owners featured in a 18-episode FX documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham” to much media attention.
The Welsh club received a flurry of interest as they made an upset-fueled run through the recent English FA Cup tournament, defeating Coventry City and almost upsetting Championship side (and new Premier League promotee) Sheffield United. The matches were promoted on ESPN+, and lifted FA Cup viewership on the service 100%.
And after 15 years languishing in the fifth tier of the ENGLISH SOCCER PYRAMID (those words to be spoken in reverent hushed tones only), Wrexham finally broke through to win their league, and automatic promotion into four-tier EPL’s League Two. The “Welcome” series cameras were there to catch all jubilation for Season Two, now in production.
If you haven’t seen the first season of the Wrexham series, go watch it on Hulu. It’s worth your time, even though the series is targeted at the casual soccer or reality TV fan. It branches off into many explainers for newcomers, rules, the industrial history of Wrexham, the roots of hooliganism (seriously), and this humorous attempt to show how the New York Yankees could fall if MLB had pro/rel.
If you don’t chuckle at the thought of the Yankees being relegated down to “beer-league softball in Ithaca, NY,” nothing will.
If you watched the series, you see the first steps of Reynolds and McElhenney’s efforts to rehab the club they bought for an estimated $2.5 million USD. It meant retooling it from the ground up, renovating the club’s historic Racecourse Ground, the oldest international football stadium in the world, then later buying the facility outright.
The new owners brought in veteran front office management and a new gaffer with Championship experience, signing big sponsors like TikTok, and then making key transfers from higher divisions, at an expected loss of more than $1 million for every season they remained in the National League.
SPOILER ALERT: It didn’t pay off immediately in Season One. They lost the final of the promotion playoff. But, we now know how Season Two will end, don’t we?
Wrexham vs the world
The new owners aren’t just settling for their TV series and their League Two promotion. They now are set on making tiny Wrexham a global soccer brand. Their summer world tour looks like it will definitely make a splash in the States.
- Wrexham will bring a team of legends to The Soccer Tournament $1 million 7v7 tournament in North Carolina this May, which I wrote about in April — there’s a possibility that both Reynolds and McElhenney will attend, and they hope to donate $500,000 of the prize money to the Wrexham community if they win
- Wrexham will play a preseason friendly against Chelsea July 19 at the University of North Carolina
- Wrexham will play LA Galaxy II from MLS NEXT Pro on July 22 in Los Angeles
- Wrexham will play Manchester United on July 25 at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium
Forget wins and losses — because wins will be very few. It’s all about expanding the Red Dragons’ brand awareness in the American market, and promoting the upcoming Season Two, which will sell their TikTok-branded kits, and bring in more revenue for the club, which they will spend on salaries for better players, and make a run at promotion to a higher league, while also paying for the stadium renovations (a capacity of more than 10,000 spectators, new floodlights) required for League Two.
Oh, and it’s working VERY well. Just look at these social mention numbers from Wrexham’s clinching victory…
Fact vs fantasy futbol
But back to facts, and the claim from Herc and Seb that Wrexham is now “bigger than MLS.”
Balderdash, poppycock, and other granddad euphemisms for ridiculous statements! But I’ll cut Herc and Seb some slack — seeing those social numbers McElhenney touted can go to your head, when not put in the history-making context surrounding Wrexham’s league-clinching victory and promotion. If you look at just Google searches from their championship-clinching weekend like WorldSoccerTalk recently did, you’ll see Wrexham did well — again, because of their celebrity connection and marketing machine.
And I’m sure the Hollywood influence on the folks at the Worldwide Leader had the boys in Bristol, CT all a titter — likely ESPN will aim to broadcast those Wrexham summer friendlies, full of sideline shots of Reynolds and his well-positioned bottles of Aviation Gin. So gushing over them gets them in their good graces. And don’t forget the corporate synergy at work — ESPN is part of the Disney/Fox family, which also owns FX Network, which airs Wrexham’s series.
But let’s talk about real numbers and real results on the field — let’s just use the reasonably unbiased OPTA World Club Rankings, and its ELO scores.
With a 62.4 rating, Wrexham is the 2,096th best club in the world. Yes, 2,096th. There are literally 2,000 clubs BETTER than Wrexham in strength and quality of play, by OPTA’s standards.
There’s a very good reason you only see glimmers of in-match action in episodes of “Welcome to Wrexham,” because, in reality, that action is rather sub-par vs. the quality of soccer you’re used to from any of the world’s top leagues, or even MLS or the EFL Championship
How does that compare to American soccer clubs? Glad you asked…
- The best-ranked MLS team is LAFC, with a 79.8 rating, 147th best in the world
- NYCFC has a 75.7 rating, 299th best in the world (down 60 places over the last month)
- The lowest-ranked MLS team is DC United, with 69.0 rating, 906th best in the world
- The best-ranked USL Championship side is San Antonio, with a 61.2 rating, at 2,394th best in the world
It’s fair to say that MLS-level competition may be a bit of a stretch for them. MLS ranks as more competitive than the EPL Championship, and that’s three tiers up from where Wrexham competed. Deadspin concluded that Wrexham would likely get wrecked by MLS competition.
Even the USL Championship ranks as a more competitive league than the England National League that the Red Dragons just conquered. Let’s be REAL…Wrexham was a GREAT investment for Reynolds and McElhenney. The club was near extinction and could be used as the subject of their docu-series. Win or lose, success or fail, they had a well-told story and content to sell.
As McElhenney notes in Episode 1, they “could have easily been the villains.” But spending a ton of their movie star and business mogul money helped avoid that. And they’ll have another great story to tell for Season 2. And maybe a wild, mad-cap Vegas vacation and American tour to highlight in a quickly-produced Season 3?
But alas, their successful 2022-23 campaign has done far more for the club than their TV series did. The series finale on October 12 had about 282,000 viewers, about what a weekend MLS match commanded last year on Fox/ESPN.
Meanwhile, business is booming stateside, with MLS is growing at such a rapid rate. It now has its first-ever billion-dollar franchise (LAFC), In just four years, the average MLS team value has grown 85% ($579 million), and every MLS team is worth more than the bottom third of Premier League teams. While MLS plays 34 matchdays in the season, plus Leagues Cup, Open Cup, CONCACAF Champions League, Wrexham has only had a few matches play on ESPN2 and ESPN+. And you don’t see Apple TV clamoring for the EPL League Two contract anytime soon to show Wrexham in the USA.
After 25-plus years of history and more markets clamoring for expansion franchises, It’s ludicrous to think this Hollywood product-made-good Wrexham would be even competitive to the American top-flight product on the pitch. Or more “popular” or “bigger” than MLS in America.
After all, AFC Richmond already is. And they’re not even real.
ESPN isn’t that hard up, but Salazar and Gomez definitely are!
(PS *Ithaca)
TY