Wrexham vs Melbourne Victory: The journey of an unlikely Hollywood story taking to the field in Melbourne
The Red Dragons' meteoric rise under the ownership of Reynolds and Mac has been charted in hit series Welcome to Wrexham, sparking an unlikely following in Australia.
Mark Glaubitz and Kylie Welbourne, from Traralgon, were among those at Marvel Stadium on Friday evening for the unusual match, brought about by a unique mix of pop culture, skillful filmmaking, and Wrexham's unprecedented recent on-field success.
Once an amateur team in the fifth tier of English soccer, the club has won a record-breaking three straight promotions, taking them to the EFL Championship – the level below the elite Premier League.
'It has just been a wild ride for them,' says Glaubitz, 'and we've been happy to watch them do it.'
Welbourne said the stories of regular people spotlighted in Welcome to Wrexham helped her develop an attachment to the club on the other side of the world.
'We got hooked,' she says. 'It's not about Rob [Mac] and Ryan [Reynolds]; it's about the whole town of Wrexham and Wales itself.'
Glaubitz adds: 'It has just made celebrities out of normal, everyday people.'
The recent proliferation of fly-on-the-wall documentaries via streaming services has led to a boon in popularity for entire sports, such as Formula 1. But Wrexham's rise in both popularity and performance – in a sport dominated by big, legacy clubs with massive budgets – has been particularly unlikely.
And Welbourne and Glaubiz reckon remaining in the Championship may be the greatest challenge yet.
Pre-season tours to Australia are typically carried out by teams at the very top of the game – Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Real Madrid, Manchester United and LA Galaxy (in its David Beckham era) – have all visited.
The games mean little, and the big-name stars often play little more than cameos, if they appear at all. The real value of the exercise is in marketing the brand.
Though the club's rise has been phenomenal, Brand Wrexham is much more than the team. As the series has made clear, it's about a club as a focal point of a town, and a town defined by struggle, resilience and a sense of community.
Reynolds and Mac sometimes mine that to the brink of ick in the show, but there's little doubt that a resurgent club has been a good thing for Wrexham as a whole.
A promotion brings with it extra revenue (mostly from TV broadcast deals, but also from increased attendance at games). But it costs money to get there. As O'Hanlon wrote in May, the club spent more than three times the National League on wages when they won promotion the first time (£3.5 million versus the £1 million most of their opponents did). The wage bill in the following year rose to almost £6 million. In the season just finished, the club spent almost £11 million on player salaries, and almost £5 million on transfer fees.
There's another cost, too: many of the players who were there at the start of this journey are now gone. Of the 31 players currently listed on the club's website, only five pre-date the Mac-Reynold (and coach Phil Parkinson) era. Ollie Palmer is on tour with the team, and was named in Parkinson's starting 11 on Friday night. But former star striker Paul Mullin – once hailed by fans as 'super' and 'f------ dynamite' – has been sent out on loan to Wigan Athletic. Fellow fan favourites Steven Fletcher and Jordan Davies are gone too.
'That's been the hard thing,' Welbourne says,' because you get attached to certain players.'
If Wrexham have bought their way to success (and they have), they've done it on the back of their celebrity owners' money. But they are now in the clear: the club announced in its 2024 accounts that it had repaid £15 million in loans to the Mac and Reynolds-controlled RR McReynolds Company LLC.
losing the A-League grand final in late May.
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