Ryan Reynolds, co-owner of Wrexham AFC, poses for a photo with the trophy alongside Sam Smith … More
Whether you are for or against the introduction of promotion and relegation into American pro soccer, if you are debating in good faith, you have to concede there are credible arguments for U.S. soccer adapting to be more like the rest of the world.
The biggest problem with MLS as a TV entity is that its regular season games often lack urgency or compelling storylines, in part because the consequences of being bad are relatively tame. You can also look at the passion in numerous second- and third-tier pro soccer markets across the U.S. and conclude they could fully support the top level of the domestic game if only given the chance.
You might even consider the popularity of the Premier League among Americans and conclude the drama relegation (sometimes) creates helps cultivate that popularity, even if the overwhelming majority of American EPL fans don’t support teams regularly involved in relegation scraps.
But there is one argument many American fans cite in their advocacy for an open soccer pyramid that is just blatantly flawed: The shoddy insistence that the rise of Wrexam AFC, and the popularity of “Welcome To Wrexham” is a demonstration of why pro/rel would be good for the American game.
Wrexham’s Fairytale Is Just That
In case you missed it, Wrexham’s fairytale story turned yet another fantastical page on Saturday when the Red Dragons earned promotion for an English league record record third consecutive season with their 3-0 victory over Charlton Athletic.
That result guarantees no worse than a second-place finish in League One and a spot next year in the EFL Championship, the second tier of the English game and one step away from the world-famous Premier League.
It’s exactly what celebrity American owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney would have dreamed of when they first took over the historic Welsh club in 2020. (That a few Welsh teams play in the English pyramid is a different issue.) But it’s also an extraordinary anomaly in the history of English and world football, and a story that would be far more grounded in popular American rags to riches fables than as some repeatable example pro/rel could bring to America.
To be clear, Reynolds, McElhenney, the club and its supporters deserve all the adulation. The new celebrity owners clearly bought into being ideal stewards of a downtrodden club, and the city of just under 45,000 embraced the unorthodox, reality-show approach to marketing the team.
But at its core, Wrexham’s rapid rise owes mostly to club stumbling into a relationship with a benevolent benefactor with far more resources than most of its now-former fourth- and fifth-division peers. And its true popularity among Americans probably has most of its roots in the appealing notion among Americans that, while money is not a sole key to happiness, it is a heck of a downpayment.
Although exact figures are tough to pin down, Wrexham’s payroll during its single season in League Two was estimated to be roughly double the league average. Even this year in its first season in League One, the Red Dragons had the third-highest squad value in the division according to Transfermarkt.
The Hard Work Begins
That advantage will come to a halt next season, when Wrexham will finally find itself playing on equal or even inferior financial footing in the Championship. Because the reality of the pyramid system in England is that the average level of investment increases on an exponnential, not linear, level with each division jumped.
The median squad value in League 1 is about $12.5 million, according to Transfermarkt data. The median EFL Championship squad value is about $70 million. The median Premier League squad value is about $600 million.
Thus we’ve only now reached the stage where Wrexham are going to be actual financial minnows, even if they can combat some of it through the creative marketing of Reynolds and McElheney that has already gotten them to this point.
If Wrexham remains popular in the U.S. after a decade of yo-yo clubbing between the second and third tier like any old Grimsby Town or Bolton Wanderers, then we’ll know that pro/rel has real American potential. What we’ve seen so far bears far more similarities to the plot of Annie, My Fair Lady or Pretty Woman – we are dealing with Hollywood owners – than to a normal existence in the football pyramid.
More realistic examples
In fact, said normal existence is growing a bit stale in England. For a second straight season, the same three clubs who were newly promoted to the Premier League are returning to the League Championship next year. And the two teams guaranteed to ascend back to the EPL – Leeds United and Burnley – have both been there as recently as three seasons ago.
This isn’t always the case, of course. Clubs like Brighton and Hove Albion, Brentford and Bournemouth have all made sustained climbs from the lower rungs of the pyramid to Premier League consistency. But those kinds of ascents usually take decades, not years, and don’t always progress in linear fashion. And for every success story, there has to be an equivalent failure. That’s how the math works.
The good news is that if the United States did adopt a pyramid system, the financial gaps betwen the tiers probably wouldn’t be as wide at first. But as time passed, those teams who established themselves as a solid top flight presence might pull away financially from those in a constant scrap for survival. Only the stable clubs would have the time and resources to begin marketing themselves more seriously beyond national borders in the way the giants of English football have become household names.
That is the most fundamentally misunderstood thing about the pyramid system. While it permits upward mobility, it reinforces class structure in equal measure. Even if there are occasionally exceptions that are literally made for Hollywood.
