Wrexham takeover by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney

The takeover of Wrexham by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney is a brief but revealing reference point in Max Best’s journey through English football. It helps frame the contrast between glamorous, internationally visible ownership and the improvised, community-dependent institutions where Max is trying to establish himself as an agent, scout, and football administrator.

A Destination and a Suspicion

The subject enters the narrative indirectly, during a car journey with Jackie Reaper. Max has realised that Jackie has been misleading him about their destination, and, after consulting the maps application, concludes that Wrexham is the only destination that makes sense unless Jackie intends to drive them to the coast and send them both over a cliff. The possibility of Wrexham therefore begins as a practical deduction inside an uneasy journey rather than as a formal discussion of football finance.

Max then tests the theory by asking Jackie what he thinks about Wrexham being bought by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Jackie corrects Max’s pronunciation of McElhenney’s name and invokes the documentary Welcome to Wrexham, making the takeover part of a wider media phenomenon rather than merely a transaction in club ownership. Max admits that he has started the documentary but still has other football programmes to watch, including All or Nothing, the Sunderland series, and a programme about Southampton’s academy. Jackie, by contrast, has never heard of that academy programme because it is on CBBC, the children’s wing of the BBC.

Celebrity Ownership and Football Media

Within the conversation, the Wrexham takeover represents a form of football visibility that reaches beyond match results and conventional sports journalism. The documentary transforms the club’s ownership into a story that can be consumed by audiences who may know the names of the celebrity owners or the television series without belonging to the club’s immediate supporter community. The joke about children’s television also undercuts the apparent sophistication of football media culture: Jackie may know the Wrexham documentary, but his knowledge is selective, generational, and shaped by what he encounters outside the traditional game.

The reference gains force because the surrounding narrative is concerned with clubs whose survival depends on structures less glamorous than celebrity branding. FC United of Manchester was created by former Manchester United supporters who had “quit” in disgust when Manchester United was sold to what they regarded as vulture capitalists. They wanted to feel like fans rather than customers. By the time Max finds the club, it has moved through two promotions, or perhaps more, and settled in the Northern Premier League Premier, England’s seventh-highest league, with promotion leading first to the National League North, then the National League, and eventually League Two.

The Lower-League Counterpoint

Max’s visit to FC United establishes the material world against which the Wrexham reference can be read. He arrives shortly before six in the evening and finds people carrying black bin bags through a turnstile, lights on in the stadium, and tinny music playing. He walks into the small ground, where concrete stairs, directional signs, separate long men’s and short women’s toilets, a beer-and-pie outlet, red-white-and-black backdrops, witty banners, and hyper-local sponsorships make the place unmistakably a football stadium. Volunteers move along the terraces recording broken seats, sweeping crisp packets, and chiselling chewing gum from the ground. An older man with the profile of an eighteenth-century prime minister is scrubbing the dugouts.

That scene gives the Wrexham takeover its larger significance in the novel. Celebrity ownership is mentioned from within a football economy where people clean turnstiles, repair stands, and prepare grounds themselves. Max finds the work almost magical and feels motivated to help. The emotional value of football is therefore located not only in fame, television, or upward mobility, but also in the ordinary labour that makes a small club possible.

Ownership, Failure, and Survival

The novel also places Wrexham alongside a harsher account of ownership at Oldham Athletic. Oldham’s decline is described through its movement from founding membership of the Premier League in 1992 to non-league football, making it the only club said to have fallen from the Premier League to non-league. The club has not finished in the top half of a table for fourteen years, and its supporters have endured owners described as thrifty before receiving the excitement they had wanted and discovering that they did not enjoy it. The previous owner was an agent who had made money arranging moves for older stars to play in the Middle East, then attempted to buy an English club, bring in young talents, develop them, and sell them on for large transfers.

Against this background, Wrexham’s purchase by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney functions as a compressed image of possibility: an English club can become the centre of an international story, but ownership also carries the risk of turning a community institution into a project shaped by outside ambitions, media narratives, and transferable celebrity value. The text does not provide a detailed account of the takeover’s terms or outcomes. Its importance lies instead in how Max uses it as a clue and how the surrounding football world supplies competing models of ownership: supporter secession at FC United, speculative ambition at Oldham Athletic, and celebrity-backed visibility at Wrexham.

Significance for Max’s Professional Formation

The Wrexham reference occurs while Max is learning how closed and hierarchical football institutions work. At one point Jackie has to explain that agents and scouts do not pay full admission to matches: they call the club, identify the player they want to watch, and receive tickets at the turnstile. Elsewhere Max tries to present himself to the Yalley family as a football agent, offering to represent James Yalley and Kisi Yalley for ten percent with no up-front or hidden fees, while still lacking the practical authority associated with the profession.

The same pattern continues at Chester FC. Max undergoes a football medical despite his outsider status, fills in a Southport FC scouting report template without understanding its abbreviations, and later discovers that he does not yet possess a Football Association Number or licence. Mike Dean explains that Chester cannot simply appoint a twenty-two-year-old with almost no experience as Director of Football, especially when the club has only enough income to survive and Max’s earlier intervention has put an eight-thousand-pound annual sponsorship at risk. Instead, Mike proposes expanding Max’s scouting duties gradually, adding youth recruitment responsibilities, and creating a role through a trial period.

In that context, the Wrexham takeover is less a standalone plot event than a cultural signpost. It belongs to the media-facing version of modern football that Max is trying to understand, while his actual apprenticeship takes place among volunteer workers, community owners, precarious clubs, youth players, licences, sponsors, and improvised chains of trust. The distance between a celebrity-owned club that can generate a documentary and a small club that must protect an eight-thousand-pound sponsor gives the reference its irony and its narrative weight.