Mullins, Messi, and a pair of football clubs with big ambitions
Wrexham AFC has had a hot couple of years. But one of the biggest teams in the world offers a lesson in the risks of overspending
An American and a Canadian went to watch a football match in north Wales on the weekend and, well, you can probably see where this is going.
Wrexham, the club bought for a pittance by actors Rob McIlhenney and Ryan Reynolds four-ish years ago and which has shot through the ranks of English football to play in third-tier League One this season, began their campaign with a 3-2 home win over Wycombe.
On Tuesday, they subsequently lost their opening round game of the League Cup, a concurrent season-long knockout tournament including all the clubs in England’s four professional tiers, a 4-2 drubbing away to Sheffield United. That they lost to Sheffield United was neither surprising nor embarrassing. United was in the Premier League last season, even if they stunk, and so they would have been big favourites, especially at home. (Sheffield United also has a pre-game song, which includes references to a greasy chip butty, sung to the tune of Annie’s Song by John Denver. This is relevant here for no reason other than it is funny.)
Anyway, the interesting thing is not that Wrexham lost the League Cup game, but that they didn’t really try to win. Manager Phil Parkinson made 10 changes to his starting lineup from Saturday, which math-aware readers will note is just about the entire starting XI. Why would the gaffer do such a thing? Because he wants to save his best lineup for League One games, which suggest the club has designs on getting promoted again. (Star striker Paul Mullins is injured and didn’t play in either game.)
Which is kind of crazy. After two consecutive promotions, Wrexham AFC has gone from a team that spent 14 years in England’s fifth tier, which is basically semi-pro, to the third tier, with an eye toward the second tier. There are many reasons for the rise, most of them related to the wealth of the owners and the global earning power of a a club featured in a popular docuseries, Welcome to Wrexham, but in reaching League One the club is no longer an economic whale among minnows. Wrexham may have spent what has been reported as a club-record fee of more than $500,000 to acquire midfielder Ollie Rathbone — amazingly, the second time they broke a club record to sign an Ollie — but Birmingham City spent $17-million this summer to augment a club that was relegated from the second-tier Championship. Among the owners of Birmingham City: Tom Brady. Yes, that one.
And yet it is also possible that Wrexham management is keeping their powder dry. There are still two weeks in the summer transfer window, plus another one opens in January, and it could just be that Deadpool and Mac want to see how this whole League One thing goes before deciding if they push again for promotion or just chill for a bit and enjoy being comfortably mid-table.
Or maybe things go off the rails. Sometimes that can happen.
FC Barcelona has almost nothing in common with Wrexham AFC other than that they are both old.
Barcelona is also one of the biggest and most successful clubs in the world, former home to legends like Lionel Messi, Ronaldhino and Johan Cruyff.
Here’s another way it is unlike Wrexham AFC: it is pretty much broke.
The short version of the story is this: under its previous president Barcelona kept up its tradition of spending lavishly because supporters demanded it (and the presidency is an elected position.) This came to be a problem when, for example, they were paying Messi a salary of something like $150-million a year. He was probably worth that, but meanwhile they were spending nine-figure sums on guys who didn’t work out. It only takes a couple of those contracts going sideways to put a club in serious financial straits, because Spain’s top tier, like most European leagues, requires teams to spend more or less within their means. Then COVID hit and Barcelona’s books were essentially a grease fire. Debts were said to be well over $1-billion. A new president came in, Joan Laporta, but they couldn’t pay Messi his normal weight, and he left for Paris in 2022. He cried, they cried, everyone cried. Tough beat.
Laporta’s response to the financial crisis was not to say, ‘Look, we kind of blew our brains out here and need to just take a couple of seasons to reset,’ because that’s the kind of thinking that gets you ousted. Instead, he sold off chunks of the team’s future media rights for short-term payments to allow them to keep signing big-name players. It worked, to a point: Barcelona won La Liga in 2022-23, thanks in part to big-name signings like striker Robert Lewandoski and winger Raphina, and the appointment of club legend Xavi Hernandez as manager.
But, last season? No bueno. Barcelona fell far behind Real Madrid in the La Liga race and was knocked out early from the Champions League, and Xavi announced in January that he would see out the season and then leave because, and I am paraphrasing here, he was sick of this shit. Basically, he said managing Barcelona was an impossible job because the expectations are so high. Again: this is from a guy whose dream job was managing Barcelona.
But then Barcelona finished the season strong, and Xavi decided to stay for 2024-25, I guess because everyone cooled down a bit. And yet, one more twist: Near the end of the campaign Xavi said something publicly about how it was a little tough given the financial challenges at Barcelona and the fact that Madrid keeps signing the best players in the world at great cost, and Laporta took offence and said Xavi was out again.
Which brings us to today, with Barcelona now managed by Hansi Flick, last seen getting pantsed as manager of the German national team in the 2022 World Cup. He did win a pile of trophies with Bayern Munich, but everyone wins trophies with Bayern. Could I win the Bundesliga with Bayern? Well, no, because my German is mostly good for ordering beer and sausages. Could I win the Bundesliga with Bayern if I had a good translator? I think I’d have a shot.
Anyway, Flick is installed and Barcelona is still broke. Or broke-adjacent. They have a $150-million hole in their accounts from last year because one of Laporta’s money-raising schemes, which involved, and I am not making this up, NFTs, Web3 and the metaverse, didn’t pan out. (Shocker.) La Liga won’t let them register any new players until they clear that up, so they still need to sell guys to make room for the guys they have bought but can’t use. And there are rumours that Laporta will make up the shortfall but selling off future earnings again. If this sounds like he has re-mortgaged the house like three times already, it’s because he has.
Best of luck, Hansi. Maybe don’t read the local press.
Which brings us back to Wrexham. The Barcelona story is worth mentioning only because a) it is funny and b) it illustrates that even the biggest football clubs in the world can get themselves in a massive financial pickle if they get silly with the spend-to-win idea.
But as much as Reynolds and McIlhenney have invested significantly in England-lower-league terms, they are a long way away from spending at a level of a top-tier European club. Wrexham spent $500k on Ollie Rathbone; Barcelona spent $90-million on Dani Olmo. (Who can’t play for them yet.)
The question for Wrexham, as they try to climb another tier quickly, is whether they can realistically keep this up. It’s an old, storied club, but it’s still so much smaller than England’s heavyweights. Liverpool’s Anfield holds almost 60,000 fans. Clubs in London and Manchester have even bigger stadiums. Wrexham’s Racecourse holds 12,600, though the Hollywood owners have expansion plans. How much can the success of a television series, and Wrexham’s global appeal because of it, give them the financial clout to make those next (big) steps?
There’s no doubt the actors have big ambitions with the club. But it’s not like you have to look hard to find out what can happen when you swing big, and miss.