Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds thought about purchasing Scottish team Arbroath before Wrexham, which could have meant a drastic left turn for their UK football career from the start. Prior to purchasing Wrexham, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney considered purchasing Scottish Championship team Arbroath. The Hollywood pair purchased the National League team in November 2020. Three years later, Reynolds and McElhenney were celebrating a National League title victory that they had won in April that had earned them a promotion to League Two on the Racecourse Ground. After 15 games, Wrexham is currently three points behind Notts County, their rivals for the National League title the previous season. But if the Hollywood pair had followed through on their first recommendation for whom to purchase, Wrexham’s fortunes might have been very different from what they are today.
Wrexham’s executive director, Humphrey Ker, spoke to BBC Scotland’s Sacked in the Morning podcast about how, at first, McElhenney had suggested that he and Reynolds buy a club in Scotland or Ireland. That’s when the discussion turned to purchasing Arbroath.
Investing heavily in the Scottish Championship team would have probably earned Arbroath promotion, putting them in quick succession against teams like Celtic and Rangers. But in the end, it was the ceiling on English football as opposed to Scottish football that convinced the movie stars to purchase Wrexham.
“So right at the jump, Rob said, well, what about a club in Ireland?” said Ker. “Because his family is Scottish, Irish, or from Northern Ireland. I must admit, though, that I was a little bit of a party spoiler because I thought the English game’s ceiling was that much farther away.
“I have to travel to Arbroath to support my preferred Scottish football team because my former roommate’s favorite team is Red Lichties. In the end, I stated, if we went to Arbroath, invested in that team, and helped them achieve rapid promotion to the Premier League, you would eventually face Celtic and Rangers.
Hearts games were something I used to attend when I lived in Edinburgh. There was a time when all the Lithuanian players arrived and it looked like Glasgow’s big two would actually face competition.
“However, it would take little time to go from Arbroath to a Scottish Premiership team that is sort of in the middle of the table.” And then there would be this issue where the big boys there would just keep hitting on you. It would just be challenging.
“So what do you do then? You enter the Champions League and are humiliated by a Greek team, and that is essentially the same pattern every year. In the end, we decided that we had to adopt the English way of doing things.
