Wrexham's Hollywood owners considered an investment into the SPFL, it has been revealed, but the size and scale of Celtic and Rangers ultimately put them off.
Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney took over the Welsh outfit in 2020 and the club are now starting to make their way back up the English football pyramid.
After a decade in non-league, Wrexham have returned to the EFL and are contenders for promotion from League Two this term.
Humphrey Ker, executive director and friend of McElhenney, has revealed the journey could have been so different though, with all football avenues in the UK explored.
Ker told BBC Scotland's Sacked in the Morning podcast: "So right at the jump, Rob said, well, what about a club in Ireland? Because his family are from Ireland, or from Northern Ireland, or from Scotland. And I'm afraid to say that I was a bit of a party pooper on that because my feeling was the ceiling in the English game is that much further away.
"My flatmate from university was a Red Lichties fan, so I have to go to Arbroath for my Scottish football club of choice. So ultimately, I said, if you went to Arbroath and we injected money and built that team and you got into the Premiership pretty quickly, you would then run up against Celtic and Rangers.
"When I lived in Edinburgh, I used to go to Hearts games. There was that period where all the Lithuanian players came over and it was like it would be a genuine challenger to that big two in Glasgow.
"But the speed at which you would get from Arbroath now to a sort of mid-table Scottish Premiership team would be quite quick. And then you would have this problem where you just get hammered all the time by the big boys there. It would just be tricky. And to take Ireland, for an example. If you go with Dundalk or someone like that, very quickly you would become the unassailable champions of the League of Ireland.
"And then what do you do? You go into the Champions League and get battered in the Champions League by a Greek team and then that's sort of the cycle year on year. So, ultimately, we were like, we've got to do England or the English system."
