Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have spent more than two years in the spotlight since buying Wrexham AFC - but there is a little-known fact about the pair which makes their Hollywood takeover story even more unlikely.
At times, Wrexham’s co-owners seem inseparable - but they did not actually meet in person until April 2021 - six months after coming together to buy the oldest football club in Wales.
Rob McElhenney had the idea to buy a football club while watching original Netflix series Sunderland ‘Til I Die.
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“I was falling in love with this team and these people and the story,” the American actor previously said on BBC Radio 5 Live. “In all honesty, it was the first time I had understood the concept of promotion and relegation. I didn’t know how the system worked.
“I looked up how many leagues there are and realised there are five leagues with the National League included.
“Even though I couldn’t afford to buy, say, Liverpool or Sunderland for that matter, or Man City or Man U, maybe we could afford to buy a lower-league team and have them ascend through the ranks.”
Watching the struggles of Sunderland from the comfort of his American home, McElhenney imagined that lower league teams might be facing harder battles off the pitch, especially with Covid threatening to topple the football pyramid.
The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star told his wife Kaitlin Olson: “I think I want to buy a football team.”
McElhenney says the conversation lasted about 20 minutes, before he declared: “I think I am going to do this.”
So how did Rob McElhenney join forces with Ryan Reynolds?
McElhenney said the pair had been “text buddies”, as he was based in Los Angeles and Reynolds was living in New York.
“He is on movie sets all over the world,” McElhenney explained. “One time, I looked in my Instagram DMs and he had DM’d me.
“From that point forward, we became friends and we would just text each other every once in a while.”
McElhenney said the idea for a joint venture into football came in the shower.
“I was thinking, you know, he’s super entrepreneurial," he said. "I wonder if he would be into coming in with me as a full partner? Because he could really raise the exposure of this thing exponentially.
“I got out of the shower and I said to Kaitlin: ‘What if I ask Ryan to be a full partner. Do you think he would do it?’.”
Olson’s response might have been the only thing better than McElhenney’s bright idea.
“I guess depends whether or not your ego can take sharing the screen with Ryan Reynolds,” she said.
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McElhenney says that he “furiously” sent the Deadpool star an email about the idea. Reynolds replied: “I’m in. Call me.”
McElhenney and Reynolds became co-owners of the Welsh club in November 2020 with 98% of votes cast by the Wrexham Supporters’ Trust in favour of the Hollywood takeover.
But McElhenney told the BBC in April 2021 that he prefers to consider himself a steward of the club, saying: “"I don't understand how I, an American who was born in 1977 in Philadelphia, could own a football club that was born in the middle 1800s in Wrexham, Wales. It doesn't make any sense.
"The way that I approach is that we are stewards of the club. I like the title chairman much better than I like the title owner because I truly can't own that. The town owns that.”
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