Why did Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buy Wrexham? The full story of the National League club and the Hollywood owners

This feature on Wrexham owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney first appeared in the September 2021 issue of FourFourTwo. 

Humphrey Ker still struggles to get his head around the past 18 months. 

One moment he was a writer and actor in Rob McElhenney’s comedy series Mythic Quest, the next he was being sent back to Britain to find a football club for McElhenney and Hollywood icon Ryan Reynolds to buy.

During the opening season of filming, Ker would occasionally spend his lunch breaks watching Liverpool’s live midweek matches. McElhenney is a sports fanatic, but couldn’t fathom the appeal of football beyond playing FIFA with his kids.

“Rob saw how much me and another guy on set were into it,” Ker tells FFT. “But the big shift was during lockdown. I recommended he watched Sunderland ’Til I Die. I thought, ‘That’s the key to this. He’s a storyteller. He needs to understand the story of football’. 

“The All Or Nothing documentaries are very good, but they don’t cut to the heart of the game, which is the fans. Rob being Rob, he devoured every documentary. He’s a doer, so he said, ‘Let’s buy a football club’. I said, ‘Er yeah, OK’. He replied, ‘No, really’.”

NEWS Hollywood co-owners break their Wrexham duck at Maidenhead

BIG PLANS Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney dreaming of taking Wrexham into Premier League