Owning a soccer club is hitting Ryan Reynolds in the wallet. Wrexham, the Welsh team bought by Reynolds and fellow actor Rob McElhenney in 2021, released its accounts for the latest financial year on Thursday and reported that the amount owed to the celebrities has risen to nearly $11.4 million, up from $4.67 million from the previous year, ending June 2022, per the AP. While the club said turnover rose from nearly $7.5 million to $13.3 million and that future prospects are positive, its losses increased to $6.4 million from $3.66 million. Reynolds and McElhenney purchased Wrexham, one of the world's oldest soccer teams, for $2.5 million while the club was in the fifth tier of the English game.
It has since been promoted to the English Football League and is bidding for back-to-back promotions, which would take the team to third-tier League One. The club cited more money earned in the EFL and the "continued popularity" of the Welcome to Wrexham documentary as reasons to predict that turnover will continue growing. It said "income generated by the club [is] now sufficient to meet the operational costs of the club going forward."
The losses were "deemed necessary to allow the club to maximize its full potential in the shortest time practically possible," Wrexham said. "The club is under no immediate pressure to repay these loans at the expense of the progress we seek to achieve," it added, "and further financial support will be provided/secured to support the capital expenditure projects the club is currently planning." Those projects include increasing the capacity of its Racecourse Ground stadium. Wrexham is regularly getting crowds of more than 10,000 spectators, more than three times the number attending before the takeover and a remarkable figure for a fourth-tier team. (It's done even better in the US.)
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