Wrexham, USA
Why Welcome to Wrexham cannot happen in the US
The streaming television series Welcome to Wrexham tells the story of what happened when two wealthy American actors/producers/entrepreneurs — Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney — bought a lower tier soccer team in Wrexham, Wales. The premise is clever: purchase and invest in a (relatively) inexpensive professional sports team and offset the expected losses by telling the story via a compelling television documentary. The show presents the English professional soccer system as idiosyncratic and quirky, something strange, from a different, long ago time — not unlike the Welsh language itself, which the documentary also highlights. But English soccer could also be described using words that Americans use to describe ourselves: capitalist, innovative, meritocratic.
In English soccer, two Americans were willing to make a bet on a small club that plays in an economically depressed region of Wales. They did this for two reasons: they thought it would be fun and they thought there was a small chance the team could make it to England’s Premier League. If they overcome the very long odds of achieving the latter, Reynolds and McElhenney could make a tidy profit.
Reynolds and McElhenney purchased the Wrexham Football Club (FC) for less than $3 million in November 2020. According to Sportico, the average Premier League team was worth $1.5 billion in 2024 — more than 500 times the purchase price of Wrexham FC. Hence the potential upside of Reynolds and McElhenney’s investment. In English soccer, it is possible for Wrexham, as well as literally thousands of other clubs competing in lower tier leagues, to make its way via a system of “promotion”, to England’s top tier, the Premier League.
The concept of promotion (and its companion, “relegation”) is foreign to most American sports fans, though both Welcome to Wrexham and Apple’s streaming series Ted Lasso have increased awareness of the idea. The premise is simple: teams that finish at the bottom of the standings (or “table” in English parlance) of the Premier League are “relegated” to England’s second tier league, which is called the English Football League Championship. Teams that finish at the top of the standings of the English Football League Championship are “promoted” to play in the Premier League. Promotion and relegation happens through a series of divisions or “tiers”, with more and more teams competing as you make your way down the tiers, which the English refer to as the “pyramid”. Thousands of clubs participate in the system, including Wrexham FC.
None of the major sports leagues in the US, including Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), or National Basketball Association (NBA), have a system of promotion and relegation, or have ever had a system of promotion and relegation. The most popular American leagues are “closed”, rather than “open”. If a team finishes at the bottom of the standings, they finish at the bottom of the standings. There are no second or third tier leagues — only “minor” leagues and college teams and independent semi-professional leagues. The story of Wrexham is therefore not possible in the United States. There are no lower tier teams playing in economically depressed regions in the US that, with investment and innovation, could make it to the big league. There are no stories in America for Reynolds and McElhenney to tell.
One advantage of a closed system is that the teams that participate in the league can cooperate with each other to increase the league’s popularity. MLB, the NFL, and the NBA have numerous structures in place that increase the chances that each team is competitive. The theory being: if every team is more or less the same as every other team, the games will be more competitive and fan interest will remain high. The increase in popularity of these leagues over the past forty years suggests this theory may be correct (it’s not, but that’s a topic for another day). Cooperative measures such as salary caps or “luxury taxes” (fees paid to other teams once a team exceeds a payroll threshold), amateur draft orders that reward poor performing teams, restrictions on relocations to other cities, and revenue sharing, are now standard practice in each league and not something fans take issue with. But these cooperative measures could and should be called anticompetitive.
In the United States, a famously capitalist country, cooperation among entities that compete with each other is discouraged and illegal. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King do not share revenue with one another to ensure their collective success. Ford, General Motors, and Tesla do not collectively restrict employee salaries to increase their collective chances at profitability. Microsoft, Google, and Apple do not agree to locate and operate exclusively in different parts of the country.
Why is this? Why is it that in the United States, a country in which a non-trivial share of residents view the word “socialism” with deep skepticism and “meritocratic” with pride, end up with professional sports leagues that operate in an anticapitalist manner? And in England, a country where even the right leaning politicians advocate for socialist programs, is soccer a ruthlessly capitalist enterprise? In nearly all other aspects of American society there is an ethos of rewarding hard work, talent, risk taking, and innovation. But not in sports. In sports, socialist ideas abound: talented young players are assigned to teams via a draft system that rewards poor performance; a salary cap ensures that lower performing teams do not spend more on players than higher performing teams; revenue sharing takes from the high performers and gives directly to low performers; new teams can only enter the league if all the other team owners agree; teams need the permission of other teams to move to another city or region; and lower performers, even those that are spectacularly incompetent, are never asked to leave the league. This is strange.