Ryan Reynolds Bought a Fifth-Tier Welsh Soccer Club Just to See What Would Happen

Ryan Reynolds got to his mid-forties the ordinary Hollywood way: a teenage soap opera, a sitcom, a run of comedies nobody outside them would call ambitious, and then, in his late thirties, Deadpool — a character he’d wanted to play for a decade, and a movie that became one of the biggest R-rated comedies ever made. Along the way he built a second career as an investor: a stake in Aviation Gin that Diageo bought for $610 million in 2020, a stake in Mint Mobile that T-Mobile bought for $1.35 billion in 2023. By any reasonable measure, he had already made it several times over, with nothing obvious left to prove.

In late 2020, Rob McElhenney — a friend he mostly knew through texting — brought him an idea that had nothing to do with movies: buy a football club. Not one of the famous ones. Wrexham AFC, founded in 1864, the third-oldest professional football club in the world, then playing in the National League — English football’s fifth tier, a level below anything a casual fan would ever see broadcast, propped up mostly by the faded grandeur of its own history. Neither man had run a sports team. The deal closed in February 2021.

Here’s what keeps this from reading as a one-time purchase: there was no single finish line built into the plan. Their own words on the day they bought it were about becoming “the latest stewards in the long and storied history of Wrexham AFC,” working alongside the players, staff, fans, and town to grow the club — not to attend one glamorous match and call the project complete. The docuseries that followed, Welcome to Wrexham, spent its first season on the unglamorous, ordinary texture of the thing: a groundskeeper’s daily routine, a town that had already watched clubs like this one die elsewhere, and real fear the club could drop to an even lower division before the story had barely begun.

What came after only makes sense as an ongoing project, not a stunt. Wrexham won promotion out of the National League in 2023, out of League Two in 2024, and out of League One in 2025 — three divisions in three seasons, the first club in the history of English football, a league system dating to 1888, to manage three straight promotions through the professional pyramid. In their first season in the Championship, English football’s second tier, in 2025-26, they finished seventh — two points behind Hull City, close enough to feel the playoff spot, not close enough to take it. As of this writing they are one season into building toward the next one, not one match from a closing scene.

Reynolds has summed up what the whole ride actually feels like from the inside in five words that are funnier and truer than any highlight reel: “I love every second of hating it. @Wrexham_AFC is the greatest drug on earth.” Not a line about triumph. A line about being fully, uncomfortably alive inside something that keeps refusing to resolve.

Most people who reach the kind of success Reynolds already had by 2020 spend the next decade managing it, protecting it, or cashing it in. He and a friend instead went looking for something with no guarantee attached at all — a struggling club in a Welsh town neither of them had ever lived in — and five years and three promotions later, they’re still showing up for a season that hasn’t finished being written. The part worth noticing isn’t that a movie star can afford a football club. It’s that what he actually bought was an open-ended project he could keep saying yes to, one season at a time — the same shape of decision available to anyone weighing whether to finally join the rec league, take over the fundraiser, or say yes to the harebrained thing a friend just floated over text.