Of all the differences between American soccer and the sport played around the world, perhaps the most notable is the concept of promotion and relegation. That’s a system where the highest finishing teams from one league move up to a higher division next season, and the lowest teams move down. It’s a fairly prominent fixture of soccer, or football, and it builds a whole lot of excitement for games that might otherwise seem meaningless. So there’s a lot less running out the clock once you’re out of the playoff race like you do in the US, or, much worse, intentional tanking to get a better draft spot, a near strategy for teams in the NFL and NBA.
One European club currently enjoying the thrills of moving up is the now globally well-known Welsh soccer team Wrexham. They’re well known not because they’re 159 years old and the third oldest soccer club in the world. And they’re not well known because they’ve won the Welsh Cup 23 times, something you’ve probably never heard of. They’re well known because actors Ryan Reynolds and Robert McElhenney bought the team in 2020 with two goals. First, to see if they could take this fifth-tier club and move them up divisions towards the Premier League, the top of English football and the strongest professional soccer league in the world. And second and perhaps more importantly, produce a Netflix docuseries telling the story.
Three years in, they’ve been far more successful than anyone would have imagined. The show Welcome to Wrexham will soon release its third season and already won five Emmys. While I’m a bit more partial to the recent British soccer docuseries Sunderland Till I Die, the show has the right mix of Hollywood flair and sports drama to attract a wide audience. It’s somewhere between Ted Lasso and Friday Night Lights and managed to put the downtrodden Wrexham club on an unprecedented stage. And on script, along with the Netflix flame has come success on the pitch, with the team now moving up two divisions in the past two years. After last week’s games, Wrexham has earned a spot to play in English Football League One, which oddly is actually the third ranked British league. But technically speaking, Reynolds and McElhenney are halfway to their ultimate goal.
Of course, the steps get quite a bit more difficult moving forward. It’s kind of like earning your first two badges in Boy Scouts – they’re basically gimmes. By the time to get to Life and Eagle, the distance is much further. For the record, I topped out a Tenderfoot. Wrexham spent over $7 million on player salaries last season. That’s well over the average for their league, something that’s been allowed by Wrexham’s increase in revenue. To be clear, Manchester City spent well over $200 million this year, and even the cheapest team in the Premier League spent around $30 million. And they’re about to get sent back down a division. So to keep climbing, Wrexham will definitely need a new calculus.
Which really raises two questions. First, should sports success be driven by team economics. Clearly they are, but is that good for the whole, where a team can buy championships. I’m sure for all the excitement around Wrexham, there’s just as much distain from fans of pretty much any other team that doesn’t have a Hollywood benefactor. There’s a lot of folks both in and outside of Manchester that don’t like City for that very same reason. So just realize that for all the good feels about Wrexham, there’s a lot more Goliath than the narrative would suggest.
Second, this story works because of soccer’s systems of Promotion and Relegation. A story about Wrexham getting better and winning their leagues isn’t that interesting until it means there’s bigger dreams on the horizon. It’s something we expressly don’t have here in the US, where no matter how bad the Jets are, they’re still in the NFL. It’s also why the economics of American professional sports leagues work like they do – essentially using a form of socialism vs. a far more capitalistic European model. Isn’t that ironic. And I guarantee you that if I asked Americans if they’d like to give relegation a try, most would say absolutely no. Just like they wouldn’t want socialized medicine either.
It's yet another odd difference between the US and other places in the world. Including soccer.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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