Forget Ryan Reynolds – meet the man plotting Wrexham’s stunning rise to the Premier League
Les Reed has acted as a football strategy adviser to Wrexham throughout their meteoric rise under the ownership of Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, and tells Zach Lowy about the club’s ambition
Anticipation is building to a fever pitch ahead of the 2025-26 Championship season, and Wrexham are preparing to play their first match in the compelling and cruel second tier of English football since the 1981-82 campaign.
Wrexham have undergone a seismic metamorphosis since being purchased by actors Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds through Wrexham Holdings LLC in November 2020, becoming the first club in the history of England’s top five football divisions to achieve back-to-back-to-back promotions. And while there have been several protagonists in that journey, one of the most important instigators in their growth is Les Reed.
After a lone managerial spell at Charlton in 2006, Reed rebuilt his reputation at Southampton as head of development, eventually winding up in a surprise role as a football strategy adviser to Wrexham’s board in 2021, with the Red Dragons starting their incredible rise through the English football pyramid.
“It was the strangest conversation I’ve ever had in terms of getting a job and starting overnight,” Reed tells The Independent. “I got a call from [Wrexham director] Shaun Harvey, who said, ‘They want you to look after the business and the football strategy.’ I’d worked with Shaun before when he was the CEO at the EFL, so I said, ‘Why not?’
“There was one game left in the season after the completion of the buyout, away at Dagenham, and then we had 10 days to come up with the released and retained list of players. He asked, ‘Can you get to the game and work on the list?’ I’d never seen Wrexham play in the current era, and I didn’t know any of their players … I went to the game undercover, and I wasn’t impressed.”
Reed wasted no time overhauling the squad, reshaping it after manager Dean Keates departed following the expiry of his contract. He spent several days glued to his laptop, poring over footage to decide which players to keep and which to get rid of. After five days, he received another call, asking if he could identify the club’s next coach. Reed pushed for Phil Parkinson, a shrewd move: the English coach is still in charge on the eve of their return to the Championship.
With the help of the FX docuseries Welcome to Wrexham, the club’s brand and financial strength exploded, attracting TikTok as kit sponsor, while their season-ticket sales trebled to more than 5,800
“Welcome to Wrexham is significantly important because it’s made Wrexham a destination club, both for fans and players, but it’s also meant that the revenues can be increased in a different way to most clubs,” added Reed. “You can max out your ticketing, your matchday hospitality, your merchandising and stuff like that. It brings all that to a much wider global audience and allows you to look at other revenue streams that you couldn’t have without that. But mainly, it helps Wrexham become sustainable in the long term, which is twofold.
“It means Rob and Ryan don’t have to keep putting their hands in their pockets, because we generate those revenues anyway, and, secondly, it works much better in the PSR or FFP regulations, enabling us to reinvest in the squad and players. It helps bring the entire community of Wrexham to life, but also to life elsewhere in the world, where even our pub landlord is a superstar celebrity in the United States. It’s done a fantastic job revitalising the community… it’s brought the history of Wrexham into people’s living rooms.”
The Red Dragons finished atop the National League in 2022-23, ending a run of 15 consecutive years outside the Football League. They followed that up by finishing second in League Two, and another runner-up finish in League One last term. But although their meteoric ascent has been no doubt buoyed by a financial affluence that isn’t normally afforded to lesser-funded clubs, they’ve nevertheless done so while also building for the future and ensuring strength and stability for years to come.
“It’s about having the right long-term strategy which encompasses initial success,” Reed notes. “No one will buy into the long term if you’re going nowhere in the first three years, so you’ve got to have these two parallel strands of winning now and winning in the future.
“And to do that, you need to have the right infrastructure. It doesn’t necessarily mean bells and whistles training grounds, but the right people in the key jobs to make that happen in a structure where it all fits together and works well together. I’ve seen mistakes happen where an owner will buy a club and try to turn them around like a merger or an acquisition and get quick wins, using similar strategies to the ones they would use in business and trying to apply them to football.
“There are two entities that make up a football club: the business entity and the sporting entity. Understanding the culture of the game is really important to get your business strategy right. Otherwise, what we see often is business strategy driving change, money spent on this, money spent on that, and then nothing gets better. And then the owner will say, ‘I’ve spent all my money, I’m not spending it any more. I’ve done enough.’ And then the fans get upset because they think the owner doesn’t care. So it’s really important that the investment comes with a really good sound strategy.”
The third-oldest professional football club in the world, Wrexham have prepared for the Championship season with yet another blockbuster squad overhaul. They have splurged a total of £11m on eight new players, including England international defender Conor Coady, Wales striker Kieffer Moore and ex-Nottingham Forest midfielder Lewis O’Brien, players with not just Championship experience but Premier League pedigree as well. It begs the question – just what exactly constitutes a successful 2025-26 season for Wrexham?
“A successful season is one where we build the squad and prove ourselves to be a top-end Championship team in terms of being competitive on the pitch and using that improvement to add requirements to the way we work, prepare, and train,” Reed maintains. “Our budget across the club is not just sustainable, but it’s growing in order for us to act in the January window if we need to kick on, or if we have a really good chance of getting promoted. No one’s foolish enough to predict that Wrexham will go up, but we know it’s our target.”
“We want to go up, our fans want us to go up, but my experience tells me that you can’t just measure success by going up. If we don’t go up, then what happens? Does everybody get fired? Do we panic like a lot of clubs would? No, we wouldn’t, but we’d want to be in a position to make sure we’re stronger next year.
“So success for me would be that we had a real chance of going up, whether that was automatic or through the playoffs. I think we’d be a good playoff team if it came to it, but what we want to be is a team that maintains that competitiveness in another season. Not going up doesn’t mean the castle falls down and we are struggling the following year.”
Wrexham travel to the south coast and St Mary’s on Saturday, to take on a Southampton team who were two divisions above them last season. Now just one promotion away from the Premier League, the fun is just starting for McElhenney, Reynolds and co.
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