Reynolds and McElhenney almost faced Celtic and Rangers before Wrexham takeover

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney initially thought about buying Scottish Championship side Arbroath before buying Wrexham.

Back in November 2020, the Hollywood duo bought the then National League side. Fast forward to three years later, and Reynolds and McElhenney were on the pitch at the Racecourse Ground celebrating a National League title win back in April, which earned them promotion to League Two.

So far through 15 games, Wrexham sit third in the table, three points behind Notts County, whom they battled for the National League title last term. However, Wrexham's fortunes could have been vastly different to how they are now had the Hollywood duo acted upon their initial idea of whom they should buy.

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Speaking to BBC Scotland's Sacked in the Morning podcast, Wrexham's executive director, Humphrey Ker, explained how initially, McElhenney had suggested he and Reynolds buy a club in either Ireland or Scotland, which is where the conversation turned to buying Arbroath.

By pumping money into the Scottish Championship side, Arbroath would likely have earned promotion, meaning they would be facing off against the likes of Celtic and Rangers in quick time. However, the ceiling of English football, compared to that of Scottish football, was eventually what swung the Hollywood stars to buying Wrexham.

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"So right at the jump, Rob said, well, what about a club in Ireland?" Ker said. "Because his family are from Ireland, or from Northern Ireland, or from Scotland. And I'm afraid to say that I was a bit of a party pooper on that because my feeling was the ceiling in the English game is that much further away.

"My flatmate from university was a Red Lichties fan, so I have to go to Arbroath for my Scottish football club of choice. So ultimately, I said, if you went to Arbroath and we injected money and built that team and you got into the Premiership pretty quickly, you would then run up against Celtic and Rangers.

"When I lived in Edinburgh, I used to go to Hearts games. There was that period where all the Lithuanian players came over and it was like it would be a genuine challenger to that big two in Glasgow.

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"But the speed at which you would get from Arbroath now to a sort of mid-table Scottish Premiership team would be quite quick. And then you would have this problem where you just get hammered all the time by the big boys there. It would just be tricky.

"And then what do you do? You go into the Champions League and get battered in the Champions League by a Greek team and then that's sort of the cycle year on year. So, ultimately, we were like, we've got to do England or the English system."

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