(l-r) Rob McElhenney, Ryan Reynolds. FX.
Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC in 2020 and have been working on expanding the Racecourse ever since. The project has posed some issues — and cost the actors a lot of money.
“We’re here to talk about a possible new stand because it doesn’t look like the Kop is going to be up any time soon,” McElhenney, 47, revealed during the Welcome to Wrexham episode that aired on Thursday, May 23.
“The Kop is very slow moving,” Reynolds, 47, said, noting that it’s “hard” to get things approved. He and McElhenney went into a conversation about their thoughts on bureaucracy.
“People who have season season 1 and season 2 know how much I personally enjoy British bureaucracy,” McElhenney quipped. Reynolds added, “I can’t maintain an erection unless I’m thinking about British bureaucracy.”
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Welcome to Wrexham viewers have been hearing about the Kop — and stadium overhaul — since the show premiered in August 2022. Wrexham executive director, Humphrey Ker, offered a recap of the Racecourse trials and tribulations over the years.
The Racecourse. FX
“The Kop was the iconic stand at one end of the stadium, and it has sadly sat a kind of derelict mass of rusting metal for the last few years,” he explained. “So, we applied to the U.K. government for some money to build a fancy new stand there and got denied. But we decided to demolish the stand anyway and then we applied for more money, got that approved and then ran into any number of exciting regulatory issues that we had to iron out before we built the damn thing.”
Thursday’s episode revealed that McElhenney proposed a temporary Kop comprised of thousands of seats. They were told that it makes “zero sense financially” and Ker’s concern was that “if the stand collapses and kills a bunch of people, I go to jail.”
Reynolds and McElhenney addressed the “safety issue” to do everything “above board” so there were no concerns of jail.
“That’s the biggest complaint that I’ve been seeing is people on the town saying we cant get in to see the games because of the tickets,” McElhenney said of Wrehxam fans. “Us losing a lot of money seems to be kind of the whole thing.”
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Reynolds quipped, “Losing a lot of money is so in right now.”
Elsewhere in the episode, McElhenney confirmed that the temporary Kop was being built. The project left the duo with a net profit of negative $456,458.
The “beautiful” temporary stand was built, per McElhenney. “But we are going to lose a significant amount of money on it,” he added. “However, I believe it’s a competitive advantage to be able to close that stadium in and to hear that support.”
New episodes of Welcome to Wrexham premiere Thursdays on FX.
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