Humphrey Ker, Wrexham’s executive director and the man who ultimately set Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds on the path towards buying the Welsh club, doesn’t cry as a rule. But come the open-top bus parade earlier this month to celebrate Wrexham’s promotion to the EFL, that rule was broken.

“It was extraordinary,” he says. “We were coming up the street past McDonald’s and Primark, looking out at the crowd as we sang, ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ by Elvis Presley. And I just burst into tears.

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“I hadn’t cried for 10 years. Not because I’m a tough guy — not in the slightest. More I’m emotionally damaged, like a lot of posh English people who experienced strange repression in their childhood!

“But everything just got to me. Partly being on that street, which I remember cycling up every day in my first five months in Wrexham and everything being shut due to Covid — things felt bleak back then. And partly all the happy faces looking up at the bus.”

Such emotion was understandable. The Vanarama National League title race was relentless, as Wrexham and runners-up Notts County smashed the previous record points tally with 111 and 107 respectively. Great television for the Welcome to Wrexham documentary crew, but draining for everyone else, especially after the pain of the previous year, when Wrexham were pipped to the title by Stockport County on the final day, then lost 5-4 in the play-offs to Grimsby Town.

“I did say to Rob and Ryan at the end of last season, ‘Look, we will win the league by 30 points next year’,” says Ker, sitting in the north Wales sunshine with The Athletic. “And how that was going to be boring for the documentary crew.

“Little did I know Notts County would be brilliant. Thankfully, we got over the line and the celebrations were fantastic. Obviously, we’d had the opposite emotion 12 months earlier.

“But, in a way, the documentary was probably 10 times better for the audience because we lost in season one. I got loads of texts from friends of mine, saying how the show blew their minds only to then be shocked at the end because we lost. They hadn’t expected that.

“But we are not Ted Lasso. This is real life. You can’t choose your ending.”

A little over three years ago, the chances of Wrexham finishing top of any table seemed remote. The club was at a low ebb even before the pandemic struck, bobbing along in the lower echelons of the fifth tier despite the best efforts of the Supporters Trust, who had ultimately saved the club in 2011.

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Crucially, though, there was one pole position that Wrexham were destined to claim in 2020 — a list of prospective football clubs for two would-be investors from Canada and America.

“Lots of people have been very complimentary about us picking Wrexham,” says Ker, who compiled that who’s who of lower league football on behalf of McElhenney and Reynolds.

“In hindsight, it makes sense. And Wrexham was genuinely an early front-runner. But we did sit down and look at a host of clubs, assessing whether they were a good fit for what we hoped to do.”

Ker inadvertently prompted that search after recommending McElhenney watch the Netflix documentary Sunderland ‘Til I Die after the two friends were sent home from the set of Apple TV show Mythic Quest at the start of the pandemic. The verdict from the co-creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia followed on the Wednesday night. “I watched the first one with (wife) Kaitlin and the show was all right.”

Ker thought nothing more about it until his phone rang two days later. By now, McElhenney had watched both series and was hooked. “Rob’s telling me how the show had him in tears one minute, then jumping out of his seat the next,” he adds. “I was glad, thinking I’d earned myself a brownie point. But then he says, ‘We should do this. Buy a football team. But do it in reverse, by buying a club already struggling and try turn it around’.”

Hence, not long afterwards, Ker was given the job of compiling the list of clubs as contact was made with Inner Circle Sports, the investment bank that brokered the deals that saw Fenway Sports Group buy Liverpool and Michael Eisner purchase Portsmouth.

“At the very start, there was a brief suggestion from within Inner Circle Sports as to whether we’d be interested in Bolton Wanderers,” says Ker, the club having been relegated to League Two in May 2020.

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“They were available for what was a massively reduced price for a club of that size, history and infrastructure. But we felt it was just too big a fish, in a way. This is a place where there had been Premier League football not long before.

“So many factors went into choosing a club, including the narrative. Here (in Wrexham) was a historic, storied club that had seen these great, great days. Beating Porto, playing in Europe, having 35,000 on the terraces was a big thing.”

The selection process was thorough. “We had five criteria,” says Ker. “These were fanbase — genuinely 10 out of 10 for Wrexham on that, as they got 4,500 every week in the National League — geography, the narrative — as in the history of the town, the challenges a club has faced, such as (previous owner) Alex Hamilton here, that meant it deserved a break — socio-economic status and facilities.

“Facilities-wise, Wrexham did not score particularly highly. It didn’t own the Racecourse Ground and didn’t have a training ground. Where Wrexham did do well, though, was geography and catchment area.

“Take another example of a club we discussed: Hartlepool United. They didn’t score very well on geography because they were so close to Middlesbrough, so close to Sunderland and so close to Newcastle, competing with a lot of big, big clubs.

“There also wasn’t that huge amount of population there. Whereas in north Wales, there are about 750,000 people. A decent catchment area and a big, dormant fanbase that we felt wouldn’t take much to activate.

“We felt this might avoid some of the challenges other clubs who had been financially charged in the past have run into. Such as going up, getting to a certain level but not being able to attract crowds.

“Here, there was a sense this could really take off.”

Eventually, the field was whittled down to just two clubs, with Wrexham finishing top of Ker’s list of possibles with 38 points out of 50 and their nearest rival, Hartlepool, on 36. Only then was contact made with both clubs.

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“Ultimately, Wrexham had been a front-runner from very early on and remained the first choice. Hartlepool had been opened up as a second front if this had all gone wrong.”

The takeover went through in February 2021. It has been far from plain-sailing all the way since then, not least that play-off defeat at the end of the first full season under Reynolds and McElhenney, but Wrexham replacing relegated Hartlepool in the EFL next season suggests the right choice was made.

“I have had a few people ask me, ‘Do you think this could be done elsewhere?’,” says Ker. “Some earnestly, almost as if to say, ‘How do I do what you guys have done?’. But it will be a challenge for someone to find anywhere with quite as strong a sense of self.

“Rob and Ryan are integral to the success of the documentary, of course. They have drawn people in who wouldn’t normally watch a football documentary. But then they have fallen in love with Wayne at The Turf, ‘Scoot’ (The Declan Swans singer Michael Hett), Chally (groundsman Paul Chaloner) and Jordan Davies.”

Davies and his partner, Kelsey Edwards, featured in a heartbreaking episode of the documentary following the death of their baby son, Arthur. Happily, the couple were able to announce on May 2, the day of the team’s bus parade to celebrate promotion, the birth of their daughter, Harlow Navy Davies.

“Jordan hadn’t been able to join us due to the baby arriving early in the morning,” adds Ker. “But as we came down the Mold Road, by the Maesgwyn (Hall), Jordan was there with his brother, two dogs and the baby in the pram, waving at everyone. To see him was so special. He got such a big roar from our bus.”

Ker, now 40, was a relatively late convert to football, instead preferring to spend school breaktimes “pretending to be dinosaurs with my friend Richard”. Then came his road to Damascus-style epiphany at the age of 11.

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“We were playing in this inter-school competition when the ball came to me,” he says. “I thumped it so well that the ball flew into the top corner. The whole school was watching and, in that moment, I realised what football can make you feel like.

“After that goal, Richard would ask if wanted to go be a velociraptor and I’d be like, ‘No, fuck off, I’m a football legend now!’.”

This newfound devotion led to every spare minute being spent kicking a ball around. Liverpool also became a big passion that has endured, with any return visit from the United States before getting involved at Wrexham invariably featuring at least one trip to Anfield.

Philadelphia Eagles were McElhenney’s sporting love growing up, while Reynolds also had a deep connection to sport. In Welcome to Wrexham, the Deadpool star speaks openly about how sporting success made him feel “validated” in the eyes of his late father. What also became evident during the first series of the documentary was how both co-owners fell in love with football, particularly Reynolds.

Ker says: “When we started this, Ryan’s interest was in using the club as a philanthropic engine. The thing he gets a real kick out of — and always has done — is using his power to give joy to people.

“I’ll give you an example. We were on the bus parade and he’d pick out someone in the crowd below, shouting how he liked their poster or whatever. Such a little gesture but something that will have made their week or month, never mind day. That’s him as a person.

“He sees this as a way of doing that on a grand scale, almost supercharging what he has always done. That’s what got him into this at the start. Rob loved that but saw the sporting side as an attraction as well.”

Asked if there was a specific moment when Reynolds’ emotional involvement in the football club’s fortunes came to the fore, Ker says: “The FA Trophy semi-final against Stockport last season and how Paul (Mullin) scored that incredible chip over the ‘keeper in the last minute from over there.” He points towards the goal at the University End of the Racecourse.

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“Don’t forget, Ryan’s experience up to then had been watching (matches) via the (TV) stream, seeing us lose his first live game 3-2 at Maidenhead after having the wrong man sent off (Bryce Hosannah) in a case of mistaken identity and then drawing 1-1 at home to Torquay.

“A great occasion to be at, with the crowd buzzing at Rob and Ryan being there. But we conceded in the 89th minute and things went a bit flat. The next game Ryan came to was (in April) against Stockport in the Trophy. They were the team we had been chasing in the league for months and there was a sense we could haul them in.

“It lit a spark in Ryan. Ever since then, he has been all over it. Our group chat is where you can see a marked difference. We’d hear from Ryan all the time but it was often Rob asking questions like, ‘How’s so and so? Is he fit?’. Ryan would add ‘That’s great’ if it was good news but then there came a shift.

“Now, he is always the first one back in, asking how Jacob Mendy’s thigh is and who will switch to his position if not fit. Ryan lives on the east coast so gets the messages earlier in the day than Rob (in LA).

“Even so, it shows how he’s totally invested in the football side.”

This will no doubt come as a disappointment to the doom-mongers — invariably fans of Wrexham’s rivals — who say Reynolds and McElhenney will soon grow tired of the project and walk away.

“I do think the Premier League is doable one day,” says Ker when asked how far the club can go. “I go right back to why we chose this place at the start, the geography and catchment area with the history and enthusiasm.

“Look at the bus parade. There was everyone from 90-year-old ladies in wheelchairs with threadbare old Wrexham scarves through to three little boys standing on an electric conductor box with a sign they’d painted themselves.

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“I’ve had a very privileged life and had some really fun jobs as an actor and writer. But I was saying to Rob on the bus, I love our day jobs but you just don’t get this in TV, with 40,000 people taking to the streets to shout, ‘Great show’ at you. That’s why this has honestly been the best three years of my life.”

(Top photo: Humphrey Ker by Richard Sutcliffe)

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