Picture a football club so old it predates the light bulb, the telephone, and the automobile.
Wrexham AFC was formed in 1864 in the back room of a pub called the Turf Hotel, making it the third-oldest professional football club on the planet. For over a century, the club was the beating heart of a small Welsh town, home to an FA Cup upset over Arsenal when Arsenal were the reigning English champions, a stadium that hosted Wales' first home international and is still the oldest international ground in use anywhere in the world, and generations of supporters who never once considered following anyone else.
Then it nearly died.
Wrexham crashed into administration in 2004, spent years fighting off a property developer who tried to take its stadium, and was relegated out of the English Football League in 2008. It bottomed out in the fifth tier of English football, a level so far from the spotlight that most fans of the sport couldn't have told you it existed. In 2011, with the club on the brink of extinction, its own supporters raised more than £100,000 in a matter of hours to fund their own takeover bid. For nearly a decade, the fans themselves ran the club, out of loyalty and little else.
This is the club that two Hollywood actors bought, sight unseen for almost everyone watching—approved by the fans in November 2020, completed the following February. What happened next is the story we want to tell before supporters and newcomers to the club alike take their seats at Yankee Stadium, for the team's first match in the U.S.
Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac (formerly Rob McElhenney) inherited an institution with a broken business model and a fanbase that had every reason to distrust outsiders. Five years and three consecutive promotions later, Wrexham sits in the Championship, one step from the Premier League, the first men's club in English football history to climb from the National League to the second tier in three straight seasons. Last season they finished seventh, two points off the playoffs and the club's best league finish in 162 years. On Wednesday, they face Liverpool, the reigning Premier League champions.
It's a story that reads like a movie because, in a sense, it is one. The docuseries Welcome to Wrexham captured the whole climb start to finish, and if you haven't seen it yet, it's worth the watch. But underneath the Hollywood gloss is something more useful to us: a genuine leadership case study, playing out in real time, in front of cameras that don't blink.
Stories like this one are worth studying closely, because the best turnarounds usually follow patterns. At Virtuosi League, we've spent years identifying those patterns across the CMOs and executives we work with, and distilled them into the LEAP Six Pillars of Leadership. They're an interconnected framework where each pillar strengthens and influences the others. Practiced consistently, together they create the conditions for effective leadership in complex, fast-changing environments, establishing trust, clarity, and confidence across stakeholders.
Wrexham's rise happens to be one of the clearest real-world examples of all six in motion at once.
Of note: When Reynolds was asked in an interview what he and Rob had gotten right, he waved the question off: this isn't a TED Talk, he said, and neither of them would want to pretend they knew all the answers for all of it. They are building in real time and appreciate someone who is willing to say, "I don’t know the answer yet" and then go and figure our the best solution.
Fair enough—what follows isn't their leadership philosophy. It's what the record shows they did.
The first thing Reynolds and Rob did was call themselves "stewards" of the club, not owners.
That word choice mattered. A club with 160 years of history doesn't need a founder. It needs someone willing to protect what already exists while building what comes next. Every renovation to the Racecourse Ground, every dollar into the academy, was framed around what the town of Wrexham needed first. The lesson for us: the strongest leaders take the time to understand what they're inheriting before they touch it.
Before Reynolds and Rob, as they're known, owned a single share of the club, they had to win a vote from the Wrexham Supporters' Trust, the fans who had owned and run the club since 2011. These were people who had personally bailed the club out of bankruptcy. They weren't going to hand over the keys to two actors with a camera crew based on charm alone. Reynolds and Rob carried that vote 1,809 to 26 with a real plan: investment in the training facility, respect for the club's Welsh identity, and a commitment to the town itself. They had to read the room and earn the room before they had a single win on the scoreboard to point to. The lesson: influence gets built deliberately, with the people whose trust matters most..
Most owners would never let cameras into the room during a brutal loss or a tense boardroom argument. Welcome to Wrexham does exactly that. The docuseries doesn't sand down the hard moments, it leans into them, because the show's creators understood something most leaders forget: transparency about struggle builds far more trust than a highlight reel ever could.
Audiences fell in love with Wrexham because they got to see what it truly costs to make things go right. The lesson: the leaders people trust most are the ones who let others see the real work.
Reynolds and Rob know movies, TV, and storytelling. They knew they weren’t football experts. So five months into their ownership they hired Phil Parkinson, gave him real resources, and then did something a lot of leaders struggle with: they let him lead. Four leagues and five years later, Parkinson is still in the job, and Reynolds says the best decision the two of them ever made was to not make football decisions. They’ve since brought in execs like Michael Williamson and Shaun Harvey with deep experience throughout the football world. The lesson: the highest form of leadership is sometimes stepping back far enough that your expert can actually do their job. Empowering a team isn't a soft skill. It's a discipline.
Wrexham attracted a growing roster of global commercial partners—TikTok, United Airlines, a new multi-year partnership with Firefox—as well as outside investment from the Allyn Family and Apollo Sports Capital. Reynolds and Rob translated excitement around the club into a sustainable business story. Reynolds and Rob converted that goodwill into real commercial alignment, bringing partners and investors into a shared growth story that made business sense. The lesson: relationships that only stay warm never scale. The leaders who build lasting influence know how to turn genuine connection into genuine investment.
Their first full season in charge ended in a playoff semi-final defeat—88 points, and nothing to show for it. The club they had taken on was fifteen years into the fifth tier, and one good year hadn't been enough to end that. This was not an overnight success story. The turnaround came from disciplined, unglamorous, repeated investment that finally compounded. The lesson: resilience means showing up the same way after a disappointment as you did before it.
Wrexham's story didn't end with one great season. It's still being written, one deliberate decision at a time. The same is true of leadership.
Bonus lesson: the biggest investment Reynolds and Rob made was in the people around them.
The manager they trusted, the staff they empowered, the community they chose to build alongside. The clubs and companies that win the long game are the ones willing to invest in their people before the scoreboard proves it was worth it.
These six pillars are the foundation of our LEAP Flagship program, and this fall is a good moment to make that same kind of investment, in your team, or in yourself. Our Fall class kicks off September 22–25 at Carmel Valley Ranch, and space is still open. Inquire or apply today.