Culture
Birmingham City vs Wrexham: The EFL celebrity derby and a battle for U.S. fandom
The phrase ‘Monday Night Football’ may be no stranger to heavyweight clashes but an all-time NFL great taking on Deadpool has to be a first.
This is Tom Brady tackling Ryan Reynolds, League One’s big spenders going head-to-head with Hollywood FC — or simply, Birmingham City versus Wrexham.
No matter how we dress up a fixture recently described on X by Wrexham co-owner Rob McElhenney as “an absolute banger”, Monday night’s showdown is a big deal on and off the pitch. Two clubs who are the very embodiment of globalised football will meet in a sellout clash that is being broadcast live on both sides of the Atlantic.
“A really, really high-profile match,” says CBS Sports executive vice president Dan Weinberg before Birmingham host Wrexham, which will be shown on two channels as part of the network’s four-year deal with the English Football League (EFL).
“We’ve carried every Wrexham game this season and we’ll continue to lean into them as much as we can. They are impossible to ignore in this country with the celebrity influence they have and the visibility of Ryan and Rob. We are enthused by the growth of their profile in the market.
“These two clubs have owners that resonate very well in this country.”
Not so long ago, few would have batted an eyelid in the United Kingdom over this particular Anglo-Welsh contest, never mind in the United States. The two clubs have very little shared history, other than the £1million City paid for Bryan Hughes in 1997 that remains Wrexham’s record transfer fee.
Now, though, the power of celebrity — plus back-to-back promotions for Wrexham and last May’s shock relegation for Birmingham — means this League One fixture carries plenty of intrigue.
Deadpool star Reynolds and McElhenney, through the success of the Emmy-award-winning Welcome to Wrexham documentary, have turned a previously provincial club into a global sensation with two successful pre-season tours of North America under their belts.
Birmingham are no less fascinating thanks to the 2023 takeover by Knighthead, the U.S. investment firm fronted by co-owner Tom Wagner and supported by minority investor Brady, the seven-time Super Bowl champion.
Relegation at the end of their first season was certainly not part of the script but it has done nothing to dim the group’s huge ambitions, which include building a new stadium after buying a 60-acre plot of land around a mile from St Andrew’s.
Former NFL quarterback Tom Brady became a minority owner at Birmingham in 2023 (Beatriz Velasco/Getty Images)
City clearly don’t intend on hanging around for long in the third tier, judging from the £20million ($26m) they splashed on transfers this summer. Around half of that is understood to have gone on wrestling striker Jay Stansfield from Fulham’s grasp, with Birmingham paying between £12m and £15m before add-ons.
To put that figure into context, the previous record paid by a club in this division before the recent window was the £4million Sunderland paid for Wigan Athletic striker Will Grigg.
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Wrexham co-owner McElhenney will no doubt recall that particular signing due to it featuring heavily in series two of Sunderland ‘Til I Die, the Netflix show that first gave the comedy actor the idea of buying a football club.
His team have been no slouches with recruitment, either. The £2million spent during the summer window was an unprecedented outlay for Wrexham, made possible by last season’s annual revenue smashing through the £20million barrier. Blue-chip sponsors, such as United Airlines, contributed heavily to that club-record figure.
Both camps have been entering into the spirit during the build-up to Monday’s eagerly-anticipated encounter, with Wrexham enlisting the help of Eli Manning, a long-time NFL rival of Brady.
In response to Manning donning the Welsh club’s team shirt, Brady took to X and Instagram — where his combined following stands at 18 million — with a cheeky video featuring one of his prized Super Bowl trophies that ends with an appeal to McElhenney to “educate the Wrexham fans just a little bit on the history of the NFL?”
See you Monday! @BCFC @Wrexham_AFC @RMcElhenney @VancityReynolds https://t.co/Ny87RekOPR pic.twitter.com/YyvkWmL5JK
— Tom Brady (@TomBrady) September 14, 2024
AJ Swoboda, managing director of sports intelligence firm Twenty First Group, believes Wrexham are a prime example of how to tap into the U.S. market over the longer term.
“High-profile figures like Tom Brady or Ryan Reynolds will always help bring clubs into the spotlight,” he says. “Especially in crowded or foreign markets like the U.S.
“But, while celebrity owners generate a short-term buzz, long-term fan engagement requires sustained sporting success and smart marketing — largely digital — strategies.
“The Welcome to Wrexham docuseries has been key to growing Wrexham’s global fanbase but the club’s owners have then backed up these efforts through material sporting performance improvements.”
He cites how an analysis of Google Trends data over the last year shows Wrexham had 22 times the interest in the U.S. compared to Birmingham and 1.4 times that of Premier League neighbours Aston Villa, even though the latter have qualified for the Champions League.
“Tom Brady’s appeal and status should continue creating interest for Birmingham City in new markets,” adds Swoboda. “But, as with Wrexham, this attention needs to be converted into deeper fan engagement. Celebrity minority ownership is not as unique as it used to be.”
Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds became Wrexham’s owners in 2020 (Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images)
As Wrexham co-owner McElhenney made clear when tagging Brady on X, Monday night’s clash under the St Andrew’s floodlights has all the ingredients to be a cracker — but, perhaps their biggest battle lies ahead.
In a recent report titled Connecting and Winning U.S. Fandoms: A Guidebook For European Clubs, fan data specialists CLV Group suggest that 36million U.S.-based soccer fans — or 44 per cent — are still undecided on which team to support. The group’s CEO Neil Joyce estimates a potential $1.1billion is up for grabs.
The big Premier League clubs or members of the European elite, such as Real Madrid, Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain, are expected to hoover up a sizeable chunk of this bounty, but Joyce also believes clubs with high-profile celebrity owners, such as Wrexham and Birmingham, can earn a piece of the action.
“Wrexham’s story is phenomenal,” he says. “It has the underdog element, a club on the brink of extinction that starts to work its way back up. Americans love that kind of storytelling.
“Then, there’s the measurability of it all. United Airlines, one of the biggest airlines in the world, is on the jerseys. That kind of link makes a huge difference. I was on a flight with United earlier in the summer and they were handing out the (free amenity) bag with the Wrexham (pyjamas).
“It isn’t about just the match. It is the personalities around it. Look at how Taylor Swift has brought new fandom to the NFL (her partner Travis Kelce plays for the Kansas City Chiefs) in the same way Ryan Reynolds has brought Deadpool fans to Wrexham.
“Given the new EFL rights deal (with CBS), there will be a lot more exposure to Wrexham for sports fans in the U.S. They can tap into that. Same for Birmingham, with arguably the NFL’s greatest of all time.
“Look at Tom Brady’s adjacent sports investments. He has the (NFL team) Las Vegas Raiders, he has a WNBA team (Las Vegas Aces). Again, I’d be tapping into those fanbases and bringing them on the journey with Birmingham as well.”
As Joyce points out, central to making any potential inroads into the U.S. sports market is CBS Sports becoming the new home of the EFL. With 250-plus matches being shown live across the network per season for at least the next four years, the potential exposure is huge.
CBS does not reveal publicly viewing figures for individual matches but executive vice president Weinberg says he has been “really, really happy with the viewership in the first month”.
He believes a key factor in America’s increasing EFL curiosity is the promotion and relegation setup that sees clubs potentially move up and down the pyramid, such as how Birmingham dropped into League One last May and are now determined to bounce straight back up.
“The U.S. market has wrapped their arms around that,” says Weinberg, who is at pains to stress that showcasing all 72 EFL teams is important to the network. “It’s compelling and dramatic.”
Birmingham’s bid to win promotion straight back to the Championship is their season’s major plotline (Cameron Smith/Getty Images)
Recent years have seen a flurry of U.S. investors getting involved in the EFL. By last Christmas, 22 of the 72 teams were either wholly owned by or had minority investors from across the Atlantic. Fourteen of those had accepted new investment since Wrexham’s takeover in 2021.
“What Wrexham have done brilliantly is globalisation and diversification,” says Laurie Pinto, a specialist in football financing and club acquisitions. “That’s easier said than done. (Wrexham director) Shaun Harvey and others should get a lot of credit for that.
“There’s lots of people who think they can do the same. That’s the challenge: trying to make a global push with partners outside the UK to diversify the income stream.”
Asked if he felt future years will bring even more investment from North America, Pinto replies: “Yes, there is a lot more interest. Most of these American owners think global and they put money in.
“U.S. sport is expensive — if you want to buy a basketball, NFL or baseball team, we are talking in the billions.”
With the U.S. hosting the 2026 World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico, sports media analyst Larry Johnson believes the new four-year TV deal means EFL clubs are in a prime position to benefit.
“Viewership data from the last couple of World Cups shows a rise in popularity (in the U.S.) for sports in Europe,” he says. “They did quite a bit for La Liga and the Premier League, even a bit for the Bundesliga.
“All the arrows point towards the next World Cup pushing up the numbers on the Premier League and EFL. Wrexham have an opportunity here, especially if they get promoted this year, to really do something special.
“Wrexham are already drawing numbers. They had a friendly with Chelsea (in July 2023) on ESPN, one of the largest cable networks. It pulled 300,000 viewers. That’s comparable with a Major League Soccer game on the same network.”
As is perhaps inevitable in an age when regular-season games in the NFL and Major League Baseball are played in London, there has been talk of the Premier League or EFL possibly doing similar by switching one-off fixtures to the States.
Such a move would be hugely controversial. When the Daily Mail suggested this summer that Birmingham and Wrexham were in talks over a possible switch, Canada-born Reynolds was very quick to vehemently deny the story.
Wrexham’s international profile has led to high-profile friendlies against Premier League giants Chelsea (Lyndsay Radnedge/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
Nevertheless, such talk remains, with CLV Group’s Joyce believing it could help a European competition steal a march in attracting fans.
He says: “The monetary gain and attempts to capture the market would be a lot easier if European clubs played competitive games in the U.S. There is more than $1billion on the table.”
Such talk about growing audiences and realising potential is, of course, for the boardoom. On the pitch, all that will matter come Monday evening are the three points.
Dan Scarr joined Wrexham in the summer from Plymouth Argyle, where he won the League One title in 2023. He is a lifelong Birmingham fan who spent three years on the playing staff at St Andrew’s after arriving late in the professional game at 22.
“What’s been going on there is crazy,” the defender tells The Athletic. “Good for the city and, being a Birmingham City fan, it is great for them. The atmosphere will be electric and it’s a sellout. There’s also the bragging rights between the owners, both being American and stuff like that.
“But we want to stop that (title-winning) parade. Everything else doesn’t matter.”
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(Top photos: Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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