The Wrexham story - a Hollywood fairytale that football needs at this moment

How Todd Boehly must cast envious glances from Chelsea up to north Wales and sigh. Because in Wrexham two American football club owners are showing him precisely how to make dreams come.

Unlike Boehly, Rob McIlhenney and Ryan Reynolds are presiding over uplift rather than downturn, triumph rather than turmoil, delirium rather than disappointment. And in the process they are fast becoming the most cherished owners in the game.

After they had watched their Wrexham side beat Notts County in the most breathtakingly dramatic fashion on Monday afternoon, Reynolds and McIlhenney joined in the unbridled celebrations on the Racecourse Ground pitch.

McIlhenney told an interview that if we all had a limited number of heart beats he had consumed most of his ration in the closing moments of the game. Reynolds, meanwhile, revealed he was on the look out for the goalkeeper Ben Foster, whose penalty save in added time had ensured Wrexham sat at the top of the National League with four games left to play.

"When I get my hands on Ben Foster, he's going to be on the injured list because I'm going to break ribs, I'm going to hug him so hard," he gushed.

Unlike Boehly, who looks a man weighed down by his new purchase, these are two owners having the time of their life. For sure, they are both actors. But there can be no pretence about the manner in which the pair have been so evidently charmed by what they have bought. And their money is going where their mouth is.

Unless, for instance, he enjoyed the process, there is absolutely no reason why Reynolds would have just used some £1.5million of his Deadpool earnings to buy himself a house in a village near the Racecourse Ground in order to get to home matches easier than flying in from Hollywood. These are two celebrity owners simply loving what they are doing.

And the locals have been equally charmed by the two of them, bestowing on them the freedom of Wrexham just before the game against County. In the Turf Hotel that abuts their home stadium, the delight in their presence is evident in the Deadpool logo decorating one wall and in the stars and stripes flags fluttering in the car park.

'It’s been brilliant for the town'

Mind, they have a lot to be appreciative about in the Turf: not just the fact their team is now heading back towards the big time, but the fact that before the Americans became involved they certainly weren’t serving a steady stream of sightseers from across the globe.

“It’s been brilliant for the town, people are coming from all over, spending money here,” Wayne Jones, the landlord of the Turf told Telegraph Sport recently. “You hang around, I guarantee there will be some Americans or Aussies in here this lunchtime. Always are.”

The irony is the two Hollywood A listers only became involved in Wrexham in order to create content for their broadcasting company. The idea was to develop a fish-out-of-water television documentary charting the progress of a pair who knew nothing about football as they buy into an ailing club.

As gambles went it was not the riskiest: if it failed, they still had a show, albeit more Boehly-like than Bafta-winning. Instead they have presided over what has turned out to be the football story of the season, one which delivered an appropriate climax at Easter time: the tale of institutional resurrection.

More to the point, this is a yarn that has caught the wider public attention. Never before can a fifth-tier fixture have attracted the attention Monday’s game did.

There were just under 10,000 fans rammed into the three-sided Racecourse and the club could have sold twice that number of tickets. In Spain, the fifth tier is played out by La Liga second teams on training ground pitches. In Italy, Germany and France, most fifth-tier games don’t even attract an old man and a dog. Largely because the dog is watching the top division games on the telly.

Here, this match was screened live on BT Sport. And McIlhenney was quick to point out such was the worldwide interest that the total mentions about the game on Twitter were 61,923. Which, astonishingly, was more than the 61,795 generated by the equally dramatic Liverpool v Arsenal game on Sunday.

At least for now, it seems the British public are rooting for Wrexham in a way they never did for that other upwardly mobile A-list takeover at Salford City. Somehow, in a game in which the underdog is always the favourite of the uncommitted, this pair of monied Yanks have turned the most heavily backed operation in the National League into a cause to celebrate.

“We've got a football club owned by two legends who are both incredible scriptwriters,” said Foster, who has added to the tale by doing a Roy Hodgson and coming back from retirement to help the club where he first started through an injury crisis. “But they wouldn't have been able to write a script as good as that, what happened today.”

Which is in part why McIlhenney and Reynolds have become so smitten: football offers a narrative that they have come to understand cannot be artificially constructed. The good news for them is that right now the story of the imminent return of the third oldest football club in the world to the football league has turned out to be the smartest content around.