When will Wrexham reach the Premier League?

wrexham have just been promoted into the football leagues and there's one question on everyone's lips and that is when can we expect them in the Premier League and I thought you know what let's dig into the data and so what I've done is I've gone through all of the teams we've moved from the fourth tier up to the first tier within the Premier League era so that's since 1992-93 season and here they are these are all of the teams who've been promoted from the fourth tier up to the Premier League in that time now as a caveat during that period some of the names of the leagues have changed so what I'm going to do in this video is refer to tiers so fourth third second and first tier now there's a few interesting things to notice here you can see there's only five teams who took longer than 20 Seasons to get into the Premier League and of these teams four of them are quite interesting that's the four teams with asterisks here so we've got Bradford reading Burnley and Brighton now each of these teams didn't have a continuous upwards trajectory actually what happened is they were relegated from the second tier into the third tier at some point which accounts for the fact that it took them longer than 20 Seasons we do have Barnsley who got promoted in 97.98 they're quite impressive because they actually didn't have a relegation they simply went up the divisions and took forever to get out of some of them and speaking of teams he took forever to get somewhere we've got wolves here who actually got through the first two tiers of their promotions quite quickly and then spent forever in the championship so they sit between the teams you took more than 20 Seasons to get promoted and the rest of the teams who took less than 15 Seasons to get promoted but what we learned from this overall data set is that it's going to take you about 14 seasons on average to get from the fourth tier to the first tier in the Premier League era and actually there's a really interesting waiting to that time frame because most teams don't spend that much time in the fourth tier so any 3.4 seasons in the fourth tier in the third tier you're looking at about 4.5 Seasons before you're getting promoted and then the second tier 6.4 Seasons to get out of the championship so there's definitely a skew towards getting out of the championship but obviously the owners of wrexham aren't thinking in terms of a 20-year time frame they want to get up to the Premier League much quicker and that means quick promotions and there are some teams in our data set who've managed to do that quite quickly so we've got Luton here that many people will know from the Premier League League this season he managed to jump quickly from the fourth third into the second tier and they weren't that long before they were in the Premier League as well so the big question is can we learn anything from those teams who manage these quick promotions so on the board in front of me here we boiled it down to all of the teams who took less than 10 years to make the promotion through tiers three and then two up into the Premier League and there are some standouts here particularly the teams we've Managed IT in Five Seasons or fewer so we have two teams that Managed IT in Four Seasons That's Fulham in 0102 and then hole in 0809 and then more recently we've got a couple of teams we've Managed IT in Five Seasons That's Bournemouth in 1516 and then Luton as we've said who managed it last season so what lessons can we learn from these teams who got quick promotions well let's begin with Fulham because Fulham got promoted in 0102 but they have been bought out by Mohamed al-fired in 1997 which is at the very beginning of this process he puts a lot of money into the club and that money helps them get to the Premier League very quickly the same is true of whole they had a couple of takeovers in the early 2000s which allowed them to put a bit more money into to their team and again that translates into very quick promotions as well and so obviously money can be very helpful if you're looking to get your team promoted quite quickly it is worth mentioning that Hull did have Phil Brown as the manager in this period And so good management along with a bit of money to help you along is a really nice recipe for Success at getting your team promoted now if we come to Bournemouth and Lieutenant they don't necessarily have great financial backing but what they do have is a really nice blend of good management and consistent playstyle which carries them up the divisions and so with Bournemouth we have Eddie Howe getting them promoted into the third tier he does leave he goes to Burnley and comes back and then he gets them promoted again into the championship and carries them up into the Premier League so even though he's gone for a season you still have that continuity over this stretch carrying them up into the Premier League similarly with Luton the manager who carries them through the divisions is Nathan Jones but again he does leave actually he gets them promoted into the third tier he then leaves and it's left to Mick Harford to get them into the championship but then Nathan Jones comes back he has them on a promotion trajectory and then he leaves again to go to Southampton handing over to Rob Edwards who similarly retained the same play style at the end of that season to get them into the Premier League as well so despite the fact there's a lot of chopping and changing there is still that blueprint that carries them all the way through the divisions so money and management are the two key things here so let's have a look at rexham to see how they compete on both fronts so let's start with money first and the good news is is that wrexham are really well placed to do well in the fourth and the third tier because both of those divisions are ruled by the salary cap management protocol which is a really fancy way of saying there's a salary control what that looks like is that you can only spend a certain amount of your revenue on salaries in the fourth tier you can spend 55 of your revenue on salaries and in the third tier you can spend 60 of your revenue on salary now as we can see from the data in front of me here this hasn't actually been happening in recent seasons and that is because of covid so as you can see here in the fourth T in 2021 actually the wage to turnover ratio was up at 80 that means 80 of a team's Revenue was being spent on wages which as you can imagine is not a particularly sustainable way of living but as you can see in The Following Season they've managed to get below that 55 threshold which is what wrexham will be expected to do as well but this won't pose any problems for rexham because they're so good at generating Revenue so in the first season of Welcome to Rex and we have Sean Harvey the CEO saying that their wage budget for the year is around 2.3 million pounds now since then they have renegotiated some contracts so that figure is now thought to be closer to 2.5 million but if we think about it in terms of a 55 wage to turnover ratio then wrexham only have to make around 5 million pounds for that to work and actually in terms of our best estimates based on the last year rexham are much more likely to be up closer to about 10 million pounds in terms of Revenue which gives them around 5.5 million pounds worth of wage budget to play with which is much higher than the season before all of which suggest that wrexham are fine because they're making so much revenue that they're going to be able to cover the costs of their wage Bill if they make it to the third tier that's going to add another half a million to their wage budget even if their revenues don't increase and so again they're probably likely to be fine in that instance but that brings us to the championship which as you can see is a nightmare when it comes to wage to turnover ratio 2021 that was up at 126 that means that on average most teams are spending more on their player wages than they're getting back in Revenue which is not a recipe for sustainable football club running as you can see those figures are coming down but it is still very high and a big reason for that is that the championship doesn't come under the same Squad cap management protocol that the other two tiers do instead the championship is regulated by ffp which are probably a bunch of letters that you have heard before because that is the same principle that is applied in the Premier League now the ffp rules for the championship are that you have a three-year window and each window you can make five million pounds worth of loss so that's a total of 15 million pounds over that three-year window now there is provision to go up to 13 million pounds worth of loss every year as long as your owners are putting money in for that loss so that means in total you can make losses of up to 39 million pounds a year in the championship over three-year window and what that means is there's a lot of teams in the championship who are operating at very high levels of loss so this is a list of profit before tax for the championship clubs in the 21-22 season and as you can see the majority of those clubs are actually losing money now we do have a couple of teams here that have made a lot of money but it's worth noting that the figure for Stoke actually includes exceptional items and they were actually operating at a loss of around 39 million which puts them right down here in the pack the championship is a brutal League from a financial perspective and if you get stuck in there for a while it's going to cost you a lot of money and to illustrate that we've just got a chart here which shows you how much money was thrown into Championship clubs and a 10-year stretch that ended in 2122 as we can see Fulham hands in a way the biggest Spenders here pushing 750 million pounds spent over that period we also have QPR over the 250 million pound Mark as well but still a load of clubs here spending well over 100 million pounds in a bid to get to the Premier League and the reason why you might make that bid is because the premium league is very lucrative so if you get into the Premier League even if you're immediately relegated you're going to make an estimated 170 million pounds from three seasons which is obviously a massive pot of money and that is what those owners are chasing but if a promoted side can survive in the league for even one year then the projected Financial benefits are massive as well because as soon as that happens then entitled to a greater trench of the parachute payments which means over five seasons they're projected to earn around 290 million pounds again a massive chunk of money and that is the pot of gold that many of these owners are chasing after so how much will it cost for wrexham to make it from the fourth tier up into the Premier League well we handed this problem to tfo's financial expert Abhishek Raj he crunched the numbers and he came back to us with a few estimations so he estimates for rectum to get from League two to League one it's gonna cost around 10 million dollars the same again from League one to the championship but once you get to the championship those costs rock it right up so he reckons that once you get to the championship the cost of getting into the Premier League is then going to be a around 150 to 200 million dollars now I've included these figures in dollars because the owners of wrexham are American now those owners are in fact Ryan Reynolds and Ron mcelhenney who are very famous actors in the United States I'm told which is good news when you're in the National League because they have a lot of money but relatively to the championship they do not have a huge amount of money actually we've estimated that their value together is around 400 million dollars if you make it to the championship it's then going to cost you 200 million dollars on average to get out of that league and that actually accounts for around 50 of the net worth of these two guys and so if they are going to get out of the championship the odds are they're going to have to try and find money from somewhere else but that's not a problem either because they have access to resources that most other clubs at that level simply do not have and that's where the Disney plus series comes in because these owners won't just be asking for investment they'll be offering something themselves exposure and this is why massive corporations like Tick Tock or United Airlines are willing to sponsor a team who are in League two because you're not just paying for a name on a shirt you're paying for a name on a shirt which is appearing on a Global TV series and the potential benefits here are exponential because the further up the divisions that wrexham go the more appealing that sponsorship is going to be and so they'll attract bigger and more lucrative sponsorship deals so when it comes to money wrexham look to be really well set to make it up to the Premier League without any hitches but as we said there are two aspects that are really impactful when it comes to getting promoted to the Premier League and the second one is management so on the board in front of me I've got what is probably rexham's best 11 going into this season and that team is fronted by these excellent forward players in Paul Mullen and Ollie Palmer who you'll know well if you have watched welcome to wrexham but they're not the only Stars here we've got James McLean who's a former Premier League player who's coming in the summer and Stephen Fletcher as well also a premier league player who's come in this summer and there's some excellent players as well across the pitch so Elliott Lee for example who's a really important Cog for them in the heart of their Midfield and so in many respects this is a team who would be comfortable playing at a higher level which bodes well for wrexham's future but that doesn't mean to say that they do this at the expense of the tactics so they do have a very direct style they like to try and build up from the back particularly through the wide areas to try and then get the ball into the box to their star forwards but if their attempts at building out the back aren't working then they still have the option of going long to someone like ollipomo is quite a tall forward you can then play the ball off into pull Mullen or into the midfielders and they can generate chances in that way so they can play quite a direct style of play as well but the problem becomes that you can sometimes become too reliant on your star forwards to generate chances and all you end up doing is getting the ball into the box for them for example you may have seen a lot of people talking about the fact that bentoza who is one of the center-backs has a massive throw on him so he can get the ball from these long throw situations into the box into Palmer and Mullen and they will often score in that way and obviously set pieces will be a dangerous source of goals as well why might this be a problem well to quote Juan malio the faster the ball goes forward the faster it can come back so if you play a fairly direct style and you can expect those games to become quite transitional the ball will go backwards and forwards and you will lose control and control is very important when you're playing at the highest level and if you add to this the fact that rexham's press is quite passive what this means is that often there are periods of play where the opposition are able to hold the ball and actually manipulate it as well earlier this season rexham lost five nil to Stockport and that was a game which really typified that Stockport were able to control the ball for Fairly long periods and just ended up chipping away at wrexham until they've got the goals and so in the long run the best way for rexham to compete at the highest level is by adopting a bit more of a controlled approach and actually this is reflected in the data when we look at the teams who are promoted to the Premier League so on the board in front of me I've got a graph from opta which just shows play style of the various teams who've been promoted to the Premier League since 1617 season on the x-axis here we've got passes per sequence so the team's making more passes in their possessions are going to be towards this end of the spectrum and lo and behold we've got Burnley here from last season and then on the y-axis we've got Direct speed up field and So the faster the team the higher they're going to be on the graph and so we can see we've got car and Luton here who are slightly outliers they're playing more direct football the majority of teams who are making it to the Premier League are towards this more slow and intricate this more controlled approach in this bottom corner here this season wrexham would appear on the graph around this area here so they're not a million miles away from that more controlled approach but it is worth remembering that they are playing in League two and once they get to the championship that could change drastically if they're still trying to play that direct play style so the big question is how sustainable is this tactical approach in the long run because if they get to the championship and they decide that their style isn't sustainable then it will require them bringing in a new manager rebuilding the squad and that could add a number of years to their projections for promotion to the Premier League so from a financial point of view it seems clear that wrexham are well set up to fly through the divisions and get through to the Premier League they may even do it in record timing but on the other hand there is that nagging doubt about the way that they play football will it be sustainable all the way through the divisions and if it isn't how many years will it add on to their time up through the divisions so with all of that taken into account looking at a best estimate of between 7 and 10 seasons before we see wrexham in the Premier League playing sustainable Premier League football if you like this video please consider subscribing to the channel the athletic is home to some of the world's best sports journalists including journalists dedicated to each Premier League team so every fan gets the coverage they deserve not just the big clubs and you can try it for free now for 30 days see the link in the description

Channel: The Athletic FC

Views: 480,609

Keywords: Tifo, tifo football, tifo irl, tifo in real life, football, irl

Id: vTZFee3jpEQ

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023