Humphrey Ker has a lovely turn of phrase.
Considering Wrexham’s executive director was a successful comedy writer long before life changed after turning good friend Rob McElhenney on to the idea of buying a Welsh football club, this should not come as a surprise.
Even so, his assertion that three or so years with McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds at the helm of Wrexham has felt like “building a rocket ship, while also piloting it out of the atmosphere” seems prescient.
Two promotions in as many years mean the landscape has changed dramatically. For a start, next season will bring trips to a string of former Premier League clubs, including Birmingham City. Off-field progress has been equally rapid, with annual turnover increasing almost ten-fold to more than £20million and 55,000 replica shirts being ordered this season.
This rise has left parts of the club playing catch-up with the team on the pitch, especially infrastructure, as a new training ground is needed, along with work on the delayed new Kop stand getting underway.
Ker, who splits his year between Wrexham and Los Angeles, is aware of this, hence the analogy about piloting a rocket ship still under construction.
“I’ve been very clear with Rob and Ryan, as much as I can be, over the need to say we need the infrastructure to catch up with the first team,” he says.
“The two of them were very big fish in a small pond as a National League club. They were still big fish in a small-to-medium-sized pond in League Two. We’re about to go into a league with clubs who can mix it with us. They are both aware of it.
“We need to get the training ground sorted, the Kop started. Our commercial operation has done a sensational job, as have all the departments, but they need support. They need more bodies, more office space. We need to expand our scouting network. We need to become more sophisticated in almost every area.”
Away from Wrexham, Reynolds and McElhenney have been playing their personal games of catch-up thanks to the Hollywood actors’ strike, which paralysed that industry. A five-month impasse meant various projects, including Reynolds’ movie Deadpool 3, were put on hold.
A consequence of the strike finally being settled last November has been fewer matchday visits by the owners to The Racecourse Ground, as filming these mothballed shows and films had to take priority as well as other scheduled commitments, such as overseeing series three of Welcome To Wrexham as executive producers.
This has led to the duo following manager Phil Parkinson’s side mainly on TV in the past few months, meaning the group chat the co-chairmen share with Ker and fellow board member Shaun Harvey took over during the promotion run-in.
“Shaun is very good at remaining level-headed,” says Ker, when asked for an insight into the dynamic of those in-game chats. “He tries to assess everything on where we are. I’m closer to him on that scale. Then you have Ryan, who is pretty emotional. Rob bounces off the walls and is a do-er. I’m not sure how he deals with watching sport — he wants to kick and head every ball.”
Like the club, Welcome To Wrexham is having to evolve but remain true to its roots.
The big shift for the third series came via broadcast timing, moving up from an autumn release to spring to give the show a more immediate feel. That, though, has not changed the winning formula that brought five Emmy awards for the first series, ensuring we hear just as much from the local community as we do the two Hollywood stars. What is noticeable, however, is the increased emphasis on dressing-room footage.
“I love the stories of local folk,” says Ker, who has joined Reynolds and McElhenney as an executive producer on the show after having been a consulting producer.
“Very touching and moving. And there are some wonderful stories once again, such as Arthur Massey, one of our oldest living fans, who celebrated his 100th birthday. Some of the stuff around (midfielder) James Jones and Chloe, his wife, and their son is very moving. But I can’t deny I do enjoy seeing our players tear strips off each other (in the dressing room) and then come back out and produce extraordinary turnarounds.
“Take the footage from Swindon (shown in episode two), when we’re 4-1 down at half-time. You can see everyone is livid. The juxtaposition between that and the elation at full time when we came back to draw 5-5 was magical.
“Not least because all those on screen are people I have a deep abiding affection for. I love them. To see them happy is good for the soul.”
Ker’s enthusiasm for Wrexham remains undimmed. He is hugely popular with staff and supporters in his role as executive director, and is effectively the club’s public face when the owners are otherwise engaged.
That, though, does not prevent him from missing family and friends in Los Angeles. His career as a comedy writer and actor has had to take a back seat. This can’t be easy, even allowing for how Eton-educated Ker continues to write for the Apple TV show Mythic Quest, which was co-created by his wife Megan Ganz and McElhenney.
There has been that job-title change on Welcome To Wrexham to reflect his increased role behind the camera, particularly when liaising with producer Patrick ‘Paddy’ McGarvey and his team in Wales.
“The crew are here all the time,” says Ker. “But, of course, we cover different ground. That allows me to say, ‘You might want to get yourselves in the club car park at 12.30, because Steven Fletcher, the Tartan Samurai, will appear’.
“Or, it might be pointing the crew in the direction of the Wrexham Miners’ project. Or some of the work the community trust is doing. Basically, sourcing stories by being there.
“I’ll see an early cut of the episodes, to check they’ve put the right badge on the right club and so on. If someone says, ‘Wrexham make the 340-mile round trip to Crewe’, I’ll step in and say, ‘No, you’ve found a different Crewe on the internet’.” (Wrexham and Crewe are less than 30 miles apart.)
As for the show’s big challenge of navigating the absence of the two co-owners at matches for much of this season, he adds: “There’s a feeling, ‘How do we weave Rob and Ryan into this?’. They are such an important part, both very engaged, even when not present. But it’s not that fun showing phone calls and Zoom calls on a documentary.
“Where we’ve been fortunate with the two and a half years covered by series one and two is that so much happened. It dropped in our laps. I’m thinking of the Notts County game and Ben Foster saving the penalty.
“I vividly recall turning round as I screamed my heart out and catching the eye of Paddy, the main man on the ground who marshals our coverage. We looked at each other as if to say, ‘Oh, my god! Even we can’t mess this episode up such is the drama we’ve just seen’.
“This season, they’ve had to box a little bit more clever. They’ve had to work hard to get that story out there this time.
“Capturing things like the period when we were in a bad run of form and how that manifested itself in the dressing room. I’m really excited for people to see that stuff. Plus the celebrations after Forest Green.”
Mention of the afternoon when Wrexham clinched promotion to League One brings us back to preparations for next season and the need for all areas of the club to keep evolving.
“We’ve had three seasons of unparalleled success,” says Ker. “Everyone has got used to that. But the reality is — and maybe I’ll be proved wrong in the coming season — you can’t sustain that year after year after year. Manchester City don’t even manage that.
“There will be difficult patches along the way, not just on the pitch. Take this summer, when we are saying goodbye to some (team) stalwarts. Men who have given an extraordinary chunk of their life to this club and played through the pain barrier. At times, taking up a position on the sidelines that they’re just not used to doing but still giving everything to help the boys over the line. We are bidding farewell to these guys and that hurts.
“A heartbreaking element of this is, as we go on, more and more of those figures will go.
“But that’s the nature of the club – it has to constantly evolve or it is in trouble.”
Episodes one to three are available to stream via Hulu in the USA and Disney+ in the UK. New episodes are released every Thursday via FX in the U.S. and the following day in the UK.
(Top photo: Ker flanked by McElhenney, left, and Reynolds; Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)