Investment in underdog stories has the power to capture the imagination of communities
Sport, and in particular football, is no stranger to the butterfly effect. Remember when one goal in the third round of the 1990 FA Cup saved Alex Ferguson from being fired? One moment started a winning streak for Manchester United and led to one of the most successful managerial careers in football history.
One of the most unexpected, however, was a decision made in a living room in Hollywood, amid a global pandemic, when It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Rob McElhenny tuned in to Netflix docuseries Sunderland ‘til I Die. Engrossed by the featured fans’ passion and unconditional dedication to their struggling team, McElhenny recommended it to fellow Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds, and the future of the English Football League was changed.
Six years later, Wrexham is no longer the team from a small Welsh mining town languishing in the English non-league. It’s a global cultural and entertainment property, whose accompanying documentary Welcome to Wrexham has drawn fans across the globe, from LA to Tokyo.
Since then, Reynolds and McElhenny have been joined in England’s lower league by a range of celebrity figures. NFL icon Tom Brady has shares in Birmingham City, rapper Snoop Dogg is involved with Swansea City, Michael B. Jordan is a minority Co-Owner of Bournemouth, and most recently, YouTuber KSI has taken over at Dagenham & Redbridge, with a docuseries already in the works.
The underdog arc is one of the most universally compelling narrative structures in existence.
Tom Wild, Head of Strategy at Fuse
What’s kick-started this trend? From a creative and brand lens, it’s not the sporting prowess of the teams, but the story of how they got there.
Elite-level football is a brilliant spectacle. But it is not great drama. The outcomes at the top are largely predictable, the players are untouchable, earning more in a week than most fans earn in a decade, and the jeopardy - the genuine ‘what happens next’ tension - has been largely engineered out by financial dominance. The status of the ‘big six’ feels unreachable to anyone else.
There is no such dominance in the wider English Football League. Promotion and relegation drama is visceral when the consequences involve real jobs, community identity, and the survival of institutions that have existed for over a century. The players feel more accessible; they live in the same areas as supporters, they ride the same buses, and even, if you drop down low enough, work the same jobs as fans, alongside their football career. The players are people, rather than brands. This is the raw material of great storytelling, and it has been sitting largely untapped in the EFL for decades.
What McElhenny and Reynolds recognised, two Hollywood professionals who understand narrative for a living, is that Wrexham’s value was not in its league position. It was in its story architecture. A club with a 160-year history, a fiercely loyal community, a recent slide into non-league obscurity, and a potential comeback arc. In screenwriting terms, that’s not a football club. That’s a pilot with a guaranteed second series.
The underdog arc is one of the most universally compelling narrative structures in existence. From Rocky to Ted Lasso, audiences across cultures are hardwired to root for the scrappy challenger. Lower-league football provides this in real time, with real consequences, week after week.
For celebrities, this story offers something money can’t easily buy elsewhere: authentic cultural meaning. Owning a stake in a Premier League club is expensive, passive, and largely anonymous. Owning Wrexham or Dagenham is a creative act. It is a vehicle for self-expression, community engagement, and content that feels genuinely earned rather than manufactured. The story is real, and that reality is the point.
For fans, the docuseries format does something traditional football broadcasting cannot: it creates emotional entry points for people who don’t already follow the game. Welcome to Wrexham was watched by millions of people who had never previously cared about English football. They were not drawn in by tactics or league tables, but by Phil Parkinson’s honest post-match interviews, the supporters’ trust members worrying about the roof, and the sheer human nature of a club fighting to exist. The story converted casual viewers into genuine supporters globally.
And for brands, the storytelling shift changes the entire value proposition of sponsorship. A shirt sponsor at a celebrity-backed club is no longer simply buying matchday visibility. They are buying documentary screen time, social media virality, and association with a cultural moment that is being watched and discussed worldwide. The question is no longer ‘how many people attend this ground?’ but ‘how many people are following this story?’
There is, however, a tension at the heart of this trend. The clubs with celebrity backing are now operating as content-first media properties, with commercial interest entirely disproportionate to their league position. Every other club in the EFL remains in the old local sponsorship economy, selling static visibility to regional businesses without the tools or platform to compete for global attention.
This visibility inequality will become a financial and competitive one. If attention drives commercial revenue, and commercial revenue funds squad investment, which drives results, then the clubs without a compelling narrative face a structural disadvantage that compounds over time. The narrative gap becomes a resource gap.
But that gap also creates an opening. The celebrity-backed clubs are already crowded with sponsors eager to access their amplified audiences. Wrexham, Birmingham, and whoever comes next will attract commercial partners at speed, and for brands, that space will get expensive. From that crowding, a counter-narrative becomes available - one that is, arguably, even more compelling.
The brands that move first to partner with the challengers - the community clubs without celebrity backing, competing on grit and spirit against well-resourced rivals - are not just buying sponsorship, they will be co-authoring a story. The plucky regional club versus the celebrity-turbocharged machine is, in narrative terms, a gift. It is the underdog arc inside the underdog arc, and if the story works, the brand is woven into it permanently.
KSI’s decision to launch a docuseries alongside his Dagenham takeover is the clearest signal yet that the new generation of football owners understand exactly what they are buying. It is not a football club; it’s a narrative platform that happens to also play competitive football. The sport provides the raw material: genuine stakes, real characters, unpredictable outcomes, and the story is the product.
Whether ‘football-tainment’ has peaked is the wrong question. The better question is who gets to tell the next story, and who is smart enough to be part of it. For celebrities, it’s an investment in cultural relevance. For fans, it’s sport made meaningful again. For brands willing to look beyond the obvious play, it is the most interesting space in English football right now.
Tom Wild, Head of Strategy at Fuse. Wild oversees the team and works closely with other areas of the business to bring its holistic vision of strategy to life. Wild has fourteen years’ experience in the sponsorship and media world, previously leading strategy for Publicis Sport & Entertainment across clients such as TikTok, JPMorgan Chase, ABInBev and Samsung UK, where he held the role of Strategy Director. He also worked as Strategy Business Director at Mindshare Worldwide on Booking.com across all of their global brand marketing initiatives, including their ongoing UEFA partnership and various entertainment partnerships.
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