National League football club Wrexham AFC has been looking at the tangible effects of having a Deadpool in the matchday squad.
The club’s report comes as Welcome to Wrexham, Disney+’s hit documentary on the takeover by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Chris McIlhenny, passes the halfway point of its 18-episode run.
In common with many streamers, Disney doesn’t routinely provide viewing figures for the platform, so the club has been looking at the numbers in areas where it can count. The signs are that being bought by one of Marvel’s most popular characters, then broadcast to the world, are largely beneficial.
Followers of the Club’s social media have increased by 19.2% since Welcome to Wrexham premiered on August 24. The club’s biggest social following can be found on TikTok, which is also the club’s shirt sponsor where Wrexham can boast 445,000 followers as of September 25, an increase of almost 38,000 since the doc launched just over a month ago.
Big increases were noted across all of the major social media sites, with Instagram the biggest beneficiary – a 46,590 jump was recorded by September 25 from its 131,000 followers pre-Disney, and leaving the club with 188,000 followers as of this morning.
Across the board, the club recorded just short of a million followers on the ‘big five’ social media sites on September 25, and it says it expects to cross the million threshold befopre the doc runs its course.
Economically too the club has seen a hea;lthy spike post-Disney. The club’s retail website has seen 185,289 new visitors during the period, who have made a total of 3,543 orders with a combined value of £290,170.
The results do not include sales from the club shop. When those sales are combined with the above, the receipts for the period increased to £360,000. By comparison, the combined receipts for the equivalent period, 12 months earlier, were £59,674.
There was never any doubt that the interest in club merchandise would increase because of the documentary but even the most optimistic projections did not reach the above levels, the club notes.
It’s unprecedented for a lower-league club to receive such massive global attention as Wrexham has been afforded since August but judging by Wrexham’s experience all the signs are that, should a Hollywood megastar come sniffing around your local footballing minnows, you’ll probably want to bite their hand off.
Wrexham currently sit second in the National League table, with a much-needed return to the football league looking promising.
