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Discussing English football ownership is turning into the ultimate name drop. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney at Wrexham. Tom Brady at Birmingham City. Michael B. Jordan at Bournemouth. J.J. Watt at Burnley. Even Snoop Dogg is in on the action, becoming co-owner of Swansea City this summer. But the American invasion of English football has moved beyond novelty. Twelve of the Premier League’s 20 clubs now answer to U.S. ownershipeither wholly or partially. Drop down to the Championship, English football’s second tier, and nine more clubs are backed by American money. On Friday, when Wrexham hosts Birmingham City, it will be a clash of two celebrity-driven, American-backed clubs facing off on U.K. soil. Its Reynolds and McElhenney versus Brady, and it’s a matchup that captures exactly how much the English football landscape has shifted over the past two decades. The Great English Land Grab Malcolm Glazers $1.5 billion takeover of Manchester United in 2005 made him the Premier Leagues first-ever American owner. Now, 20 years later, the four most successful clubs in English football historyLiverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelseaare all majority-owned by Americans. The 2008 financial crisis accelerated the trend. The U.S. economy recovered faster than Europe’s, creating a surplus of capital among moguls wealthy enough to covet professional sports teams and an opportunity to buy overseas clubs at a discount. That arbitrage remains. In May 2022, Todd Boehly and private equity firm Clearlake Capital bought Chelsea, one of the Premier Leagues marquee clubs, for $3.2 billion. Just over a year later, Josh Harris purchased the Washington Commanders for $6.05 billion, nearly double what Boehly paid. Celebrity involvement was limited until Reynolds and McElhenney made their splash in 2021. They bought Wrexhama fifth-tier Welsh clubfor just $2.5 million. Their unique approach and subsequent success have demonstrated how American celebrity ownership can benefit a club via global marketing in ways traditional ownership cannot. The Rise of Wrexham When Reynolds and McElhenney took over in February 2021, they inherited a club with deep roots and persistent struggles. Founded in 1864, Wrexham is the third-oldest professional football club in the world. But by 2021, the club had spent 15 years stuck in the National LeagueEngland’s fifth tier. Think of it as Single-A baseball or the NBAs G-League, but a tier lower. Thats where Wrexham floundered. Reynolds and McElhenney started by admitting what they didnt know and bringing in experts. Their first hire was Shaun Harvey, who had previously run the entire English Football League. Harvey recommended they hire Phil Parkinson, a manager with a history of earning promotions. With the front office set, the on-field strategy was simple: Spend money on better players. Wrexham lured Paul Mullin, the fourth tier’s top scorer, exploiting a loophole that exempted equity investment from lower-league spending caps. But the off-field strategy is where Wrexham really won. Reynolds and McElhenney launched Welcome to Wrexham on FX, turning the club into a four-season documentary series. They signed sponsorship deals with TikTok, United Airlines, Expedia, and Aviation Gin (which Reynolds co-owns). By the 202324 season, while playing in the fourth tier, Wrexham was generating nearly $34 million in revenuemore commercial income than five Premier League clubs. The money funded operations and player acquisitions that contributed to three consecutive promotions from 2022 to 2025, a first in EFL history. Now, the club that sold for $2.5 million four years ago is reportedly valued at up to $475 million, and the club is one promotion away from the highest level of English football, the Premier League. The CopyGOAT: Tom Brady Gets In Birmingham City was last in the Premier League in 2011, when it won the League Cup, an annual in-season tournament, by beating English juggernaut Arsenal. That same season, the club was relegated from the Premier League and spent the next 13 years stuck in the leagues second tier. Then Tom Brady and Knighthead Capital Management took control in July 2023. Brady became a minority shareholder, and he brought his playbook from 22 years in the NFL, where he won seven Super Bowls. While the Knighthead brass run the club, Brady acts more as Birminghams self-help guru. He imported his personal “body coach,” Alex Guerrero, as an adviser on performance and nutrition. Players now receive electrolyte monitoring and tailored hydration protocols. When head coach Chris Davies hit a rough patch before Christmas, Brady sent him a video of Alabama coach Nick Saban discussing leadership philosophy. The ownership made ruthless decisions. They fired manager John Eustace after 11 games despite sitting sixth in the Championship. They brought in Wayne Rooney, an English football legend. When that didn’t work and Birmingham was relegated to League One, the third tier of English football, for the first time in 29 years, they fired Rooney. Amazon’s Built in Birmingham documentary captured Brady questioning Rooney’s work ethic on cameraan unusually direct critique that signaled how this ownership group was going to operate. The club hired Davies to replace Rooney, and he led Birmingham to the League One title with a record 111 points in 202425, earning a promotion to the Championship, where theyre competing with Wrexham for one of the three coveted spots atop the table that earn promotion to the Premier League. Is the Future of English Football American? In the past 18 months, American investors have completed multiple acquisitions across all levels of English football, from Everton in the Premier League to lower-tier clubs like Carlisle United and Reading FC. And the growth in U.S. investment shows no signs of slowing, as private equity groups are viewing English football clubs as undervalued entertainment assets with global reach. Manchester United was worth an estimated $1.5 billion when the Glazers bought it in 2005. Forbes now values it at $6.6 billion. Friday’s match between Wrexham and Birmingham offers a snapshot of where American ownership stands. Wrexham sits 15th in the Championship with eight points from eight matches. Birmingham is 11th with 10 points. Both teams are mid-table, far from the automatic promotion spots that would lift them to the Premier League. The Championship is brutal by designa 46-game grind where clubs relegated from the Premier League arrive with parachute payments that can triple operating budgets. Promotion requires finishing in the top two or winning a four-team playoff. Neither Wrexham nor Birmingham will likely earn promotion this season. But Friday’s match isn’t really about league position. It’s about temporary bragging rights between American celebrity owners who’ve proven that English football can be reimagined as a global entertainment productone that just happens to involve the occasional 90 minutes of actual football.
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E-Commerce
Taylor Swifts highly anticipated 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is here. And this might be Swifts biggest release yet, given that along with an album, shes also premiering a film on the same day. Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl features a new music video for the album’s single The Fate of Ophelia, lyric videos, and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and commentary. Its being hosted as a companion event by AMC, Cinemark Theaters, and Regal Cinemas. The catch? Its showing in theaters for just three days: October 3 to 5. The brief theatrical window follows the same pattern Swift has used to release limited-edition versions of her past albums and merch that are often available only on her site for a short amount of timecreating a sense of urgency for fans. According to some analysts, replicating the strategy of generating fast ticket sales in a limited timeframe is beneficial not only for Swift but also for the major movie theater chains. Who wouldn’t want to cut out the middleman these days? Brandon Katz, director of insights and content strategy at Greenlight Analytics, posited to Fast Company. AMCs unique distribution deal with Taylor Swift allows them to bypass film studios and create more tailored deal terms. It represents a unique new business model for theaters, though one that isn’t easily repeatable. Exhibitors will also receive a new theatrical product headlined by the most famous entertainer on the planet at a time when wide-release volume is still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels. That’s helpful. Even without a traditional marketing runway, Showgirl will attract attention. The Taylor Swift effect The Life of a Showgirl is an appropriately named album for arguably one of the worlds biggest pop stars, who has built an empire from her music since she was 16 years old, creating a devoted fandom of “Swifties.” In the past few years, Swift seems to have been busier than ever. She rerecorded her first six albums, reclaiming her music after the original masters were sold by her first record label (she eventually was able to buy the original masters back). She performed around the world on her 21-month-long Eras tour. And in August, she got engaged to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce after a whirlwind two-year romance that saw her become a fixture at NFL games, including Super Bowl LVIII. She also teased the new album in her appearance on Jason and Travis Kelces New Heights podcast). Her impact on any business she’s involved with has been so significant that it’s been given a namethe Taylor Swift effect,” which experts say reflects the singer-songwriter’s strong economic force. Companies have been keen to take advantage of that Swift effect whenever they can. For instance, when The Life of a Showgirl was announced, many immediately adopted the albums orange aesthetic and font style in their own social media posts. Spotify launched a pop-up merch shop in New York, while other brands, including Uber Eats, are hosting special deals and pop-up events to celebrate the release. This isnt the first time Swift has released a theatrical film. Following the end of the Eras tour in 2023, she released Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film, bypassing traditional studios and instead signing a deal directly with AMC Theaters. The film went on to earn roughly $261 million at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing concert film ever. Later, Swift struck a deal with Disney for the films streaming rights. This is the first time, however, that Swift is premiering a movie to coincide with a new album on the same day. Again, shes skipping studios and releasing the film through AMC, Cinemark, and Regal Cinemas. Last month Deadline reported that the film had already raked in $15 million in first-day presales and that sources were projecting it to make between $30 million and $50 million over the October 3 weekend. A Swift business model According to data from Greenlight Analytics, the concert films Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (with willingness to pay, or WTP, at 53%) and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé (with WTP at 52%) generated fan enthusiasm on par with Elvis (with WTP at 63%), suggesting that live-music experiences for big-name artists can generate long tails of monetization opportunity. Katz said that while releasing the film is a good idea for Swift, exhibitors, and the domestic box office, he emphasized that this isnt going to usher in a new genre of film, since only stars at Swifts level will be able to generate respectable box office revenue or streaming interest. For the majority of artists thinking about chasing a similar goal, the juice would not be worth the squeeze, Katz said. However, Swift is clearly continuing to move into the movie industry: In addition to the Eras Tour and Party of a Showgirl films, shes reportedly developing a feature project for Searchlight Pictures.
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E-Commerce
How can you get ahead in your career and still enjoy the ride? One solution offered in business books, LinkedIn posts, and team-building manuals is to use humor. Sharing jokes, sarcastic quips, ironic memes, and witty anecdotes, the advice goes, will make you more likable, ease stress, strengthen teams, spark creativity, and even signal leadership potential. We are professors of marketing and management who study humor and workplace dynamics. Our own researchand a growing body of work by other scholarsshows that its harder to be funny than most people think. The downside of cracking a bad joke is often larger than what you might gain by landing a good one. Fortunately, you dont have to tell sidesplitting jokes to make humor work for you. You can learn to think like a comedian instead. Humor is risky business Comedy works by bending and breaking normsand when those rules arent broken in just the right way, its more likely to harm your reputation than to help your team. We developed the benign violation theory to explain what makes things funnyand why attempts at humor so often backfire, especially in the workplace. Essentially, humor arises when something is both wrong and OK at the same time. People find jokes funny when they break rules while seeming harmless. Miss one of those ingredients when you tell a joke and your audience wont appreciate it. When its all benign and theres no violation, you get yawns. When its all violation and not benign, you could end up triggering outrage. Its hard enough to get laughs in the darkness of a comedy club. Under fluorescent office lights, that razor-thin line becomes even harder to walk. What feels wrong but OK to one colleague can feel simply wrong to another, especially across differences in seniority, culture, gender, or even the mood theyre in. The hit sitcom The Office pokes fun at the cringeworthy jokes cracked by a hapless boss. An advertising study In our experiments, when everyday people are asked to be funny, most attempts land flat or cross lines. In a humorous caption contest with business students, described in Peter McGraws book on global humor practices, The Humor Code, the captions werent particularly funny to begin with. However, the ones that were rated by judges as the most funny were often also rated the most distasteful. Being funny without being offensive is of paramount importance. This is particularly true for women, as a robust literature shows women face harsher backlash than men for behavior seen as offensive or norm-violating, such as expressing anger, acting dominantly, or even making asks in negotiations. Dont be that guy. You might end up getting no respect Research by other scholars who examine leader and manager behavior in organizations tells a similar story. In one study, managers who used humor effectively were seen as more confident and competent, boosting their status. Yet when their attempts misfired, those same managers lost status and credibility. Other researchers have found that failed humor doesnt just hurt a managers statusit also makes employees less likely to respect that manager, seek their advice, or trust their leadership. Even when jokes land, humor can backfire. In one study, marketing students instructed to write funny copy for advertisements wrote ads that were funnier, but also less effective, than students instructed to write creative or persuasive copy. Another study found that bosses who joke too often push employees into pretending to be amused, which drains energy, reduces job satisfaction, and increases burnout. And the risks are higher for women due to a double standard. When women use humor in presentations, they are often judged as being less capable and having lower status than men. The bottom line is that telling a great joke rarely gets you a promotion. And cracking a bad one can jeopardize your jobeven if youre not a talk show host who earns a living making people laugh. Flip the script Instead of trying to be funny on the job, we recommend that you focus on what we call thinking funnyas described in another of McGraws books, Shtick to Business. The best ideas come as jokes, advertising legend David Ogilvy once said. Try to make your thinking as funny as possible. But Ogilvy wasnt telling executives to crack jokes in meetings. He was encouraging employees to think like comedians by flipping expectations, leveraging their networks, and finding their niche. Comics often lead you one way and then flip the script. Comedian Henny Youngman, a master of one-liners, famously quipped, When I read about the dangers of drinking, I gave up . . . reading. The business version of this convention is to challenge n obvious assumption. For example, Patagonias Dont Buy This Jacket campaign, which the outdoor gear company rolled out on Black Friday in 2011 as a full-page ad in The New York Times, paradoxically boosted sales by calling out overconsumption. To apply this method, pick a stale assumption your team holds, such as that adding features to a product always improves it or that having more meetings will lead to smoother coordination, and ask, What if the opposite were true? Youll discover options that standard brainstorming misses. Create a chasm When comedian Bill Burr has his fans in stitches, he knows some people wont find his jokes funnyand he doesnt try to win them over. Weve observed that many of the best comics dont try to please everyone. They succeed by deliberately narrowing their audience. And we also find that businesses that do the same build stronger brands. For example, when Nebraskas tourism board embraced Honestly, its not for everyone in a 2019 campaign, targeting out-of-state visitors, web traffic jumped 43%. Some people want hot tea. Others want iced tea. Serving warm tea satisfies no one. Likewise, you can succeed in business by deciding whom your idea is for, and whom its not for, then tailoring your product, policy, or presentation accordingly. Cooperate to innovate Stand-up may look like a solo act. But comics depend on feedbackpunch-ups from fellow comedians and reactions from audiencesiterating jokes in the same way lean startups may innovate new products. Building successful teams at work means listening before speaking, making your partners look good, and balancing roles. Improv teacher Billy Merritt has described three types of improvisers. Pirates are risk-takers. Robots are structure builders. Ninjas are adept at both: taking risks and building structures. A team designing a new app, for instance, needs all three: Pirates to propose bold features, robots to streamline the interface, and ninjas to bridge gaps. Empowering everyone in these roles leads to braver ideas with fewer blind spots. Gifts arent universal Telling someone to be funny is like telling them to be musical. Many of us can keep a beat, but few have what it takes to become rock stars. Thats why we argue that its smarter to think like a comedian than to try to act like one. By reversing assumptions, cooperating to innovate, and creating chasms, professionals can generate fresh solutions and stand outwithout becoming an office punchline. Peter McGraw is a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Adam Barsky is an associate professor of management at The University of Melbourne. Caleb Warren is a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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