Prologue

'We've had a request,' begins Spencer Harris, the director of Wrexham AFC. It's 7 November 2020. I'm in the lounge, watching early evening TV.

I remember the date because what happens a few days later - who calls me, and where they call from - will be so extraordinary that I'll mark the moment with a Facebook post. It will amount to no more than one line in the sea of words written about Wrexham AFC amid one of the most extraordinary takeovers in world sport. But I don't know that at the time. I don't know of all that is to come: the Emmy award-winning TV show, the international headlines, the Hollywood superstars that we will welcome to our club. I don't know of the effect that it will have on me, a voluntary disability liaison officer with cerebral palsy who is weeks away from working for one of the biggest names in the film industry and a very successful American TV star.

I sit in shock, listening intently as Spencer continues. 'Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney want to speak to you. Am I OK to give them your phone number?'

I pause, lower the phone from my ear. 'Well, yes,' I stutter. 'Yes, of course.'

These are the moments I look back on, over four years into our football fairy tale, when I wonder how we got here. How I, little old Kerry who began volunteering at Wrexham in 2016, became swept up in all of this. How a non-league football club in an unglamorous area of North Wales, which survived for years only on the generosity of its fans, became the luckiest team in the world.

£12 a year. That was how much it cost to be a Wrexham owner in 2020, and there were more than a thousand of us. Together, we made up the Wrexham Supporters Trust (WST). No matter how much money you put in - the equivalent of £1 a month, as I did, or £1,000 a year - everyone had the same say. Nobody was more of an owner than anybody else and, crucially, each of us had a voice.

Aside from managers and players, the club employed just a few full-time members of staff: the groundsman, stadium manager, commercial manager, shop and ticketing staff, club secretary and head of youth. Everyone else had full-time jobs elsewhere and ran the football club as volunteers.

There was the six-person Wrexham AFC Board of Directors, comprising fans overseeing all the day-to-day logistics. They looked after the money, sorted the deals for new players and held all the secrets. They answered to the Wrexham AFC Supporters Trust Board: twelve elected fans who acted on behalf of all fan owners. Spencer Harris, a strategic director at Kellogg's, was the public face of the club and the one who would put his head above the parapet. We didn't have a full-time CEO; the role was divided between the directors, all unpaid. We held ownership meetings quarterly to discuss the direction of the club.

Wrexham was almost an after-work hobby. We held meetings in the evenings and sorted out the odds and ends at weekends. That was how the club ran for twelve years.

At the time, I was a big fan of our model of fan ownership. I thought it was incredible. Here we were, still a big, identifiable club throughout North Wales, even in the National League, doing it on our own in the spare time people grabbed between work and family and life. Volunteers were running the football club out of duty and passion. I really respected that. Ultimately, it was why I joined. It was why I built my own role up from a part-time one to the equivalent of a full-time job, without earning a penny.

But the model had its drawbacks. It's only now, with the benefit of hindsight and Hollywood money, that I've realised how limited we were. There was never enough money in the pot, so the same story kept repeating itself: the minute we had a special player, we had to sell them because we needed money to run the club. We also had to pay what those in the boardroom call 'the National League premium' - that little bit extra to encourage players to drop out of the English Football League.

On top of that, the National League (the fifth tier of English football) is a tricky division to get out of, in part because there's only one automatic promotion spot (League Two has three, and League One and the Championship have two). In 2011, a haul of ninety-eight points - then a record for the club - wasn't enough to get us promoted automatically. Increasingly, we found ourselves coming up against clubs with rich owners and bigger budgets. In 2013, we were beaten in the play-offs by Newport County, bankrolled by a former mechanic who had won the Euromillions. Salford City had won promotion in 2019 funded by Manchester United's Class of '92.

We knew that we could never go out and buy the top striker or the best players, and a divide was building between those who were wary of welcoming new owners at the expense of losing fan control of the club and those who thought it was time to try something different.

During the pandemic, the stakes were higher still. Put simply, we didn't know where the money was going to come from without supporters coming through the turnstiles or sponsors paying for the advertising hoardings. First team players were furloughed and had to take on extra work, in supermarkets or as delivery drivers, to support their families. On the field, the curtailed 2019/20 season ended with the club's lowest result in 156 years when Wrexham finished twentieth in the National League.

Most nights, I went to bed filled with anxiety over the future of the club. I knew the players and their families. What would happen to them if they lost their jobs? What would happen to us without Wrexham? I still received my state benefits throughout the pandemic, but my work was never about money for me.

Wrexham AFC saved my life. I don't mean that I would have died had the club not come into my life, but it found me at a time when I didn't know what my purpose was. After a cerebral bleed that could have killed me in September 2005 but instead left me in a wheelchair and without feeling down my right side, I'd left the workplace and woke up every day in pain and with no reason to get out of bed. I didn't have an identity or know what to do with each day. I never thought I'd work again. That bubbly Kerry who had always refused to let her cerebral palsy hold her back felt like a distant memory. I was a shell of myself again, back to being that lonely teenager who never thought she'd be accepted or make anything of her life.

Wrexham brought the world to me. That's how it saved me.

Take my 2018 fundraising to put on accessible away travel for wheelchair users. I sold red blankets emblazoned with the club crest to raise the £3,500 we needed to cover several away fixtures that season. My husband Kings and I had ordered 680 blankets, each individually wrapped, and spent our evenings in the living room unpacking and repackaging them all: the club's kit suppliers, Macron, had offered to embroider Wrexham's crest at a cut price if Kings and I took care of all the packaging for them. At the first fixture we offered our accessible travel to, against Solihull Moors, grown men were in tears because they'd never been to an away match before. En route to a London fixture, we met up with other coaches of fans at a service station, and when everyone started chanting together, I knew it had all been worth it.

Those interactions are what keep me at Wrexham: the families I meet and the impact I have on them. I'm proud that I'm good at the work I do there. I'm proud that, every day, I do things I never thought I'd be able to. And I'm proud of the effect my efforts have on the club's supporters.

I owe a lot to Wrexham. That club is everything to me. And it could have gone under were it not for the discussions taking place in the background - discussions with two Hollywood superstars on the other side of the Atlantic.

There had been twelve approaches to buy Wrexham in the eleven years since the club went into the hands of the Wrexham Supporters Trust. We heard all the rumours - businesspeople, conmen, entrepreneurs, opportunists - but nothing ever came of them. If the interest had been serious, the WST would have put in place NDAs and the prospective buyer would have had to put up a bond of £5,000. That protected us from chancers and scared off the pretenders. As far as we knew, no NDA was ever signed in all that time.

This time was different. The rumours began: an offer had come in for the football club. A serious offer - so serious that it was being discussed among the board members. Every day, there were whispers, mutterings. I pulled aside somebody in the know and spoke to him off the record. The gist? 'This is big.'

As far as names went, though, the rumour mill was as silent as silent can be and I was none the wiser. Until I got the phone call. I was in the kitchen, preparing our tea, when the phone buzzed. It was someone else inside the club.

'Do you want to know the name?'

My heart stuttered. My voice hitched. 'I'd love to,' I began. 'But I know I'm not supposed...