Wrexham co-owner Rob McElhenney spoke about how football club owners should treat their staff, players and fans amid Nuno Espirito Santo’s dressing down by Evangelos Marinakis at Nottingham Forest
Rob McElhenney has made his feelings clear on how football club owners should behave as debate rages over the angry exchange between Evangelos Marinakis and Nottingham Forest boss Nuno Espirito Santo. The Forest owner sparked uproar on Sunday after storming across The City Ground pitch immediately after his club’s 2-2 draw with Leicester City.
Marinakis headed straight for Nuno, with the two caught in what appeared to be an awkward conversation, as Forest’s Champions League hopes were dealt another blow. The Greek businessman later released a statement, claiming his furious outburst was simply a moment of “passion”.
Nuno also did his best to play down the incident in his post-match interview, but it led Gary Neville to urge the former Wolves and Tottenham boss to walk away from the job.
Wrexham co-owner McElhenney, along with fellow actor Ryan Reynolds, has overseen three promotions in a row since buying the Welsh club in February 2021. The Red Dragons will play in the Championship next season after recently securing a second-place finish in League One, with the owners adopting a very different approach to that of Marinakis when it comes to working with players and coaching staff.
Both McElhenney and Reynolds were invited into the changing room by manager Phil Parkinson to deliver speeches ahead of matches this term.
However, rather than berate their under-pressure stars, they chose to provide encouragement. McElhenney opened up on their ownership methods after a Wrexham player told him of a similar experience to the one which unfolded at Forest which occurred when he was at a previous club.
“One of the players mentioned to me a story that I thought was devastating,” the Hollywood star said during an appearance on the Men in Blazers podcast. “He said that after a particularly terrible loss, the chairman of the club that he was playing for came into the locker room and screamed at the players.
“He said, ‘My son is in the box and he’s crying. You’ve made my son cry.’ He was screaming at these guys and then left. As he was telling the story, he wasn’t laughing, so it wasn’t like he thought it was a funny anecdote. He was shaken by it, and I thought it was terrible.
“I can’t imagine a more horrible way to treat a room full of people who have just given their blood, sweat and tears for you and left it all out on the pitch. What level of narcissism and a**holery does it take to walk into that room and make it about you and your family’s experience, as opposed to what they just went through for you and for everybody that was watching on TV at home.
“I couldn’t wrap my head around how you would approach something like that, so we always want to present something different than that.”
McElhenney spoke to the Wrexham players ahead of their 2-1 victory away at Blackpool in April. The team was under pressure at the time after dropping out of the automatic promotion spots in League One following a 1-1 draw at home to Bristol Rovers.
However, the result saw them move back into second place – a position they ended up in at the end of the season. McElhenney revealed he encouraged the squad to play with freedom ahead of the crucial clash and his words clearly had the desired impact.
Expanding on the Wrexham’s co-owners ethos, the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia creator said: “I would never presume to talk to a professional athlete about what it’s like to perform, because I am not a professional athlete, nor am I an athlete at all.
“Phil asked me if I would come and talk to the guys. What I did was reached out to a few of my friends who were professional athletes. Over the years, I’ve reached out to these guys a few times just to say, ‘Would you want to have a relationship with the chairman? How involved do you think that they should be?’
“I want to make sure that the players always feel supported, whether that means me embracing them or me leaving them alone. There’s a couple of baseball players and a couple of American football players, and to a person, they all said we would love to have a relationship with the owners.”
He added: “Ryan and I have always embraced that. I certainly can’t talk about strategy or execution, but I can alleviate some stress for them.”
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