Luka Modric, Gareth Bale and Deadpool: This is the changing face of Welsh football

There must be something in the Welsh water.

Not content with one Real Madrid galactico investing in one of the country’s top football clubs, now there’s a second looking to get involved, after Gareth Bale followed his former Bernabeu team-mate Luka Modric’s involvement at Swansea City by heading a consortium hoping to buy Cardiff City.

Throw in the Hollywood takeover up north at Wrexham by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2021, which has yielded the fastest rise through the domestic divisions in EFL history via three straight promotions, and Wales is becoming the land of football opportunity, as well as song.

Only time will tell whether Bale’s interest in Cardiff, his hometown club, bears fruit. Vincent Tan, their owner since 2010, remains very much at the helm amid interest from not just the former Wales talisman’s consortium.

But the very suggestion that the most gifted Welsh player since the great John Charles in the 1950s wants in at Cardiff has brought a further frisson of excitement to a country whose football landscape feels to be shifting season by season.

“Gareth loves Cardiff,” says Brian Flynn, who, when in charge of Wales’ age-group sides, was instrumental in bringing Bale into the international fold after he’d not been involved in schoolboy representative football.

“He loves Wales, first and foremost. That was blatantly obvious throughout his career. But he’s always been a Cardiff boy, too. If he does get involved, him just walking into the dressing room will inspire players.

“He’s very knowledgeable on the game, too. If you asked him to do a certain thing within the framework of the team, he’d exercise that to perfection.”

For much of the previous decade, Swansea were Wales’ undisputed top team, spending seven consecutive seasons in the Premier League and winning the League Cup in 2013. That this success came courtesy of a possession-based, pleasing-on-the-eye brand of football only added to the feel-good factor swirling around their Liberty Stadium home.

Arch-rivals Cardiff, however, refused to let Swansea have it all their own way. Having got to the FA Cup final in 2008, they twice won promotion to the top flight during that same decade while also reaching the 2012 League Cup final, where they only lost on penalties to Liverpool after holding Steven Gerrard, Luis Suarez and co to a 2-2 draw.

As football in the south bloomed, at the other end of the country Wrexham were withering away in the non-League.

Even when a return to the EFL, which they had been relegated from five years earlier, opened up via reaching the 2013 Conference Premier play-off final at Wembley, south Walian supremacy was maintained via a 2-0 win for Newport County, the fourth of the quartet of leading Welsh sides who have traditionally competed over the border in the English league.

Twelve years on, though, things have changed.

Those three straight promotions have taken Wrexham to the Championship — which is one level above Cardiff, following their relegation to League One last season. Swansea, who finished a colossal 86 places above Wrexham as recently as 2019-20, will be their divisional peers next time around — the first time the clubs have been in the same division since 2003.

“There’s three Welsh clubs whose objective is reaching the Premier League,” says Neil Warnock, the most recent manager to lead Cardiff into the top flight in 2018. “At the moment, Wrexham has the best chance. And you wouldn’t have said that a few years ago — not unless you’d had a few drinks!”

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Bale’s pursuit of Cardiff — “A dream come true,” said the 35-year-old last month, when asked about the possibility of getting involved — isn’t the first time he’s been urged to buy a club.

During the 2016 European Championship, as Wales made a surprising run to the semi-finals, there was a running joke among Bale’s Wales team-mates that he should quit Real Madrid, buy south Wales minnows Merthyr Town and then sign a load of his international team-mates so such a tight-knit group of Welshmen could play together all season long, not just a few times each year for their country.

Merthyr, so the plan went, would then channel the spirit and ability that eventually took Wales all the way to the last four of that tournament in France nine years ago to power their way from the club’s position at the time in the seventh tier of the English game (they are now up to the sixth) to the Premier League.

Right now, Cardiff would take just the one promotion, to undo the damage of last season. Sliding into League One capped a demoralising few years in the Welsh capital, with relegation having felt to be a long time coming after finishing 18th and 21st in the 24-team division in two of the three previous years.

Poor recruitment, managerial instability — eight different men have had the job since the start of 2021-22, including three last season — and questionable decision-making at the top have all combined to drag Cardiff down to a league they have not played in since 2003.

Escaping League One won’t be easy. The third tier has become notorious for holding big clubs against their will, with Sunderland, now back in the Premier League following last season’s promotion, taking four years to bounce back after getting relegated from the Championship in 2018.

Brian Barry-Murphy, a former Manchester City academy coach, has been handed the task of leading a considerable rebuild after nine players, including Bale’s former Wales team-mate Aaron Ramsey and ex-club captain Joe Ralls, were released this summer. Callum O’Dowda, who had played 32 times for the Republic of Ireland, also joined Ferencvaros in Hungary last week for an undisclosed fee.

“I don’t think it will be straightforward to get out,” says Warnock. “It’s why I believe Cardiff have made a mistake in allowing Joe Ralls to go. Joe has still got a lot to offer at 31. Whether it was out of the manager’s hands or not, I don’t know, but I’d certainly have looked to keep him. The manager would have had a big ally on the field.”

Warnock still has strong feelings for Cardiff, where he won what for now is the last of his eight career promotions seven years ago.

“Cardiff is a big club,” adds the 76-year-old. “As a city, it could easily sustain Premier League football. You look at clubs like Leicester and Southampton, who’ve had lengthy spells up there. To me, Cardiff are on that level as a club, or should be.”

Like Modric’s surprise move into ownership with Swansea — the 2018 Ballon d’Or winner is believed to have a shareholding of around five per cent — Bale’s potential involvement at Cardiff has got fans talking.

Just what figure Tan has in mind as being sufficient to even consider a sale is unknown outside the club’s hierarchy but what isn’t in doubt is how integral the Malaysian businessman has been to Cardiff staying afloat financially.

The last available set of accounts for the 2023-24 financial year revealed, along with a pre-tax loss of £11.6million on a turnover of £23.2m, that Tan is owed £68m. Interest is waived on these loans.

“Tan has to be prepared to take a hit,” says football finance expert Kieran Maguire, when asked about a possible sale of Cardiff. “The deals I’ve seen (for clubs in League One), you’re normally looking at one-and-a-half times to two times the annual revenue (when setting a valuation). If you’ve got some decent real-estate, you might be able to get a bit more.

“Revenue in 2023-24 (for Cardiff) was £23m. It’ll drop maybe by £10m next season, unless of course they get themselves going in a similar fashion to Birmingham and get a feel-good factor going, with matches selling out. Unless there is a good start, I can’t see matchday revenues holding up, sponsors getting excited and so on. They’ll also be on one-sixth of what the TV money is in the Championship.”

Forty miles west in Swansea, there’s a tangible air of optimism building under Brett Cravatt and Jason Cohen, the club’s majority owners following last November’s takeover.

New head coach Alan Sheehan’s strong finish to the season after taking what was initially interim charge in February — Swansea collected 24 points from their final 13 games — has helped, as have promising subsequent signings such as Cameron Burgess, Bobby Wales, Ethan Galbraith and Ricardo Santos.

“The last few years have been difficult, as we lost our identity, but I’m feeling more hopeful,” says Swansea Oh Swansea fanzine editor Steve Carroll. “We’re not a massive club, but, at the same time, you’ve got to have ambition and try to overachieve. That’s what we did before.

“For us, the rivalry will always be Cardiff. Make no bones about that. I’ve never had a problem with Wrexham, even when they were the best team in Wales during the 1990s. That might change, of course, now we’re in the same division, and they’ll have a bigger budget than us.”

The coming season will be the first since 2000-01 where Wrexham have been in a higher division than then fourth-tier Cardiff. It will also be the first time the north Wales club has met Swansea in league combat since two seasons later, when the latter pulled off a great escape under Flynn’s management to avoid dropping into non-League themselves.

“The landscape is changing for Welsh football, but in a positive way,” adds Flynn, who also spent almost 12 years in charge of Wrexham from 1989 and previously had a season with Cardiff late in his playing career.

“Cardiff got relegated but they’re more than capable of bouncing back at the first attempt. Swansea are making some interesting signings — planning and recruitment look to be on the right track. As for Wrexham, momentum is key in football and I’m expecting another really exciting year. The Championship will be a huge challenge but they have the perfect manager (Phil Parkinson) to pursue their endeavours.

“I can see Wrexham being top six by Christmas and ready to push on again.”

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Barely a fortnight separated the revelation that Modric had become a minority investor in Swansea from the first tangible benefits of the Croatian’s involvement emerging.

Zeidane Inoussa, a 23-year-old winger with Swedish club Hacken, confirmed that a call from the 39-year-old galactico had helped persuade him to ignore offers from Italy and Germany to become Sheehan’s first signing.

“We’re told Modric has spoken to a couple of signings,” says fanzine editor Carroll. “Let’s be honest, if you get a phone call from Luka Modric, then you’re going to take it. It does sound like he’s genuinely interested in some sort of football ownership and being part of a group.

“Obviously, his focus is still on playing for another year and the World Cup this time next year but he’s clearly looking beyond when he finishes playing, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.”

Modric is tipped to join Milan once the Club World Cup is over, his contract at the Bernabeu having only been extended to the end of a competition where Madrid face Paris Saint-Germain in the semi-finals on Wednesday.

But those close to Swansea insist this move into ownership is no gimmick. Like Bale, the experience Modric can pass on from a trophy-laden career — 27 at the last count with Madrid — is extensive, while that call to prospective signing Inoussa underlines the pull of his name.

There are also likely to be commercial benefits for a club who lost £15.2m in 2023-24 on a turnover of £21.5m. Appealing to an international audience — the holy grail to football clubs right now, especially in the wake of Wrexham’s considerable success in this area — is one way to boost those figures, as is reviving a player-trading model similar to the one that proved lucrative when selling the likes of Dan James, Joel Piroe, Flynn Downes, Joe Rodon and Ollie McBurnie in the not-too-distant past.

Wrexham remain the EFL’s masters at tapping into overseas markets. Fifty-two per cent of their record £26.7m revenue in 2023-24 came from outside the UK, thanks to the spotlight afforded to blue-chip sponsors such as United Airlines and Meta by the Emmy award-winning Welcome To Wrexham documentary series and the links with Deadpool movie franchise star and co-producer Reynolds and McElhenney, creator and star of long-running U.S. sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

An upshot of this is other teams at such levels of the game adopting a similar approach by bringing big names on board, such as Birmingham and NFL great Tom Brady, with a documentary about the West Midlands club set to air soon on Amazon Prime.

“There’s a big first-mover advantage here,” says football finance expert Maguire. “It’s a limited market for football documentaries, and Wrexham already have the audience.

“I’m teaching in Charlotte, (in the U.S. state of North) Carolina, in a couple of weeks’ time. I did the same gig last year and the first thing that struck me was the number of Wrexham football shirts. As soon as I said I do football stuff in the UK, they were all asking if I knew about Wrexham and (saying) how wonderful the club is. Fair play to the owners for that, as they’re very personable.

“This is where I can’t see Modric making a big difference (at Swansea) — he didn’t have a long career due to smiling a lot, did he? But what I will say is there’s no downside commercially to, say, Bale or Modric getting involved.

“Take Bale at Cardiff. He’d be front of house as a Wales feel-good factor. He won’t move the dial like we’ve seen in Wrexham but it could help if the marketing department are trying to get a deal over the line and a potential sponsor can have lunch with Bale, or a golf morning, maybe with a signed Real Madrid shirt thrown in for good measure.”

One man not surprised to see the likes of Modric and Bale wanting to stay in football is a former manager who first announced his retirement in the early 2000s, only to return to the game time and time again.

“It is hard to let go,” says Warnock, now an advisor to Torquay United of National League South, in English football’s sixth tier. “Nothing can replicate being involved with football. I know that better than most.

“People say, ‘Oh, I bet you’re loving retirement, aren’t you?’. But, there’s only so many times you can go to the garden centre or to get a cup of coffee, or take the dog for a walk. You’ve got to have something else. That’s why, more than ever, players at the end of their careers, with a few quid in their pockets, are having a look to see what is on offer.

“Football is like a drug.”

(Top photos: Bale, left, and Modric; Getty Images)