Before Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney hit the headlines as superstar Hollywood football club owners – a home-grown actor was quietly toiling away at a non-league outfit in Greater Manchester.
In 2019, Jonathan Sayer, best known as part of the Olivier-winning comedy troupe Mischief, bought out Ashton United with his father, after the club put out an SOS tweet begging for help.
It tugged on Sayer’s heartstrings – not least because his grandfather played for Ashton (which is one of the oldest football grounds in the world) more than 400 times and so, in the office of a flooring shop, papers were signed to make him the co-owner.
In his new book, Nowhere To Run, he gives a comical warts-and-all peek behind the curtain of running a non-league club – seemingly a universe away from what’s going on in the Premier League and beyond.
Ashton United was steeped in some surprise debt, players were being paid by the match from the secretary’s bank account, and only one person had the key to the changing rooms – and he’d gone AWOL.
Sayer goes from hiding in the car park following early losses in his tenure, to screaming on the terraces in a cup final.
Speaking to Sky News from Los Angeles, ahead of opening his company’s production of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Sayer said owning a club has changed his relationship with football.
“I think it’s fair to say I’ve seen how the sausage is made. It’s made in a terrifying manner – it’s a very expensive sausage.
“I think that there’s a point in the book where I talk about how the first competitive match started, and then 10 minutes later I just kind of realised that I hated it. I was just totally panic-stricken. I was just like, ‘Oh my God, what if we lose? What if we lose next week? What if we lose the weekend? What if we go down and really struggle to get out of the mindset for a while?’
“I think since then, thankfully, I’ve managed to come to terms with those emotions and the fact that football is up and down.”
He added not being able to deliver for his community “terrifies” him, and he wants to be a “custodian” on their behalf.
Pic: Colin Thomas
‘Gaggle’ of volunteers holds the club together
Sayer also talks highly of those volunteering at the club, with Sayer calling them the “lifeblood”.
In scenes unlikely to be seen at Old Trafford or the Emirates, volunteers offered to water the newly relaid pitch earlier this year after the heatwave threatened to dry it up, by sleeping out in tents and taking shifts to walk up and down the new turf watering it.
Sayer added some volunteers have been around for decades working on the turnstiles or even painting lines around the terraces, calling the team a “gaggle”, rather than the cliched army.
“I think that’s super, super special,” Sayer said.
“It connects you with something – like a goal that’s bigger than yourself and a purpose that’s larger than you, and you feel connected to something.”
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‘There’s no winner if you’re not interested in the community’
And while Sayer has a deep family connection to the club and wants to root it in the community, he said some owners might see their clubs as assets – and that’s disappointing.
“There’s no winner, if you will, coming in to invest in a football club, and you’re not really interested in the community and the football club – you can have a bad time,” Sayer said.
“You’re going to just find after a couple of years, this is awful, this is expensive, there’s a lot of emotion knocking around.
“And what do you get out of that? I’m not sure. And the same for the supporters, the players – that’s just a negative situation.”
Sayer is keen to point out that giving back to the community and listening to the stakeholders is what should make people want to come in and invest in football clubs.
The actor said he can relate to what Reynolds and McElhenney are doing in Wrexham: “There’s a bit [in their documentary] where they’re talking about making good on their promise to the community and I think you do you feel that. I think that is totally true.
“You feel ultimately responsible for everyone’s happiness.”
Sayer said being an owner has changed his relationship with football. Pic: Colin Thomas
‘Small things could make a huge difference to us’
Sayer said his club, and those in the Premier League are “chalk and cheese”, but added he would love to have more conversations about how they can support each other.
“It would be great for those worlds to connect, to just have formal connections in different ways. I think that would be really, really beneficial for so many different people,” he said.
He explained being able to link up with clubs higher up the pyramid would be really beneficial, adding he’d like to see the FA support the community side of clubs more, for instance on pitch maintenance – which for small clubs is a big deal.
“To clubs like ours, that would make a huge difference because it would mean that lots of our teams could play on the pitch, we’d have more of a sense of community, you wouldn’t have games postponed at the same rate… It genuinely puts clubs into financial peril,” he said.
He added even just being able to contact bigger local clubs and ask for advice would make a “tremendous difference”.
Sky News has contacted the FA for comment.
Hurst Cross in 2020
Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds at Wrexham
Is Ryan Reynolds the Jonathan Sayer of Wrexham?
And on Reynolds and McElhenny – well, Sayer was there first.
But would he say Reynolds is the Jonathan Sayer of Wrexham?
“I think that if you said that to him, he’d say, ‘Who is Jonathan Sayer? What are you doing in my club? Get out!’
“I certainly don’t honestly think that I’d started a trend. I don’t think we’re the same people at all.”
He points out at one time, the two teams were only a league apart – and a good season for Ashton or a bad season for Wrexham could have seen them meeting up.
Sayer added: “I’m desperate to get a copy of the book in their hand because I think both of them would do a really good job at playing me in a movie, you know?
“Quite often people are saying, ‘oh, you know, Jonathan, that guy from Deadpool, you’ve got similar physiques’. So, you know – he could do the stunts.”
Nowhere To Run is out now.