Hollywood or bust? League One’s biggest fish face wide-ranging battle

The top of League One right now bears an uncanny resemblance to the upper echelons of League Two last season. All three teams automatically promoted from the fourth tier in 2023-24 occupy spots in the top seven, with Wrexham second, Mansfield third and Stockport seventh.

It can be interpreted as an assault on the established order of League One, three sides with momentum and upward mobility breaking the mould. The only team looming above all three at the summit are Birmingham, who are vindicating the big spending sanctioned by Knighthead Capital, the ownership group fronted by Tom Wagner and NFL superstar Tom Brady.

But while Birmingham, whose £15m signing of Fulham’s Jay Stansfield smashed the League One transfer record more than four times over, have been labelled “a Championship team in waiting”, they’re not the only ones to show ambition. With fourth-place Exeter also in contention for their first promotion to the second tier after winning at Shrewsbury on Thursday, ambition is everywhere you look at the top of League One.

Wrexham are chasing a historic third successive promotion – a feat never achieved in England’s top five divisions – and recruited marquee names such as George Dobson and Ollie Rathbone from expected promotion contenders Charlton and Rotherham in the summer. The Millers, second favourites to go up after being relegated from the Championship, will be odds-against when they host Wrexham on Saturday.

Yet even the Hollywood-owned Welsh club accept they are playing second fiddle to Birmingham. They are no longer the biggest fish all their league rivals crave to catch, though that’s something their manager, Phil Parkinson, believes has been a boon since they landed in League One.

“There’s an expectancy on a lot of clubs in this division and the spotlight is away from us a little bit,” he says. “I feel that’s helped us, being slightly under the radar compared to what we have been in previous seasons.

“There’s a lot of teams in contention. The pool of potential challengers goes deep. Ourselves, Mansfield and Stockport have all come up and started really well and you’ve got Birmingham with their spending power, which is a different level.”

Wrexham’s striker Ollie Palmer agrees – although there’s a reluctance in Parkinson’s squad to compare themselves to the table-topping Blues. “I think people try to link us and Birmingham because of the owners,” he says. “I think other clubs and players are more bothered about the Hollywood status than we are.

“ Ultimately we’re not really interested in that, or what Birmingham are doing. Good for them, I’m sure it [the investment] is good for their football club but it’s not something I’m too concerned about.”

Wrexham may not be worrying about Birmingham, but Chris Davies knows the teams lurking below his league leaders pose a real threat, rubbishing the notion that promotion ought to be a formality for the Blues. So although his team have won seven of their nine games and beat Wrexham 3-1 in front of a bumper 28,000 crowd last month, he says: “Wrexham have had a very good start to the campaign, they’ve obviously built momentum from promotion, they know how to win and they have very honest players who will work hard, and are a club that’s invested a lot of money and have big ambitions.”

Birmingham travel to fifth-placed Lincoln, another of the league’s fast starters who should not be discounted, on Saturday. Davies says: “My job is to make sure the players enjoy this, but understand they still have a challenge. We will not get carried away because, as we’ve seen already, this is a really difficult league and anyone who thinks it’s easy, they don’t understand the challenge ahead of us.”

Flying further under the radar are Mansfield, the least fancied of the trio that won automatic promotion, a side renowned for their toughness, resilience and the organisation of their manager, Nigel Clough.

The Stags are chasing history of their own, looking to claim a spot in the second tier for the first time since a solitary season in 1977-78 – although they don’t quite share the lofty ambitions of Birmingham and Wrexham. T he noise around them has been quietened recently by Clough, who insists “it’s about staying in the league” – whether that means they finish “fifth from the bottom or sixth or seventh from top”.

He adds: “Trying to establish ourselves as a League One club is the next stage now, having not stayed at this level for more than 30 years. I don’t think that is tempering expectations too much.”

With Mansfield level on points with Wrexham but boasting a superior points-to-games ratio having played one fewer, opponents may not take Clough’s words at face value. All Birmingham’s challengers can harbour genuine hopes of competing in the Championship next year, though it is Parkinson and Wrexham, perhaps aided by their Hollywood owners Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, who are dreaming biggest.

“I think Rob and Ryan’s first game was Maidenhead away in front of a couple of thousand,” Parkinson says. “And now Rob is sat there at Birmingham seeing his team play in front of 30,000. That’s a testament to them and everyone connected with the club.

“You’ve got to be able to dream in football, haven’t you? Every supporter has got to have dreams. If you’d said to Wrexham fans two years ago we’d be going to Rotherham, then Huddersfield at home and Charlton away in the space of a week after playing Aldershot and King’s Lynn, they’d have said: ‘No, it won’t happen that quickly.’ But it has, so we continue to dream.”