[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

But a Hollywood star taking over a non-league football club is basically playing Championship Manager on easy mode, if not cheat mode. 

Sorry Ska'd I don't get the analogy, I don't really see how it makes any difference whether it is a Hollywood star, a Saudi Prince, a chainstore owner or a Chinese businessman who owns club, it not like he is managing the football side of it.  You are quite right about the high profile they bring to the club and the rewards that will come with it, however I suspect your impression of certainly Reynolds business acumen may be a little misplaced.  Reynolds is a considerably more successful business man than Lai is.  In 2020 he sold his shares in Aviation Gin for $610 million, which he had only purchased in 2019 making a massive profit and in the last couple of weeks, he sold his majority shareholding in Mint Mobile to T-Mobile for $1.3 billion (making him a very substantial profit), so I don't think we would be struggling to to our £5 million back from him, if he owed it.

Not sure I disputed Reynolds' business acumen at all? In fact, I explicitly pointed out that as he can use his Hollywood contacts to make a successful TV documentary series out of the whole venture, he gets an instant return on investment, which is more than 99% of businessmen could hope for from a club purchase. It's a rock-solid commercial move, and not one that a Saudi prince or Chinese businessman can easily replicate, unless Lai has earned some Tinseltown clout starring in superhero films that we're all unaware of.

And the ChampMan analogy refers to the fact that in purchasing a non-league club, your initial injection of capital will go much further, as will the halo effect of gaining international fans. Of course that doesn't necessarily translate into immediate on-the-pitch success, but the amount of money you're putting in tilts the scales far more than it would in the Championship or Premier League, self-evidently. To return to the analogy, if you had a one-off single-use cheat code for Championship Manager that allowed you to magically put £5m into a club, would you use the cheat on Manchester United or on Blyth Spartans? And which do you think would be more visibly transformed by the cash?

So yeah, not knocking Reynolds overall, I reiterate that Wrexham have every right to love him, his commercial nous is clearly coupled with a philanthropic bent, and that's a good thing. And during their cup run, his TV series + social media presence did more for the profile of the FA Cup in thirty days than the actual FA have done in thirty years. But Prem and Championship ownership is the realm of hard-nosed business sharks looking to put the minimum in to get the maximum out (incredibly common), lifelong fans who'll bankroll the club as far as they're able (vanishingly rare), men who are wealthy enough to use a club as a status symbol without ever expecting money back (rarer still), and out-and-out crooks. All the passion in the world won't change that, sadly.