HIGH WYCOMBE, England -- In English soccer's third tier, one of the strongest clubs is owned by Hollywood actors, while the division's biggest spenders feature a man widely considered the greatest NFL quarterback of all time among their shareholders.
But it is the less glamorous Wycombe Wanderers, majority-owned by Georgian-Kazakh billionaire Mikheil Lomtadze since earlier this year, that has topped the table for the first 18 games of the season, with an incredible unbeaten league run stretching back to mid-August.
"We are doing things in a different way," said Dan Rice, Wycombe Wanderers' director of sport, of the two clubs still viewed as favorites to gain promotion from the League One division -- Wrexham AFC and Birmingham City.
"They have a clear objective to get into the Championship [English soccer's second tier] and then the Premier League [top tier] as fast as possible. We want to be there, too, but we are pragmatic in terms of the size of the club that we are, and we're very focused on building the club up," Rice told RFE/RL during a recent interview at the club's new London training ground.
Wrexham is co-owned by Hollywood duo Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who have made a documentary on their club's rise through English soccer's fifth and fourth divisions, while tapping their fame to build commercial partnerships.
Birmingham City, where retired NFL Hall of Famer Tom Brady has a small ownership stake, has historically played at a much higher level than this, including in European competitions, and boasts a 30,000-capacity stadium that is three times the size of Wycombe's.
For Wycombe, doing things in a different way includes planning for a "world-class" soccer academy with a future branch in Kazakhstan -- the country where the Georgian-born, Harvard-educated Lomtadze made his fortune as the co-founder of the Nasdaq-listed fintech giant Kaspi.kz.
"Once we have established what we want to establish here, we will aim to bring Kazakh players over here to show them what we really hope will be an elite environment. We're definitely very invested in finding Kazakh talent," Rice said.
A Small Club Focused On Details
The training ground now used by Wycombe Wanderers in Harlington, on the western edge of London, is testament to a soccer club that is a work in progress.
Much of the main building that the club shares with Imperial College London resembles a construction site, as existing space is turned over to make way for new facilities for a growing staff and playing squad.
And yet nobody would disagree that the facilities here are a massive improvement on the ones that the players used last season, close to the club's hometown of High Wycombe, about 50 kilometers northwest of London.
There, the marshy pitch was unusable for at least three months of the year, forcing players to play on a harder artificial surface, a situation that caused injuries.
Summer player transfers saw the club make some astute acquisitions but mostly in the form of player loans and free transfers.
That is normal for most clubs at this level, bar Birmingham, who spent more than $35 million on players in the offseason in order to guarantee an immediate return to the league the club was demoted from last term.
As for Wycombe's unbeaten run -- Wrexham and Birmingham were the last teams to beat them in the league, both in August --Rice is quick to credit manager Matt Bloomfield, a club legend whose appointment predated the takeover.
At the same time, changes behind the scenes have been relentless.
Since the summer, the club's new youth academy has been headed by Jeremy Sauer, who arrived from Brighton and Hove Albion, a top-tier English club renowned for its excellence in scouting and player development.
The first team's training sessions are now recorded by drones -- something that requires daily permission due to Harlington's proximity to Heathrow Airport -- to drive improvements in performance.
And the club has invested heavily in sports science's best techniques for player recovery, vital given that sides at this level play a grueling 46 games, excluding cup matches, every season.
No Abramovich 2.0
Kaspi.kz has no direct connection to Wycombe Wanderers, which Lomtadze owns via his company Blue Ocean Partners Ltd.
But his acquisition came at a time when the company he co-owns with fellow billionaire Vyacheslav Kim is looking for new markets after forging and dominating the market for digital payments and marketplace services in Kazakhstan.
In October, Kaspi.kz spent over $1 billion to acquire a controlling stake in Hepsiburada, one of Turkey's largest e-commerce platforms. In November, the company said it would not be bidding for neighboring Uzbekistan's state-run HUMO payments system, after previously declaring interest in the privatization.
English soccer is not new to billionaire owners from ex-Soviet countries.
Harvard Business School graduate Lomtadze's project looks a lot more grassroots than Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich's glory-filled two decades in charge of London club Chelsea, which came to an abrupt end with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
At any rate, English soccer's relatively new Profit and Sustainability Rules make it essentially impossible to build overnight "superclubs" these days.
The regulations essentially tie the spending of clubs to their ability to generate regular revenue from ticket sales, sponsorship, and other commercial sources.
At present, Wycombe Wanderers struggle to fill out their stadium, and many locals in High Wycombe approached by RFE/RL admitted to supporting larger clubs in nearby London.
For two centuries a furniture-making hub of national importance --Wycombe Wanderers' historic club nickname is the "chairboys" -- the town is now one of many commuter towns whose appeal to incoming residents lies in its proximity to the capital.
Those soccer fans that do take in the games have witnessed promotions, relegations, and a period between 2012 and 2020 when the club was fully owned by a supporters' association -- a group that holds a 10 percent stake in the club even now.
Jonny Vipond, who recently took his 8-year-old daughter to her first Wycombe game, says that he feels that the club that was an amateur outfit for more than a century of its 137-year existence is now in a pretty good place.
"Are we punching above our weight? I think we are," said Vipond, sipping a beer at a pub close to the stadium in High Wycombe.
"But what we've got right so far is the unity, the camaraderie. Whether or not Birmingham think they can buy the league, all the money in the world doesn't buy that."
