Birmingham City and Wrexham are expected to flex their financial muscles this summer and are likely to be among the biggest spenders outside the Premier League once the transfer window opens.
Both clubs are ready to mount a push for the top division and both have spending power on a par with those Championship clubs that already benefit from Premier League parachute payments.
Sky Sports News has been told that Birmingham and Wrexham are likely to be targeting similar players to the likes of Leicester, Ipswich and Southampton - and some of the smaller Premier League clubs this summer.
There are striking similarities between both the ambitions and the strategies at St Andrew's and the Racecourse Ground. Birmingham and Wrexham both have wealthy American owners. Both have a rapidly expanding commercial base which dwarfs much of the competition they have met with so far.
Both have produced major TV documentaries to showcase their mission and widen their global appeal. And both have a business strategy, which is planning specifically for life in the Premier League. Sooner rather than later.
Crucially, because both have been promoted from League One, where the financial fair play rules are very different to the Championship, both have a lot of freedom to invest in their teams this summer.
In League One, clubs have only been allowed to spend 60 per cent of their total turnover on players although this is changing for next season, to further limit the amount wealthy owners can pump in.
In the Championship, the rules say no more than £39m can be lost over any three-year period. For Wrexham and Birmingham, that gives a lot of leeway to invest in the squad because a new three-year cycle starts now.
Theoretically, both clubs could gamble the family silver for the next two years, trying to reach English football's promised land, knowing that if they fail, they have a third season to claw costs back and still remain within the PSR limits.
It has been made clear to me that neither Birmingham nor Wrexham want to do that and "gamble" on getting to the top division. Instead, both are looking to expand their commercial revenues even more spectacularly, so that they have even more cash to spend on players. But their spending power is already mighty and impressive.
Birmingham made headlines when they smashed the League One spending record by paying £15m plus add-ons to Fulham for Jay Stansfield on Deadline Day last August. Before that transfer window, the previous record fee paid in League One was £3.4m for Will Grigg. Birmingham paid more than four times that to get Stansfield.
It was a deliberate signal of intent and a gregarious show of strength. But it was also a calculated part of a much wider strategy: don't just recruit players who are good enough to play in the division above - buy talent that you feel can also hold their own in the Premier League. Otherwise, your squad will not be able to keep pace with your ambition. Expect them to pursue a similar calibre of player this summer.
"Parachute payment clubs have a roughly one-in-four chance of getting promoted," Birmingham owner Tom Wagner told The Times. "Non-parachute clubs have a one-in-16 chance. If we can achieve parachute-level revenues, we're four times more likely to get promoted.
"If our revenue progresses as we expect into next season, which is basically a certainty, we will be the highest revenue-generating club in the Championship ever, not receiving parachute payments - and we will be on a par with those receiving parachute payments.
"If we then progress one year further, and we're fortunate enough to end up in the Premier League, we'll be a mid-table club or better in total revenue, first year in."
Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought Wrexham in 2021 for £2m. The club now has an estimated worth in excess of £100m - a 50-fold increase in four years.
Wrexham were rock bottom in value when the A-listers bought the club, just after the crippling Covid pandemic, and with the team in the fifth tier of English football. Extraordinarily, after three successive promotions, their ambitions to make the Premier League don't seem so unrealistic.
Wrexham's estimated turnover this season has been more than £27m. That is an enormous figure for a League One club - four or five times the turnover of the league's smallest clubs. Their front-of-shirt sponsor alone, I've been told, is worth around £5-6m, which is similar to Burton Albion's total turnover for 2023/24.
And while these values are carefully protected for commercial sensitivity, it's thought Wrexham's shirt sponsor is worth broadly as much as what many middle-ranking Premier League clubs earn for putting a particular company's logo on their shirt.
The Racecourse Ground has already been renovated. Now the club is building a new 5,500-seater Kop stand which will be future-proofed to allow for further expansion if Wrexham can achieve another promotion.
There's no doubt that both Birmingham and Wrexham have gone global. The north Wales club brought in Michael Williamson as their new chief executive 12 months ago, having been on the board of Inter Milan, DC United and Inter Miami, where he worked closely with David Beckham. A superstar CEO with superstar friends.
McElhenney and Reynolds have invested around £8m in the playing squad, but they've succeeded in hugely growing their fanbase and commercial revenues thanks to the Disney+ documentary series, "Welcome to Wrexham", with Season 4 available now.
Their sponsors have included TikTok, United Airlines, and Meta Quest. The stunt that produced a "Hollywood" style sign which appeared, not in the Santa Monica mountains, but on the Rhostyllen coal slag heap overlooking the town, went viral on social media in 2021. The club currently has 1.7m TikTok followers worldwide.
And the US factor is key here. Wrexham advertised the club, with a special appearance from Sir Anthony Hopkins, during February's Super Bowl in New Orleans. I've been told that around 65 per cent of Wrexham's total income now comes from abroad. American owners, at both Birmingham and Wrexham, are repeatedly pitching their product to an American and worldwide audience. Hence the importance of international TV documentaries.
While Wrexham have produced three box-sets with box-office A-listers in McElhenney and Reynolds, Birmingham have done the same with NFL legend Tom Brady. The club's minority shareholder is expected to feature heavily in Birmingham's new Amazon Prime documentary series, which has followed every aspect of the club, behind the scenes, from pre-season to the league title. The box set launches across 200 different countries next month.
When Knightshead bought Birmingham two years ago, the club's sponsors included a local packaging firm and a company that offered surgical weight loss. Now, the club is supported by multi-national brands including Nike, Delta Airlines, Vertu, Coral, Undefeated and Heineken.
Instead of a last-minute rush from the local pub before kick-off, thousands of fans now attend the new St Andrew's fan park on a matchday, soaking up the pre-match atmosphere and snapping up a huge new range of merchandise. The average Birmingham fan's spend, I'm told, is up 300 per cent on last season. They currently have 18,300 season ticket holders with 10,500 more on the waiting list.
Such is the clout of the Birmingham owner, Wagner has been pictured this week meeting with the chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, who is being heavily lobbied to support Wagner's plan for a £3bn Sports Quarter in England's second city. With a brand new 62,000-capacity stadium for Birmingham City to play in.
The manager, Chris Davies, told Sky Sports News the project is similar to the one that saw City Group dominate and regenerate a large part of Manchester. If it goes ahead, Birmingham's new stadium would dwarf the Etihad's 53,400 seats.
A phrase regularly repeated around the halls of power at St Andrew's is: "It's not about the league you are in, it's about the club that you are." But both Birmingham and Wrexham are getting ever closer to the league that every English football club aspires to be in.
