Michael Eisner drops hint that Portsmouth are set to follow in Birmingham City & Wrexham footsteps | OneFootball

Pompey are looking to board the EFL docu-series hype train.

Michael Eisner has hinted that a 'Welcome to Wrexham'-type docu-series could be heading to Portsmouth soon, thanks to inspiration from the Welsh side and Birmingham City.

Having cameras going behind the scenes at football clubs wasn't started by Wrexham when the first series covering the club in the National League launched on Disney+.

Tottenham Hotspur's 2019/20 campaign, when they had José Mourinho at the helm, was covered by Amazon Prime, as were their north London rivals, Arsenal, in 2021/22 - Sunderland's League One struggles were documented by Netflix in 2017/18 and beyond.

'Warnock', a 2005 fly-on-the-wall movie about Neil Warnock's 2004/05 season with Sheffield United came before all of that.

But where you have to give credit to Wrexham is their popularisation of the genre in the lower leagues. Just like North Americans becoming owners of EFL clubs, it's now become very fashionable to have a camera crew documenting a term inside a football club, and Pompey are looking to get in on the action.

Portsmouth eyeing 'Welcome to Wrexham'-esque documentary

Eisner, Portsmouth's owner and chairman, was ahead of the curve when it came to American ownership of English football clubs and the idea of filming a behind-the-scenes series at Fratton Park, but the former Disney chairman decided against going ahead with the idea because he didn't want to be "a Hollywood stereotype," as he told Sportico.

Now, thanks to the success of 'Welcome to Wrexham', and the imminent arrival of Birmingham's own production, Eisner is revisiting that thought.

"We’ll be copying them (Wrexham) to a degree," Eisner revealed

"It’s complicated. … You have to think hard about how you want to invest."

Portsmouth behind-the-scenes series could generate immense revenue for the club

According to Eisner, Wrexham's player budget sits at $25 million (£18.8 million). Two seasons ago, when they were in League Two, they generated more commercial revenue than five Premier League clubs, as per The Athletic.

A large part of the club's attractiveness to sponsors is because of the popularity that the Disney+ documentary has brought to the club. These brands, like United Airlines, an American aviation company, are willing to invest more into the soon-to-be Championship side because they know their brand is going to be seen a lot more and be associated with a positively-trending club.

Even though Birmingham's production is yet to be seen by the public, their chairman, Tom Wagner, has already spoken about how it massively helped them to construct the squad that put up a multi-record-breaking 111 points this season.

"I’ll say the following. Without having had the tailwind of the documentary series distributed by Amazon to over 200 countries, we would have already been on a path to have the same level of revenue as parachute clubs next year in the Championship, which is something that has never happened before," Wagner said, via Birmingham Live.

"With the tail wind of a doc series and so many global partners that we have, we’ve got a lot to come on the revenue side. People might say why do you keep talking about the revenue side of things, but without revenue we don’t get the players."

It would take a lot of time for Pompey to get up to the revenue levels that the top two League One sides are producing, but it's proven that a successful docu-series will get you heading in that sort of direction, and could help Portsmouth take the next step up the ladder.