Wrexham, you may have heard of them. If you’re the local authority on what’s going on in the lower echelons of the British football leagues, you certainly have.
But you’re more likely to have heard of them because four years ago they were bought by two actor-celebrities, Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds and sitcom actor Rob McElhenney.
By ploughing significant money into the club, the two owners have ensured that Wrexham, from a small city in north Wales, have been promoted in three consecutive seasons. They now find themselves in the Championship, the second tier of English football, only one division below their more illustrious cousins to the north, Manchester United and Liverpool.
McElhenney sees no reason why Wrexham and their coach, Phil Parkinson, can’t go all the way to the top as they bask in the satisfaction of popping out of Division Two like corks.
“People would laugh when we would say that [Premier League being the target], especially members of the press, and fans and lots of people would laugh,” McElhenney told BBC Sport. “Hopefully, one day we’ll be competing with Liverpool.”
You might also have heard of Wrexham because of Welcome to Wrexham, a documentary TV series that started season four last week. The series, on the satellite channel FX, an offshoot of Disney Entertainment, features McElhenney and Reynolds and their journey to make an unsuccessful club a successful one.
It’s fun and it’s heartwarming and good for a few laughs. It’s also fiendishly clever. Sport, with its natural cycle of victory and defeat, is innately dramatic and McElhenney and Reynolds have plugged into this.
The new owners have said in interviews they’ve always been fascinated with the idea of promotion and relegation — a concept alien to most US sports fans — which is also inherently dramatic. They’ve plugged into that too.
Welcome to Wrexham is a script that writes itself. Who needs AI when you have home or away matches every week? And who needs to assemble a stellar cast when you have a “cast” playing in the same colour shirts out on the pitch every home Saturday?
There’s another aspect in which Welcome to Wrexham is outrageously clever. In the show the two celebrity owners try to lose their celebrity status. They try to learn Welsh, and we laugh because we know they never will. Celebrities don’t speak Welsh, or very few do.
They’re celebrities pretending to be ordinary guys, not ordinary guys pretending to be celebrities. Ordinary guys couldn’t fork out £2m to buy the club from their Supporters’ Trust. Ordinary guys don’t buy clubs, they support them.
There are shades of Ted Lasso here, the fictional college football coach who transplants across the Atlantic and takes over Richmond FC. Ted Lasso is satire. And the satire comes from watching a decent man and his entourage try to come to terms with an ignoble sport — British Premiership football — and the characters who populate it.
There’s the grumpy skipper; there’s the prima donna striker; there’s the glamorous owner. There’s my personal favourite, Trent Crimm, louche football reporter from The Independent.
Lasso is forever trying to remind everyone of sport’s higher calling. Football reminds him that “higher calling” is merely a notional concept. Yes, there are occasional passages of beauty, but behind the scenes, football is a mud bath. That’s when it’s not a bloodbath.
‘Welcome to Wrexham’ is billed as a documentary. That could be right but, equally, it might not. It’s also a sitcom
Welcome to Wrexham is closer to the bone than the satire of Ted Lasso. It is closer to the bone because it has often been said that British (and European) football is a bit of a pantomime, full of heroes, clowns and cartoon villains.
Welcome to Wrexham is billed as a documentary. That could be right but, equally, it might not. It’s also a sitcom, where the cast is made up of players rather than actors. What Reynolds and McElhenney have done in buying Wrexham is that they’ve bought their own sitcom and the script writes itself.
There was once a time when the dressing room was sacrosanct. You might occasionally see snaps of fast bowlers getting into the ice bath, but that was it. Once, what happened on tour, stayed on tour, and this included all the shagging and roistering. It was seen as part of a sportsman’s life and editors turned a blind eye.
Such boundaries are with us no longer. Cameras go where they once were forbidden. It makes for entertaining TV. But do we really want all the mystery so relentlessly pared back from our sport?
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