Welcome to Wrexham Review: Watching Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds Buy a Sports Team Is Damn Compelling

The Pitch:

English: Pitch
American: Field
Welsh: Traw

In 2020, Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a Welsh football team. Neither of them had ever been to Wales before taking such an enormous leap, let alone Wrexham. Nor had either of them ever followed the English football league, let alone the fifth-tier Wrexham Red Dragons.

And yet, they saw some real potential both in the club (which is the third oldest football team in the world and the oldest professional club in Wales — they even play at the Racecourse, the oldest international football pitch in the world, est. 1807) as well as in the residents of Wrexham. Potential for historic sporting success, sure, but also the potential for an incredible story.

And so they started making this docuseries. And then they bought the club. (Yes, in that order.) Then, they started working with both the team and the community (and, of course, FX) to build something great.

Building Trust: A smart thing the Welcome to Wrexham creative team does in its first episode is establish that this entire project — both McElhenney and Reynolds’s purchase of the team, and the documentary they’re making about the entire process — is about trust.

Yes, a certain degree of ego is implicit in McElhenney’s excitement when he realizes that the English football league system, which sees teams moving up and down a five-tier professional pyramid each season based on both performance and funding (more on that below), could potentially allow for a team in the lowest tier (like Wrexham) to get promoted all the way to the highest tier (the Premier League).

But what the series takes extreme and precise pains to make clear is that it’s Wrexham’s place in the community — and, even more critically, its identity as a fan-owned club — that’s ultimately the thing they are committed to keeping the highest priority. McElhenney and Reynolds could be driven by all the ego in the world, but at the end of the day, they know that it’s still Wrexham’s fans whose support they need to earn.

(To be clear: it does not seem like McElhenney and Reynolds are driven by all the ego in the world. Of course, the series has a built-in bias towards making us think that, but the kinds of business decisions we see the pair make seem to literally put their money where their mouth is, so why not lean towards good will?)

In this, interestingly, Welcome to Wrexham calls to mind another popular American project having to do with an English football league club on the cusp of promotion. No, not Ted Lasso. This would be AFC Wimbledon, another fan-owned small-market club constantly on the verge, which has seen a surprise source of financial support spring up from another (niche) titan of American pop culture: novelist John Green, of Vlogbrothers, DFTBA, and Nerdfighter army fame. In fact, Reynolds even guested on the Dear Hank and John podcast late last year, where they all talked about their shared interest in being financial supporters/responsible stewards of small, fan-owned English football clubs.

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