As someone who regularly checks the ESPN home page, I’m accustomed to the fact that the site’s top headlines are dominated by even the most minuscule developments in the NFL and NBA. (Unless it’s the Stanley Cup final, hockey might as well not exist.) If soccer—or football, as the rest of the world calls it—does make the cut, it’s usually reserved for a megastar like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. With all that in mind, I can’t imagine I was the only person who did a double take last month when the result of a home opener in League Two—the fourth tier of English football—was prominently featured on the site. Imagine if Single-A baseball were held in the same esteem as a Shohei Ohtani highlight reel; it doesn’t make any sense. Such is the Wrexham Effect.
For the uninitiated: Back in February 2021, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney finalized their takeover of Wrexham AFC, a historic Welsh club then languishing in the fifth tier of English football. To facilitate their ambitious plan to get Wrexham climbing up the football pyramid—and to raise the club’s profile—the actors set up an accompanying FX docuseries, Welcome to Wrexham, following the team’s first season under new ownership. Over the course of 18 episodes, Welcome to Wrexham has been many things: an endearing portrait of the local community, a compelling sports drama, a digestible Welsh history lesson, and a glorified piece of branded content engineered by an A-lister known for peddling gin. (Naturally, Reynolds’s Aviation Gin is emblazoned on the team’s kits; Wrexham’s main shirt sponsor was TikTok, which has since been replaced by United Airlines.)
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Considering that Wrexham just completed a summer preseason tour in the United States playing friendlies against heavyweights like Manchester United and Chelsea, it’s safe to say that Welcome to Wrexham has officially put the club on the map. (Wrexham was also included in the latest installments of the FIFA video game franchise, which only adds to the team’s sudden cultural ubiquity.) While the first season of Welcome to Wrexham ended in heartbreak—the club lost in the playoff semifinals, missing out on promotion—the series delivered a kind of feel-good story that’s been likened to a real-life Ted Lasso. But just as the mustachioed coach of the Apple TV+ series uses football to deflect from issues within his personal life, what Wrexham is trying to accomplish on the pitch belies something far more cynical outside it: a commercial enterprise in which the unrelenting growth of the brand takes precedence over the actual sport it’s wedded to.
In the annals of soccer ownership, the stars of Deadpool and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia make for pretty innocuous figures compared with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund or [insert disgustingly rich oligarch here]. But even with all their Hollywood charisma—and a docuseries designed to paint them in a positive light—there were enough hints in the first season that Reynolds and McElhenney are more self-serving than they let on. It’s a trivial moment, but I keep thinking back to the episode in which Wrexham faces off against the worst team in the division, Dover, which leads to Reynolds and McElhenney calling the game alongside the club’s longtime commentator, Mark Griffiths. The match begins as expected, with Wrexham taking an early 2-0 lead, but when Dover score five successive goals, the actors ditch their commentating duties—thereby missing out on Wrexham staging a historic 6-5 comeback in stoppage time. “I think we’re gonna let Mark take it the rest of the way,” McElhenney says in an unconvincing voice-over. The only thing worse than fair-weather fans is fair-weather owners.
A far more worrying development arrives in the following episode, when Reynolds commandeers Wrexham’s pitch and its players for a commercial without giving a heads-up to key members of the coaching staff. Wrexham’s head of performance medicine and sports science, Kevin Mulholland, didn’t mince words about the situation: “It’s just a fucking disgrace, we got a game on fucking Saturday.” It’s perhaps the closest Welcome to Wrexham gets to offering a dissenting view of its owners, who repeatedly stress that they have the club’s best interests in mind. (For his part, Reynolds admits he’s addicted to growing and building brands, which, to be fair, he’s quite accomplished at.) Given the outsized attention that Wrexham’s received since the takeover, the vast majority of fans would agree that Reynolds and McElhenney have held up their end of the bargain, even if promotion would have to wait at least another year after Season 1.
For Welcome to Wrexham’s second season, there won’t be as much drama on the pitch: At some point during Season 2, we’ll see the club get automatically promoted after thoroughly dominating the league. (The city of Wrexham also gets an uptick in tourists who became fans of the team after watching the series, as well as a visit from King Charles.) But what’s most telling are the comments from Reynolds and McElhenney long before promotion is secured. “We’re heavily invested in building this club, the stadium itself, and if we don’t get promoted this year, the club is completely, totally, and wholly unsustainable,” Reynolds says in the Season 2 premiere. McElhenney echoes a similar sentiment: If Wrexham isn’t sustainable, then they’ve failed on their promise to the community and the team will be “fucked.” (We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.) That Wrexham’s story this season has a happy ending shouldn’t detract from the implications of such failure: By the actors’ own admission, the consequences would’ve been disastrous. (English football has a long and tragic history of cavalier owners who’ve run storied clubs into the ground.)
To be sure, Wrexham was perfectly positioned for success: The club has a manager and several players on its payroll that are a class above the competition. But the beauty of sport is that nothing is predetermined: If Leicester City can defy the odds to win the Premier League, then you can easily imagine a world in which Wrexham suffered another setback. (For the fans’ sake, thank God they didn’t.) The win-at-all-costs approach isn’t just a poor fit for something as wonderfully unpredictable as football: It’s the sort of venture capital mindset that’s capable of cratering entire industries. When viewed in that light, the words of encouragement from Reynolds and McElhenney at the start of the season seem a lot more patronizing, if not vaguely ominous. “You’re all very important to us, and we want to continue to support you. And if you keep winning, it makes it a lot easier,” McElhenney tells the (unpaid!) Wrexham women’s team before quipping that they should score “more goals” next time.
Of course, Reynolds and McElhenney are largely shielded from such criticism when they’re the ones controlling the narrative, and that’s what makes Welcome to Wrexham a bizarre viewing experience. Because of their self-professed naivete in the world of sports ownership, Reynolds and McElhenney have orchestrated a scenario in which they’re the plucky underdogs—never mind that Wrexham now has the commercial power that the clubs they’re competing against can only dream of. (As for why Wrexham was chosen by the actors: The third-oldest professional football team in the world with the oldest active international stadium is an effective sales pitch to potential sponsors and investors.) That doesn’t mean that what Wrexham has already achieved under Reynolds and McElhenney’s ownership hasn’t been a genuine boon for the club’s supporters; it just feels uncomfortable that the series expects us to celebrate the fact that the actors are increasing their net worth along the way. (They’ve since invested in the Alpine Formula One team.)
There’s still plenty to love about Welcome to Wrexham: From the players and the expletive-laden manager to the wry owner of the bar attached to the stadium and the Declan Swans, the series is never better than when it’s showcasing the intimate bond between the club and the community. I’ll keep rooting for the Wrexham faithful, just as anyone who’s watched the Netflix docuseries Sunderland ’Til I Die—itself an inspiration for Welcome to Wrexham—hope that the Black Cats return to the Premier League. But the moments of authenticity sprinkled throughout Welcome to Wrexham shouldn’t be conflated with all the artifice surrounding it. At its core, the series is cleverly packaged, binge-worthy propaganda capitalizing on the fastest-growing sport in the United States. Reynolds and McElhenney have done right by Wrexham so far, but the celebrity owners shouldn’t be mistaken for underdogs: They’re disrupters.