In future generations, bright-eyed, football-mad children on their first visit to the Racecourse Ground in north Wales will ask: “Why are we Wrexham fans, Mum?” And they’ll be told: “Your father was a Wrexham fan, and your father’s father, and your father’s father’s father … well, your father’s father’s father watched Welcome to Wrexham with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney on Disney+.”
As a fan of a club playing in the same league as Wrexham, the unfolding hype has been an uneasy watch. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with random people from around the world deciding to support Wrexham, but you do have to wonder if some of them are a bit gullible if they’re choosing their team after watching a celebrity-fronted docu-commercial.
The second series of the show starts with a piece to camera where Reynolds and McElhenney pretend to be lost for words as they deliver news that King Charles is coming to the north Welsh town, and will pay the club a visit. The players and fans seem baffled at the circus of money and power that has descended on them. “You’ve got two Hollywood actors, you’ve got the royal family in Wrexham. How do you even put them together? I’ve no idea,” says a perplexed Wrexham striker, Ollie Palmer.
The answer to how this all came together has to do with two celebrities attaching themselves to the rapidly accelerating global commodification of football. The apparent authenticity of football culture in its native home is now a highly marketable product. It’s red-carpet glamour meets terrace culture. This particular synthesis has been successful in creating bingeable content for the highly competitive streaming market.
But is Welcome to Wrexham really about football? It seems to be as much about the celebrity of Reynolds and McElhenney, who are executive producers of the show, and the bromance between them. There are self-deprecating jokes about midlife crisis; there’s a cutesy subplot where McElhenney feels left out as Reynolds goes to a game without him; there’s an entire episode devoted to their first visit to Wales.
At times, the documentary feels like a corporate video. At the end of the first series, the dramatic tension of a crucial playoff game is interrupted so that the celebrities can wax lyrical about their executive director, who is also a consulting producer on the show. At other times, it’s just very Hollywood. “I can’t believe this is my life,” says McElhenney at one point, standing on the pitch he owns, marvelling at a situation that he paid to contrive.
This is where we are now. As the money involved in football becomes ever more absurd, clubs are finding it harder and harder to simply exist, let alone compete. Some get lucky and become the subjects of cringey documentaries or multibillion-pound sportswashing operations for autocratic petro-dictatorships, while others fight for their lives or get stripped for their assets.
My own club has been on the dirty end of this particular stick. In what Disney+ subscribers call “series one”, and what real, authentic football fans like me know as the 2021-22 season, Wrexham bought the aforementioned Palmer from AFC Wimbledon. Palmer went on to become pivotal in the Welsh side’s improved late-season form, but the move deprived cash-strapped Wimbledon of our only recognised striker and, ultimately, formed part of the story of our tragicomic relegation from League One. Nobody made a documentary about that, but they should have.
Palmer later revealed that he had reluctantly accepted the “irresistible” terms offered to him by Wrexham. The Hollywood duo’s money had gazumped Wimbledon, a club I part own, as I have one share, for which I paid £25. This fan-owned model was what Wrexham used to have too, before it got pumped full of Hollywood cash, like a celebrity’s behind full of filler.
Reynolds and McElhenney clearly really care about the club and the community, and it would be churlish to deny that their purchase of Wrexham is a lesser evil. Imagine, for instance, a series called Saudi Mags, where Mohammed bin Salman takes a break from ordering the murder of dissident journalists to go to Newcastle and eat a stottie with Peter Beardsley in Grainger Market. And yet that seems like a low bar.
Clearly a savvy businessman, Reynolds tells us: “I’ll lie awake at night for hours just thinking about how we can better centre this club on the world stage.” The fact that this happens during a scene in which he films an advert for an online password management brand at the Racecourse, using Wrexham players as actors, suggests he may not be thinking of the kind of global acclaim most fans dream of that comes with great football.
The Disneyfication of football is no fairytale. It’s part of a wider shift that will have consequences that are hard to predict but seem unlikely to be good. In other words, game’s gone.
Simon Childs is a freelance writer based in London
