| Andrés Martinez
My son taught himself to play the guitar during Covid lockdown. Someone else recently told me they picked up French, and we all know about all the sourdough yeast starters out there. Rob McElhenney was sufficiently bored to check out the Netflix docuseries Sunderland ‘Til I Die, despite not being into soccer and not finding the first episode that gripping. It is the greatest sport documentary I’ve ever watched – certainly the best at capturing the relationship between a sports team and its community and fans –so I am not surprised that when he persevered beyond the pilot he was swept away by it and binged his way to the end. What I am surprised by is that his takeaway from watching the melancholic train wreck of a show (things don’t go well for Sunderland) was: “I’ve got to do this.” The writer and actor (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Mythic Quest) felt he had to buy an English football team toiling in a lower division and then chronicle the story of his efforts to get it promoted, and of the impact the club’s improved fortunes would have on the town that loves it.
Covid wasn’t THAT long ago, which makes it all the more remarkable that since his lockdown epiphany, McElhenney and his co-conspirator Ryan Reynolds did sell a docuseries about acquiring and running a football club, then went out and found themselves one (in that order), acquiring Wrexham AFC in northern Wales, the world’s third oldest football club, for $2.5 million from its Supporters Trust. And since then, they’ve already accomplished something no one else had ever accomplished in the (rather long) history of football in Britain: three consecutive promotions.
Wrexham was languishing in the fifth tier of the game, “the National League,” when the Hollywood duo arrived, but this fall they will play in the Championship, as the second division of English football is confusingly called, just one step below the promised land of the English Premier League (Welsh clubs, unlike Scottish ones, play in England). One more promotion and Wrexham will be facing the likes of Manchester United and Arsenal and will be worth several times its current estimated value of more than $150 million. The accompanying FX docuseries Welcome to Wrexham debuted its fourth season last week, chronicling the team’s League 1 season and promotion to the Championship.
But wait. Is it more accurate to say the club has an accompanying docuseries, or to say that this major media production has an accompanying football club? The unprecedented – and highly improbable – footballing success of these celebrities who’d be the first to tell you they didn’t know much about soccer before getting into this is plenty fascinating, but what is most fascinating about the Wrexham phenomenon from our Great Game Lab perspective is what it represents in terms of the ongoing convergence of media and sport.
I think, write, and teach about what I call the “mediafication” of sport and the “sportification” of media, and Welcome to Wrexham is on the cutting edge as a case study that illustrates, and likely accelerates, both trends.
McElhenney and Reynolds have been refreshingly candid throughout about their intentions, and in an odd way the media production might have reassured local fans in what an Associated Press story called the “tired-looking city” of 40,000 people that the two Hollywood celebrities weren’t just doing this on a lark. Or at least that it was a bigger, more profitable lark, perhaps worth their while and sustained attention. Either way, the club was in dire straits after previous financial implosions, so fans didn’t think they had much to lose when they voted to hand control of their club over to the Americans.
The show aims to be various things at once. It is a fantastic explainer of British footballing culture (including the alien concept to American sports of the dramatic promotion/relegation system), a humorous depiction of the McElhenney – Reynolds dynamic (there is even an episode on bromance), a straightforward summary of the team’s fortunes and main characters similar to many such fly-on-the-wall sports docuseries (like Amazon’s All or Nothing series), and a loving portrayal of the town and its fans (characters like the proprietor of The Turf pub become part of the cast).
McElhenney told NPR’s Fresh Air that the idea all along was to marry the “power of storytelling with the power of sport” and that “the whole point of the documentary is to get you to fall in love. It is at its core a love letter to working-class people.” He had asked consultants, he explained in the same interview, to look for a “working-class club that has fallen on hard times and help me find people who love their team as much as I love the Philadelphia Eagles.”
One of the reasons so many wealthy Americans are crossing the Atlantic to invest in European football clubs is because there is a certain romance to rescuing those clubs with amazing histories and passionate fanbases who’ve fallen on hard times, of which they are many. And the prices seem cheap to Americans because that unfamiliar specter of relegation tends to depress valuations (one terrible season that relegates you out of the Premier League, can cost you hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenue over the next decade). Everyone wants to orchestrate a Sunderland ‘Til I Die with a happy ending, which is a lot harder to do than it looks. Well, at least we thought it was, before McElhenney and Reynolds waltzed into the game.
Birmingham City is another club that was promoted to the Championship for next season, and in one of the show’s new episodes there is an amusing encounter between McElhenney and Tom Brady (Birmingham’s celebrity part-owner) and their competing documentary film crews (Amazon Prime is making one on Birmingham).
Normally, remarkable sports stories are captured after the fact by storytellers taking you beyond the matchday reports and coverage, but Wrexham is doing all this in real time. The football probably wouldn’t be happening without the show (at least not under Reynolds and McElhenney’s auspices) but it’s also true that the riches generated by the show are fueling the sporting success. On The Town podcast early on in this journey, McElhenney explained the novelty of the experiment to Matthew Belloni like this: “The idea of telling a story and getting people invested in the story and you’re watching as the story is also feeding into the building of the infrastructure of whatever the business or project is is really fascinating.”
Still, it all sounds like a Hollywood stunt that could have gone awry, but somehow, it’s all worked beautifully. A top executive at another club in England confessed to me that he was obsessed with the show and in awe of how well the two celebrities have navigated the business. They’ve been appropriately humble and collaborative in their dealings with fans (always talking about themselves as “stewards” not “owners”), and they have hired top-notch executives and footballing talent (both coaches and players) that would have normally been beyond the reach of a club of Wrexham’s size. The club and its show have developed a flywheel effect where they each benefit the other. For instance, Wrexham early on after the takeover had glamorous sponsors pumping money into the club that no other club in its division had ever had, such as a TikTok jersey sponsorship, which has since been picked up by United Airlines.
The challenge will only get steeper from here, as it is notoriously difficult (and costly) to make that last jump from the Championship to the Premier League, though at this point I wouldn’t bet against the charmed Hollywood duo.