Welcome To Wrexham
Disney+
4 out of 5 stars
Last year, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, two Hollywood actors who knew little about soccer, made the news when they bought a struggling Welsh football team.
The docuseries on Disney+, Welcome To Wrexham, follows their improbable takeover – and the underdog story of a football club in a working-class town – with humour and humanity.
Here are three reasons to tune in:
1. The love of the game
What would Reynolds, the wisecracking anti-hero of the Deadpool films (2016 to 2018) – and McElhenney, the star of hit sitcom It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (2005 to present) – want with a football team in the United Kingdom?
McElhenney became interested in the game because of a British friend, and was drawn to Wrexham because of his own working-class roots and how his hometown team, the Philadelphia Eagles, winning American football’s biggest trophy was “the best day of my life”.
For Reynolds, a love of sports sprang from the fact that being good at it was one of the few ways he received the approval of his late father.
And McElhenney somehow talked Reynolds – whom he had never met in person – into buying the oldest football club in Wales.
2. An underdog town and football club
Once a coal-mining town, Wrexham has seen better days.
And its football club is a source of both nostalgia and disappointment, having languished at the bottom of the professional leagues for years.
So the Hollywood takeover is seen as a godsend, but the new owners – whose goal is to see the club promoted – are greeted with some apprehension.
3. Sports psychology
The actors make fun of their own celebrity and cluelessness, but the series is much kinder with its portraits of various players, staff and fans, for whom the club means so much.
It also captures how fans are often their teams’ harshest critics, and the irony of supporters delivering their summary judgements of professional athletes while flipping burgers or sipping tea.
But, as any fan knows, it is about much more than just the football.
