Outside the Racecourse Ground, the crowd scene before a Wrexham FC home game in the National League is out of the ordinary. There are many more cameras than is normal for a non-league game, but the supporters are different too: as the documentary Welcome to Wrexham returns to Disney+ for season two, we see red and white replica shirts being worn by fans from the US, Portugal, Australia and Thailand.
Wrexham FC had no such international following before 2020, when it was, bewilderingly, bought by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Investing an initial £2m, the friends promised to do two things: revamp the ailing Wrexham FC, perhaps even turn it into a Premier League club; and make a documentary about the journey.
If it is not clear whether Welcome to Wrexham is a TV show about a football club, or whether Wrexham FC is a football club that provides material for a TV show, it is certainly a break from streaming TV’s many other behind-the-scenes football documentaries, most of which are shimmering corporate success stories. Like the other one that isn’t – Netflix’s Sunderland ’Til I Die, which captures the club suffering consecutive relegations – Welcome to Wrexham is acutely sensitive to how important a football club can be to a city. When the local economy is dead and everyone is struggling, footie can give a community a meeting place, a shared purpose, maybe even a job. But that’s only if it wins, and winning is hard.
Season one introduced us to the players, the lifelong fans and the small business owners who all desperately wanted Wrexham to be promoted to League Two, and so did we as we watched a recap of the club’s 2021/22 campaign. That it fell short, losing in the play-offs, gave Welcome to Wrexham more jeopardy, and now it means time is running out for an artificially inflated enterprise to balance its books. As McElhenney puts it: “From a financial perspective, if we do not get promotion this year, we are fucked.”
The 2022/23 league season, which the series is now covering, has finished in real life, so almost everyone watching knows how this chapter ends. There’s a danger the drama could stall, and this week’s big issue isn’t a glamorous one: the club has applied for some government funding. It needs £20m to help it knock down the old Kop end and replace it with a new stand to prepare the Racecourse for the higher leagues.
The £20m, if granted, will be from a levelling up fund. Often, Welcome to Wrexham stops to wryly translate British vernacular for American viewers, but it likes to keep its politics light, so here a caption doesn’t flash up saying, “Levelling Up: an obviously bogus project to reduce inequality, created by a government that exists to entrench it.” One of Reynolds and McElhenney’s British advisers does, however, react to the application’s eventual rejection by speculating that the government might have written Wrexham off at the next election.
In the meantime, the old Kop is so knackered it is demolished anyway, but its fall isn’t allowed to pass without a stirring tribute, featuring gorgeous archive footage of a goal being scored in front of teeming terraces, and a short but emotional interview with an ex-player who got a goal himself and heard the roar.
These days, Wrexham FC has more complex aims than just scoring goals, so you fear for manager Phil Parkinson if he can’t keep getting promoted: one mid-table finish and he could be out, not for lack of footballing nous but because he’s not established an entertaining TV persona. The show tries to help him out with its “Phil’s Enthusiasm” counter – it ticks up every time Parkinson says “fuck” during a team talk – but the gaffer’s reliance on dour cliche (“we gave ourselves a mountain to climb”) leaves a hole in the show’s centre. He’s all ball and no show, as is a segment that looks in detail at goalkeeper Rob Lainton’s wrist injury. You can almost hear fast-forward icons being tapped from Bangkok to Brisbane.
Just as they have saved the club financially, however, Reynolds and McElhenney can always lend the show their star power. Now they have help on that front as the opening episode’s centrepiece sees King Charles III visit the stadium. This poses the awkward question of whether a series so attuned to how the unfairness of the western world impacts on working people will give in to genuflecting pomp. Not a bit of it: there’s an amusing segment where a deportment coach teaches Ryan and Rob the proper etiquette, but they decide that’s silly and just give the guy a handshake and a polite chat instead. He’s on their turf.
Welcome to Wrexham is on Disney+ now.
