‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Review: Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny Try to Save a Soccer Team in Feel-Good FX Docuseries

If you’re as online as I am, the premise of Welcome to Wrexham might bring to mind a GIF. Specifically, the one from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle of Ryan Reynolds in surgical scrubs, asking: “But why?” Why did Reynolds and fellow movie/TV star Rob McElhenny decide to buy a fifth-tier (official designation, not my personal judgment) football team in Wales together? Why did they then decide to make a docuseries about it for FX?

Truth be told, after watching the five half-hour episodes sent to critics (of 18 total for the season), I still don’t have clear answers. Welcome to Wrexham is mostly concerned with delivering feel-good fluff, and that it delivers in big heaping piles. But cotton candy has its time and place too. If you’re in the mood for a bit of uncomplicated sweetness — and especially if you also have a soft spot for McElhenny, Reynolds and/or the general concept of sports fandom to begin with — Welcome to Wrexham may hit the spot.

Coming just a couple of years after Ted Lasso, Welcome to Wrexham can’t help but feel, at least initially, like a reality-show copy: Both center on clueless Americans who know nothing about football being placed in charge of football teams. Neither McElhenny nor Reynolds knows much about the sport going in, much less about the day-to-day practicalities of running a club. Yet for reasons only vaguely gestured toward in the premiere (something something sports, something something dads), the pair go halfsies on a struggling team located in the small working-class town of Wrexham. The purchase largely seems to inspire excitement from fans who bemoan that Wrexham AFC lately has been so bad, “You go into each game almost defeated as you start.”  

From there, the pressure is on for Reynolds and McElhenny to get the team back in shape, in hopes of getting promoted at the end of their first full season. (If you’re already lost because you don’t know what “getting promoted” means or where Wales exactly is, fear not: Welcome to Wrexham makes itself super-friendly for even the most oblivious Americans with captions to translate certain terms in English, American and Welsh, or diagrams to spell out the structure of the English football league system.) For the most part, they try to do this by deferring to the judgment of Humphrey Kerr — Mythic Quest writer, football lover, actual British person and now Wrexham’s executive director — who travels between Wrexham and McElhenny’s home in Los Angeles to offer updates and advice.

McElhenny and Reynolds are the obvious draw of Welcome to Wrexham, and the docuseries leans into the guys’ snarky-but-sweet personas as well as the surreal Hollywood-ness of it all. When McElhenny makes a crucial phone call at one point, the camera finds him doing so in front of a studio backlot mural of Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

But the series’ heart really lies with the players, staff and especially the fans associated with Wrexham. Big chunks of each episode are given over to interviews of townspeople who speak earnestly about what the sport has meant to them, or the community they’ve found among other fans, or simply what everyday life in Wrexham is like. At their most intimate, these mini-profiles offer us the impression of having popped by the Turf (the corner pub just outside the stadium) ourselves to enjoy a Wrexham-themed performance by a local band or listen to a regular spill his romantic troubles over a pint.

Yet our understanding of these people, and the town they live in, never runs deep enough to make us feel like we’re locals ourselves, at least in the first few episodes. Welcome to Wrexham‘s kaleidoscopic perspective means that some individuals barely have a chance to make an impression before the focus has moved on to someone else.

More frustratingly, the show has a tendency to avert its eyes from any matter too complicated or potentially controversial. Perhaps it’s the kinder choice not to depict the emotional fallout of a mass firing. Maybe there really was very little resistance among the citizens to the idea of two big-money outsiders swooping in to save this team and the struggling town around it. But the lack of almost any visible conflict or messiness leaves Welcome to Wrexham feeling a bit hollow from a viewer’s perspective.

To their credit, Reynolds and McElhenny seem to have a solid grasp on what they have to offer the club, and what they don’t. The impression given in the docuseries is that they’ve largely stayed out of practical strategy or logistics since purchasing the team; their contribution lies instead in their celebrity status. Where Wrexham had previously been sponsored by Ifor Williams, the U.K.’s largest trailer manufacturer, these new owners have been able to secure partnerships with the likes of TikTok, Expedia, EA Sports and Reynolds’ own Aviation Gin. Their deep pockets are able to lure top talent or pay for upgrades to the Racecourse Ground — the oldest international football stadium in the world, Welcome to Wrexham proudly informs us at the top.

For that matter, McElhenny and Reynolds have the star power to sell this very pitch to FX, where people like who otherwise might never have heard of the National League at all might watch and be converted into new Wrexham fans eager to shell out for tickets or merch. Ultimately, that seems to be the true purpose of Welcome to Wrexham: It’s effectively one long commercial for Reynolds and McElhenny’s new joint investment, and a pretty savvy one at that.

That’s not to write off the docuseries is a purely cynical venture. The entire story of professional sports is one of people who both sincerely worship the sport and hope to make money off of it, for reasons both altruistic and self-interested — and for whatever it’s worth, everyone in the series from the Hollywood stars to the cheering crowds down at the pub seems genuine in their passion for the team, the sport, the town. If Welcome to Wrexham seems too polished for its own good, well, it’d hardly be the first sports docuseries to field that criticism. At least this one leaves a warm and fuzzy feeling behind, and manages to conjure as much affection for the ordinary fans as for the beloved celebrities who brought them here.

Source: Hollywood