Welcome to Wrexham: It’s the future

The first thing, and likely the most important thing, is that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney seem to be sincere. It is hard to be absolutely certain, of course: They are both actors, after all, and a 45-minute Zoom meeting is, on balance, probably not the ideal format in which to take the measure of someone’s soul. If their enthusiasm and affection for Wrexham, the down-at-the-heels Welsh football team they bought two years ago — and the community that it calls home — is an act, though, then it is a convincing one. McElhenney watches Wrexham’s games these days, while “pacing back-and-forth, unable to sit still,” he said.

“There is nothing quite like the anxiety football produces.” At first, Reynolds wondered if he was resistant to the sensation. He caught only half of Wrexham’s first few games after his and McElhenney’s takeover was completed in February 2021.

He was, by his own admission, “pretty passive.” It did not last. When it hit him, hit him hard. “It is a horrible, cyclical, prophetic hellscape that never ceases or ebbs,” he said, a sentence that suggests he has come to fully understand the appeal of football. “I love every second, but it’s torment in equal measure. Every second is pure agony. It’s a new experience for me. I am in awe of people who have survived in that culture their whole lives.”

Neither McElhenney nor Reynolds had quite anticipated the extent of the emotional impact when, late in 2020, the former approached the latter with a proposal. McElhenney had spent a considerable portion of lockdown watching sports documentaries: the acclaimed “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” for one, and more significantly an HBO series on Diego Maradona. He decided he wanted to add his own production to the canon, and he wanted Reynolds — an acquaintance, rather than a friend, at that stage — to help bankroll it.

The result, “Welcome To Wrexham,” is heartwarming and funny and appealing, but it is also difficult to categorise. At one point, Reynolds describes it — perhaps as a slip of the tongue — as a “reality show,” but that feels reductive. So, too, does the faintly euphemistic term “structured reality,” a genre most recently characterised by Netflix’s glossy “Selling Sunset.” But nor is it, strictly speaking, a documentary — not in the traditional sense, not in the way t h a t “Sunderland ’Til I Die” was a documentary.

There is a long-held rule among wildlife photographers and documentarians that they are present to observe, rather than intervene. “ W e l c o m e T o Wrexham,” by contrast, is inherently interventionist. Wrexham had been drifting, hopeless and f o r l o r n , i n English football’s fifth tier for more than a decade when it was bought, out of the blue, by two Hollywood stars.

Reynolds and McElhenney aren’t simply telling a story. They’re shaping it, too. That’s exemplified, most clearly, by what appears to be an innocuous jump cut halfway through the show’s second episode. All of a sudden, the viewer is at home with Paul Rutherford, Wrexham’s locally born veteran midfielder.

With more than a hint of pride, Rutherford shows off all the work he and his wife, Gemma, have done to their home. It turns out the house is about to get a little busier. The couple already have two boys; a third is on the way. Rutherford is currently buildi n g the baby’s crib. Later, he is shown playing football with his oldest son. He carries him home on his shoulders. It is heartwarming, touching and deeply ominous. A n y o n e w h o h a s seen a nature documentary in w h i c h a young giraffe becomes separated from the herd, or an installment of “Match of the Day” in which a player is shown picking up an innocuous early yellow card, knows the cue. Something bad is about to happen.

The bad, in this case, comes in Wrexham’s last game of the season, a few months after the takeover. The team needs to win to make the playoffs. Rutherford, introduced as a substitute, is sent off for a reckless challenge. He’s shown in the changing room, his chest heaving, urging his teammates to win without him. They don’t. Wrexham is held to a draw. Its season is over.

A caption appears. Rutherford’s contract expired the next day. He was released. Such is the cold reality of football, of course, a sport that has no appetite for sentiment and — at the level Wrexham occupies — no money for it, either. Countless players suffer the same fate as Rutherford every season, victims of the game’s unapologetic mercilessness.

Reynolds and McElhenney are clear that, while they’re ultimately responsible for it, they didn’t make that call. Personnel decisions are left to those on the ground at Wrexham, those who know the sport far better than they do. Nobody is hired or fired because it makes good drama; their commitment, Reynolds said, is simply to do the best by Wrexham.“Sports are kind of meaningless to me unless I know what is at stake for someone,” Reynolds said.

“What a player overcame to be there. What a club means to a community. If I think about the movies that made an impression on me; is “Field Of Dreams” a movie about baseball? Not really. It’s a movie about a father and son trying to connect. That context is what pulls you in.”

At heart, of course, what Reynolds and McElhenney have done with Wrexham is an inherently benign form of ownership, certainly by football’s standards. They’ve not saddled the club with debt. They aren’t using it to try to whitewash the image of a repressive state. They’ve given a club, and a town, reason to believe, and all for the price of a couple of camera crews. Their ownership does not, they insist, hinge on “Welcome To Wrexham” being a success. They are in it “for the long haul,” Reynolds said, whether the audience is or not.