Two Hollywood actors with nominal knowledge and no experience purchase an English football team and go on a journey. The triumphs and pitfalls they en
Two Hollywood actors with nominal knowledge and no experience purchase an English football team and go on a journey. The triumphs and pitfalls they encounter along the way is the subject of a docuseries upcoming on FX and Hulu.
“Welcome to Wrexham,” premiering Wednesday, follows Ryan Reynolds (“Deadpool”) and Rob McElhenney (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”), the new owners of the Red Dragons of Wrexham, a working class town in North Wales that is home to the third oldest professional football club in the world.
In early 2021, the pair completed the purchase of Wrexham, a fifth-tier team in the English Football League, in the hopes of restoring it to its former glory after nearly two decades of struggling. The problem is they have no experience running a football team nor working with each other, so there is a learning curve.
Luckily, they have a competent front office to show them the ropes as well as Humphrey Ker, a Hollywood writer and British football fan who serves as the club’s executive director as well as go-between and translator for the American actors and British club management.
“It’s been a great pleasure and also a total nightmare as is the nature of these sorts of things,” said Ker, who previously worked for McElhenney as a writer on his Apple TV+ series “Mythic Quest.”
“They are both incredibly enthusiastic, very intelligent, very quick to pick up on things, which means I can’t really sneak anything past them.”
“And it’s been tremendous fun,” the native Londoner continued. “I mean, to work for a football club in any capacity is a dream come true but then to do it with two guys who are — quite unusual for a lot of owners of football clubs — in it for very altruistic reasons, really, rather than as a means to kind of pad their own egos or their wallets or whatever it may be … it’s been great.”
The partnership under the actors’ RR McReynolds Company LLC has taken its share of criticism as being a publicity stunt and even “Ted Lasso” made a joking reference to it last season. But the results on the field can’t be denied. Wrexham went from 11 wins, 10 draws and 16 losses in 2019-20 to 19-11-12 in 2020-21 (the season the transaction completed) and 26-10-8 in 2021-22 under their full ownership, for a second-place finish in the National League.
“Ultimately we wanted to finish top of the table,” Ker said, “and we came second so we were a bit disappointed about that. But you know, it’s given us lots of excitement going through the next season … with the sense that we want to go one better and get promoted.”
— Zap2It
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