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‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Wins No Matter What
![WELCOME TO WREXHAM — “Down to the Wire” — Season 3, Episode 8 (Airs June 13th) — Pictured: Rob McElhenney, Elliot Lee. CR: Craig Colville/FX.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-rollingstone-2022/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
This post contains spoilers for the third season of Welcome to Wrexham, which is now streaming in its entirety on Hulu.
Last week, I found myself wildly cheering a play in a game that happened a year and a half ago, in a sport I had never much cared about previously, on a show that I’d ignored for nearly all of its three seasons before impulsively deciding to binge the whole thing.
Such is the power of FX’s Welcome to Wrexham, a docuseries chronicling Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds‘ purchase of a Welsh football club, and how their money and celebrity have helped reverse the fortunes of both the team and the town in which it plays.
The play in question was a goal scored by Wrexham midfielder Anthony Forde, which gave his team the lead in a November 2023 match against Yeovil. Wrexham desperately needed the win that day to maintain their hopes of being promoted out of the fifth-place National League and into League Two, the next level of competition in UK football. Forde, meanwhile, needed the goal even more, as this was his first game back with the team after going on compassionate leave after his brother was diagnosed with leukemia and his wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The episode about the Yeovil match explained that Reynolds had used his celebrity connections to put Forde’s wife in touch with a top doctor, and that her prognosis was now much better. That in and of itself would have been a fairy-tale moment; for Forde to rescue the team in his first game back was one of many Welcome to Wrexham developments that felt almost too good to be true.
Those sorts of improbable moments are of course why people love sports in the first place, and why the people of Wrexham have put so much of their hearts into their once-downtrodden club. And the Welcome to Wrexham production team does a masterful job of preparing the audience to drop their jaws and say, “You have got to be kidding me here!” when such a moment comes. But they come so often that it was almost a relief for the show’s third season to conclude last week on a bit of an anticlimactic note, a reassurance that the entire thing isn’t some massive prank about a football club that’s as fictional as the one on Ted Lasso.
Season Two ended with Wrexham finally earning promotion into League Two, the next step on the dream journey to the Premiere League. Though the early part of Season Three season suggested Wrexham wasn’t quite ready for this higher level of competition, the team quickly began playing so well that the idea of an incredibly rare back-to-back promotion in consecutive years became less a question of if than of how: Would Wrexham finish high enough in the standings to earn an automatic promotion to League One, or would the team have to go through a grueling playoff scenario? By the finale, even the playoffs were in the rearview mirror, and now it was a question of when the team would clinch — and, thus, when McElhenney and Reynolds should make sure to be present for the big moment.
In the end, it’s a rare case of the club’s luck being better than the show’s. McElhenney convinces Reynolds not to fly in for the season’s penultimate match, since two other teams would have to lose their own matches, in addition to a Wrexham win, for automatic promotion to happen that day. But then Wrexham wins, their rivals both lose, and Rob and Ryan are stuck watching a live feed in separate locations back in the States, commiserating by phone about the bad choice they made to stay home. (There’s not even a camera crew present to film Rob, and it looks like the footage of him was shot on a phone by his It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-star and wife Kaitlin Olson.)
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It was a welcome reminder that, no, this is not a wholly scripted, feel-good saga where Mac from Always Sunny and Deadpool swoop in to rescue a struggling team, and where everything always happens in the most dramatic, camera-friendly fashion possible.
It only mostly happens that way.
Because of McElhenney’s obsession with Philly sports, real and fictional, the Rocky movies have long been a touchstone for the series. Wrexham’s promotion-clinching victory at the end of Season Two was accompanied by a piece of Bill Conti’s iconic score. The Season Three finale begins with McElhenney comparing the show’s first two seasons to the first two films: In Season One, Wrexham put on a valiant fight but came up short of promotion, just like Rocky nobly loses to Apollo Creed, while both Wrexham and Rocky came out on top at the end of their second installments. The parallels are a lot thinner between Rocky III and Wrexham Season Three — “Is this where we fight Hulk Hogan?” Reynolds quips in the middle of his friend’s Stallone soliloquy — especially after it becomes clear that the club isn’t overmatched in League Two.
As a result, Season Three couldn’t lean on underdog sports movie narratives quite as much as the previous seasons had. The team is a success. The show has made the players (and some of the Wrexham locals who appear frequently) into celebrities well beyond the sphere of UK football fandom. In the second season, it was presented as a huge deal that McElhenney and Reynolds got to meet King Charles while he was visiting Wales; when Prince William turns up late in Season Three, it seems almost inevitable — especially once it turns out that William is an old school chum of Humphrey Ker, the actor and writer on McElhenney’s terrific Apple comedy Mythic Quest who oversees the day-to-day management of the club. (The prince even refers to him as “Humph.”)
But the show has always been smartly transparent and self-deprecating, identifying questions and criticisms the audience will have and addressing them before anyone would think to ask them. McElhenney and Reynolds and the others talk about the advantage that their stardom, and the success of the show, gives the club. They’re upfront about the importance of sponsorships, so when a scene turns into a shameless plug for a Wrexham corporate partner like HP, or for Deadpool & Wolverine(*), it’s an understood part of how the business works. The community is always treated with deep love and respect, but without Wrexham ever being presented as somehow more worthy of this Cinderella story than any of its rivals.
(*) Another instance of the show understanding how people will respond to it is how frequently it acknowledges that Ryan is much richer and more famous than Rob, so that even though this whole thing was Rob’s idea, Ryan is always the one who gets the biggest response and the most credit.
Yet that level of affection for the people of Wrexham is what takes the show from good to great. Simply chronicling the story of how McElhenney’s midlife crisis has injected new life (and lots of cash) into an also-ran team would be entertaining enough. But Welcome to Wrexham consistently finds ways to illustrate why the team matters so much to the people watching from the stands, as well as the ones playing on the pitch.
An incredible episode from early in the second season parallels the story of Millie Tipping — a teen Wrexham supporter with autism, who watches games with ear baffles on to help with her sensory issues — with that of the team’s star goal scorer, “Super” Paul Mullin, whose young son Albi was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. The series has explored the 1934 mining disaster that killed 266 local men. It did an episode about the team’s oldest living fan as he approached his 100th birthday. It frequently checks in on the Wrexham women’s semi-pro team, whose star forward Rosie Hughes, a part-time prison guard, is an even more prolific goal scorer than Paul Mullin. And Mullin and Anthony Forde are just two of many Wrexham players who have been remarkably open about the challenges of their lives away from the pitch. The depth, breadth, and empathy of the documentary is continually remarkable.
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That ambition was harder to maintain, though, within the much more compact third season. Where Season One offered 18 episodes (chronicling roughly a year and a half from when Rob and Ryan bought the team through the playoff loss), and Season Two had 15, this one had only eight episodes, the finale covering events that happened only a couple of months before it debuted. The immediacy is welcome, particularly for viewers whose primary means of following the team is through the show, and who are trying to avoid getting spoiled on game or season results(*). But there was definitely a sense that Season Three tried to tell more stories than it had time for, with many ideas being introduced and then forgotten.
(*) As someone who came very late to the series, for reasons that I can’t even justify in hindsight, considering how microtargeted it is to me, I now have to be much more careful with my travels through online sports coverage.
Welcome to Wrexham has in the past been at its best in its finales, where the various personal stories of that year get woven into the action of the concluding games. Season Three’s finale did this as well, but with a twist, where we saw people like Millie, singer/fan Michael Hett, and the rosters of the men’s and women’s teams all posing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, perhaps the most iconic Rocky location of them all. This was all likely filmed after the League Two season finished, but there wasn’t any context provided, and the sequence came and went so quickly, some viewers who don’t know those movies well wouldn’t be blamed for not understanding what was happening.
Presumably, we’ll get more of this big trip to America in Season Four, along with seeing if Wrexham can do the unprecedented and earn three promotions in three straight seasons. But after three wonderful years, Welcome to Wrexham is in a tricky position. The show has made the audience fall so in love with the team and the town that we want nothing but the best for them. But if only good things keep happening, the series risks becoming less interesting.
That said, even the owners’ mistake about when to fly in at the end of the season offers reason for continued optimism. Among the reasons McElhenney suggested waiting is that the club has a history of making things hard on itself even in prosperity. He assumed the guys would (to borrow one of the actors’ pet phrases) Wrexham it up and need until the last possible moment to clinch. That turned out not to be the case. But there were enough other instances of unexpected adversity and metaphorical own-goals that, even if the move to League One is a wild success overall, there should still be plenty of tension along the way.
And if there’s an early scene on the Deadpool & Wolverine red carpet, then that’s just the cost of doing business with this warm, winning series.