Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have won plenty of praise for their award-winning Welcome to Wrexham docuseries but the club’s co-owners say the show’s success is down to the fans.
In the wake of winning the Best Sports Show prize at the Critics’ Choice Real TV Awards in June 2023, the Welcome to Wrexham duo spoke to Variety about the trials and tribulations of owning a football club.
The pair explored some of the toughest times they’ve had as owners and also revealed how their documentary series owes its success to the people of Wrexham.
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Reynolds and McElhenney attribute docuseries’ success to Wrexham fans
In their interview with Variety, Ryan Reynolds was quick to point out that the focus of their Welcome to Wrexham documentary is not them, but rather the people of Wrexham and those who make the football club tick.
“If you’re just reading the headlines, you probably think, ‘Oh, this show is going to be funny,’” he said. “It’s gonna be a fish-out-of-water story about two schmucky showbiz morons going in, falling on their asses, learning as they go. But the show literally does not center us. It centers the town.”
Later on in the interview, Reynolds added: “That’s always the wonderful thing about doing a docuseries, is that your job is just to listen. You can either jam something into your pre-existing vision or you can listen and allow it to become what it’s meant to become.
“Thankfully we did the latter. Ultimately, we got very lucky because even if you’re not rooting for Rob or Ryan, it’s pretty hard not to root for this town.”
Co-owner Rob McElhenney also added: “After the first episode aired, I was grateful to hear from several people that there was a collective sigh of relief that we weren’t there to make exploitative television, we were there to celebrate them.”
Tough start to life in Wales
Of course, Reynolds and McElhenney’s time at Wrexham hasn’t all been easy, with the pair having to make some very tough decisions shortly after arriving to get the club on an upward trajectory.
Part of that was telling Wrexham’s previous manager, Dean Keates, and a host of players, that their contracts would not be renewed.
“Those were really difficult moments. You realize this is not a game, this is not a television show, these are people’s lives,” McElhenney began. “We do not take any of that lightly, and we were on camera making those decisions. But it was a conscious choice to not put that into the documentary, because it didn’t seem fair to the people who were going through the real difficult thing in that situation to focus it on us, as if our agony was more important than theirs. It certainly was not.”
On top of that was the disappointment of Wrexham missing out on promotion in Rob and Ryan’s first full season in charge and the impact it had on their documentary.
“It was devastating. We had two or three episodes already done and edited,” McElhenney said. “We had all of these high hopes that there was going to be a happy ending, and we had to sit down and make the rest of the series knowing that it was going to have this tragic end — and figure out how to approach it.”
“Maybe it was just me justifying the loss so that I could feel better, but I remember having many conversations with Ryan saying, ‘We knew that we had a second season already picked up, and we knew that we were gonna start filming again in a few months … as a chairman, this is terrible. But as a storyteller, it’s really not that bad?’”
Of course, Wrexham missing out on promotion in the 2021/22 season set up the fierce title race with Notts County the following season that led to the incredibly nail-biting finale that finally saw Wrexham earn promotion back to the EFL.
Welcome to Wrexham is available to stream now on Disney+ in the UK and Hulu in the US, with season 2 expected to premiere later in 2023.