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'Welcome to Wrexham's' Winning Formula Goes Beyond the Pitch [1]
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Date: 2025-07-10
Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.
The opening title sequence for the documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham” starts with archival video of happy coal miners at work followed by stark footage of factories closing and collapsing in on themselves. Behind the images, the lyrics of the theme song croon:
Don’t forget where you came from.
Don’t forget what you’re made of.
The ones who were there, when no one else would care.
Don’t be afraid to cry now, even when the world comes crashing in.
“Welcome to Wrexham” is a show about a soccer team, and that title sequence and theme song can be easily understood as a psalm to the successes and many struggles of the team. But it’s no mistake that the imagery and the music there are invoking wins and losses much deeper than those that occur on any athletic field, because “Welcome to Wrexham” is also a show about a place and a community of people, who just so happen to be brought together by sport.
With its fourth season recently concluded, there’s ample evidence to conclude that while “Welcome to Wrexham” gets plenty of dramatic mileage out of the soccer action and feats of athletic prowess, it stands out from the pack because of the other details: an essential sense of place and its documenting of everyday triumphs that occur across a community.
An official trailer for the fourth season of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ (Credit: FX Networks via YouTube).
Loserville
For the unfamiliar, “Welcome to Wrexham” follows Wrexham AFC, a Welsh soccer team that was purchased by American actors Ryan Reynolds (“Deadpool,” “Free Guy”) and Rob McElhenney (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) in 2021. Their vision from the start involved not only turning around a long struggling sports franchise but also documenting the process and turning the team into a platform for storytelling and community development.
Coming into the endeavor, it’s safe to say that the psychology of the team and the psychology of the town were deeply intertwined, and the show often leans into that premise. On the one hand, you have a soccer team with a once proud legacy that had been relegated to less competitive and prestigious leagues and found itself incapable of climbing its way back. On the other, you have a region in northeast Wales that once produced millions of tons of coal and employed tens of thousands of people in industry before enduring mining disasters, a downturn, and deep cycles of disinvestment in the back half of the 20th century.
It’s not hard to see how the team’s woes could start to stand in for the region’s challenges, and vice versa. It’s also not hard to see why a couple of Hollywood types would sense potential there. Few storytelling templates are as dependably rousing as the underdog story, or, similarly, the improbable comeback. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ (Credit: FX via IMDb).
“Welcome to Wrexham” is a documentary series, so Reynolds, McElhenney, and their associates only have so much control over the script. Save for some early speed bumps though, they couldn’t have drawn things up much better if they tried.
As with any documentary work, extra scrutiny and skepticism are due when the subject of the story is also shaping the narrative, but there’s no denying the effectiveness of the storytelling on display in “Welcome to Wrexham’s” best moments. It is consistently thrilling to see the team overcome long odds and rise to the next challenge, and the producers know exactly how to tee up a satisfying climax.
Fittingly, the lyrics of that opening theme song close with a pivot to the hopeful and triumphant, exclaiming, “Don’t forget to sing when you win.”
By the end of the most recent season, there has been no shortage of singing, and if you have any experience cheering on a hard luck sports franchise – take the Buffalo Bills or my Minnesota Vikings as just a couple of cherry-picked examples – you will likely find these to be inspiring and overdue moments of catharsis for a deserving fanbase.
Up the Town
Some soccer fans who follow the sport more closely have conversely chafed at the Wrexham story, seeing a case of buying your way to the top, a false underdog if ever there was one.
There may be some truth in that telling, but the unique landscape of European soccer, with its ladder of interconnected leagues and the constant churn of club promotion and relegation, keeps the competition and the stakes ever rising. Likewise, however much or little you are charmed by the role Reynolds and McElhenney play (along with a number of their famous friends), the main story of the soccer club and its glitzy owners is supplemented by a bevy of touching portraits from around the community, spotlighting smaller-scale stories of fans and regular folks rising to meet their own challenges.
There are lots of sports documentary series out there, from retrospective works like ESPN’s “The Last Dance” to contemporary offerings like HBO’s “Hard Knocks” and Netflix’s “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.” “Welcome to Wrexham” carves out its own unique space with how it goes beyond sports. Learning about the history of the region and the efforts to revitalize the town make for a compelling sub-plot throughout the series. There’s no doubt that success on that score will be harder to measure than success on the field, but it adds to the small and scrappy, against-the-odds spirit of the show.
Rob McElhenney and Wrexham AFC fans watch a match in ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ (Credit: FX via IMDb).
The stakes remain human through it all, with the fourth season’s vignettes focused on Ukrainian refugees starting a bakery and an area youth fighting cancer, among others. And local characters like the owner of the historic pub next to the stadium, the manager of the independent video store, and a social circle of older women who convene at a local cafe appear periodically across all four seasons. In that way, “Welcome to Wrexham” resonates because it documents better than almost anything else the experience of being a sports fan; it’s not just about the people who play the game and manage the teams. I regularly saw my own experience as a fan reflected in these people, and it’s a moving reminder of the role sports can play in our relationships with our friends, family, and home.
It’s a winning formula, and I can imagine many, many sports organizations would love to have a “Welcome to Wrexham” of their own. Ultimately though, there’s a specificity here that can’t be mapped onto any old place. There’s power in this small town that’s been through hard times and questioned its sense of self. There’s power in a place that needs a reminder that there are future victories in store. And there’s power in a community that gets to stand tall and sing again.
Welcome to Wrexham airs on the cable network FX and all four seasons are streaming on Hulu.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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