In early 2021, two “Hollywood stars with seemingly little knowledge of football” bought Wrexham AFC, the oldest club in Wales, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. This series from Disney+ looks at what happened next. It’s pitched at a US audience, which can create irritations – anyone with a “whiff of an accent that isn’t Home Counties gets subtitles”, and there is a lot of exposition – but once the “Football for Dummies shtick” is over, it “improves enormously”.
The stars in question, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, are sincere and funny. They’re outshone, though, by the players and fans: after its bumpy start, the series evolves into a touching portrait of “an ordinary town that is down on its luck and could do with a lift”.
Part of the series’s appeal is that the Wrexham players are clearly not in it for “the riches or the glamour”, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. We meet one who is 35, and still living in a small house with his large family. The series “takes us back to a nostalgic, almost mythical time before football became Big Football, and it’s great”.
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“If someone had told me that I would become mildly hooked on a docuseries about Wrexham football club,” said Carol Midgley in The Times, “I would have told them that they were deranged.” But Welcome to Wrexham isn’t just about football: it’s about hope and heartbreak; it’s about living in a working-class community, and sharing in the “pride/sorrow (mostly sorrow) of your local club”. The show is a “little gem”.
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