When Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC in 2021, most football fans outside Wales had never heard of the club. Five years later, that has completely changed. The Canadian actor, best known for Deadpool and a string of Hollywood comedies, didn’t just buy a football team, he turned its story into one of the most talked-about sports documentaries of the decade. Welcome to Wrexham has become the engine behind a genuine cultural moment, and it says a great deal about why so many of us are drawn to watching our favorite institutions from the inside.
From the National League to the Championship
Before getting into the show itself, it’s worth appreciating just how remarkable Wrexham’s on-pitch rise has been. The club spent years stuck in the National League, English football’s fifth tier, before Reynolds and McElhenney’s ownership coincided with three consecutive promotions. Wrexham climbed from the National League to League Two, then League One, then the Championship, a run virtually unheard of in modern English football. In the 2025-26 season, the club came agonizingly close to a fourth straight promotion, finishing just two points behind the final Championship playoff spot. It was a heartbreaking near-miss, but also proof that the club’s rise is not a marketing gimmick. Wrexham is genuinely a good football team now, built on real recruitment and real coaching, not just goodwill from its famous owners.
Why the Documentary Struck a Chord
Welcome to Wrexham works because it treats football as a human story rather than just a sport. The show follows players, staff, and townspeople alongside Reynolds and McElhenney, and it doesn’t shy away from disappointment, injury, financial pressure, or the emotional toll of relegation battles. That honesty is part of what separates it from a typical vanity project. Reynolds has been candid about how much he’s learned about football culture, and the show captures his genuine, sometimes clumsy, education in real time. Audiences who had never watched a match in Wrexham, or anywhere in Wales, found themselves invested in the fate of a club they could locate on a map for the first time. The show has since been renewed for three additional seasons, running through an eighth season, a strong signal that its audience isn’t going anywhere.
What Would a Premier League Promotion Mean for the Show?
Wrexham didn’t make it to the Premier League this year, but the possibility remains very much alive, and it raises an interesting question: would top-flight football actually help or hurt the show? On one hand, Premier League football brings unmatched global visibility, bigger opposition clubs, and higher stakes every single week. On the other, part of Welcome to Wrexham’s appeal has always been the underdog framing, a scrappy club fighting its way up from non-league obscurity. Once a club reaches the Premier League, some of that scrappy charm can fade into the machinery of a much bigger, more commercialized league. The show’s producers will likely need to lean harder into the human stories, the town, the fans, the staff, rather than relying purely on the drama of promotion chases, if Wrexham does eventually make that final leap.
The Wider Trend of Behind-the-Scenes Sports Documentaries
Welcome to Wrexham didn’t invent this format, but it helped prove there was a mainstream appetite for it beyond motorsport and basketball. Formula 1’s Drive to Survive showed that fans wanted access to the personalities behind the competition, and other leagues quickly followed. Full Swing brought a similar treatment to golf, while various clubs and federations have experimented with their own docuseries to build global fanbases. What makes Wrexham’s version distinctive is scale: it’s not a glossy elite league but a genuinely small club, which makes the emotional stakes feel more personal and less polished. It suggests that the appetite for this kind of content isn’t really about how prestigious the sport or club is. Viewers want authenticity, characters they can root for, and a sense of being let in on something real.
A New Model for Fan Engagement
Whether or not Wrexham reaches the Premier League next season, the club has already changed how football fans think about following a team. Global audiences now check Wrexham’s results the way they might check a favorite show’s ratings, and matchday atmosphere has become part entertainment, part sporting event. For fans who have caught the bug and want to follow the action live, plenty are now exploring the best betting sites Canada has to offer to keep track of Wrexham’s results and the wider Championship race as the new season unfolds.
Ultimately, Welcome to Wrexham succeeded because it never tried to be bigger than the club itself. It let a small Welsh town and its football club tell an honest story, and audiences responded. Whatever happens next on the pitch, that formula has already left its mark on how sports documentaries get made.