Hope of the side

• Published date: 19 September 2023
• Publication title: Signal

OUTSIDE the Racecourse Ground, the crowd scene before a Wrexham FC home game in the National League is out of the ordinary. There are many more cameras than is normal for a non-league game, but the supporters are different too: as the documentary Welcome to Wrexham returns to Disney+ for season two, we see red and white replica shirts being worn by fans from the US, Portugal, Australia and Thailand

Wrexham FC had no such international following before 2020, when it was, bewilderingly, bought by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Investing an initial £2million ($NZ4.2m), the friends promised to do two things: revamp the ailing Wrexham FC, perhaps even turn it into a Premier League club; and make a documentary about the journey.

If it is not clear whether Welcome to Wrexham is a TV show about a football club, or whether Wrexham FC is a football club that provides material for a TV show, it is certainly a break from streaming TV’s many other behind-the-scenes football documentaries, most of which are shimmering corporate success stories. Like the other one that isn’t — Netflix’s Sunderland ’Til I Die, which captures the club suffering consecutive relegations — Welcome to Wrexham is acutely sensitive to how important a football club can be to a city. When the local economy is dead and everyone is struggling, footie can give a community a meeting place, a shared purpose, maybe even a job. But that’s only if it wins, and winning is hard.

Season one introduced us to the players, the lifelong fans and the small business owners who all desperately wanted Wrexham to be promoted to League Two, and so did we as we watched a recap of the club’s 2021-22 campaign. That it fell short, losing in the play-offs, gave Welcome to Wrexham more jeopardy, and now it means time is running out for an artificially inflated enterprise to balance its books. As McElhenney puts it: ‘‘From a financial perspective, if we do not get promotion this year, we are f.....’’

The 2022-23 league season, which the series is now covering, has finished in real life, so almost everyone watching knows how this chapter ends. There’s a danger the drama could stall, and this week’s big issue isn’t a glamorous one: the club has applied for some government funding. It needs £20m to help it knock down the old Kop end and replace it with a new stand to prepare the Racecourse for the higher leagues.

The £20m, if granted, will be from a levelling up fund. Often...