How did two Hollywood actors find themselves as owners of the third oldest professional football club in the world?
That’s what FX’s new docuseries Welcome to Wrexham strives to answer. It details the story of how Deadpool himself Ryan Reynolds teamed up with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia creator and star Rob McElhenney to purchase the fifth-tier Red Dragons, based in the working-class town of Wrexham in North Wales. It sounds like the start of a joke – but it’s all too real and, according to Reynolds, it was all McElhenney’s idea.
“We didn’t know each other before this endeavor. It was Rob who contacted me and kind of laid it all out,” Reynolds tells ABC News. “I love building businesses, that’s a big part of my life. And Rob certainly is no stranger to that – he’s created two, now three, huge, huge television series.”
Their plan is to build Wrexham A.F.C. up from underdogs into champions, and to tell the human stories of the Welsh community along the way. Their “entire intention,” McElhenney says, “is to show people that even if they don’t think that they’re a fan of football, or even a fan of sports, that we can get them invested in the story.”
Reynolds is confident that they will succeed. “I think that this town and this community has this kind of wellspring of stories coming out of it that, really, are tangential to football, but at the same time, it’s really about those people and the personalities in that community who live and die with this club,” he says.
Welcome to Wrexham premieres Wednesday night on FX.
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