Inside Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s Great Wrexham Gambit

What happens when two Hollywood actors who know nothing about soccer buy a middling pro team in Wales? GQ’s Tom Lamont spent a season following football's newest fans to find out.
A collage of Rob Mcelheny and Ryan Reynolds speaking on a soccer field with scarves on the border
Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, the new owners of one of the oldest football clubs in the world, Wrexham AFC.Photograph: Patrick McElhenney / FX;  Collage: Gabe Conte

Ryan Reynolds, restless as a trapped cat, broke off his pacing and stooped to peer through plate glass balcony doors. He was in an owners’ lounge, high to one side of a soccer stadium in the city of Wrexham in Wales, a few miles west of the Welsh-English border. From here, Reynolds could watch as hundreds, then thousands, of expectant fans found their seats. It was October 2021. The Canadian actor and entrepreneur, figurehead of the Deadpool movie franchise and an investor with a sprawling list of financial commitments to his name, had been in Wrexham for three days, having never set foot in the city before. With his friend Rob McElhenney, the American actor and creator of the sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, he had taken over the local soccer team, an ancient, lowly, success-starved outfit called Wrexham AFC. They were about to watch their first home game as owners.

"Nervous," Reynolds confessed, as McElhenney joined him by the balcony doors. "Nervous," McElhenney agreed. That two Hollywood stars should act on a curious impulse (more than a whim, less than a life-long ambition) and invest millions of their dollars in Wrexham had perplexed almost everybody inside these city limits. It had perplexed almost everybody who paid attention to sports. As they stared out of their lounge, Reynolds and McElhenney might have been having a few doubts themselves. Sun gleamed off battered folding chairs, showing stains and scratches. An enormous concrete terrace had been condemned before they took over here, and now sprouting brown weeds, it was hidden under tarp. Pipes leaked. The stadium had no permanent scoreboard.

But like parents who try to see the best in their complicated offspring, Reynolds and McElhenney were alive to the charm and detail in things. A sporting venue had stood on this site in some form or another since the 1860s. Wrexham AFC had been founded shortly afterward, making it one of the oldest sports teams in the world. So the smell of tired and moldering concrete delighted the new owners. The shabby signage, the peeling surfaces, it was all proof of a long-running story they'd bought themselves into. Since acquiring the club six months prior, they'd been following their team's progress from afar, on computers, Reynolds explained. "You're watching games for the better part of a year on a shitty YouTube feed," he said. "Then you walk in here. The place is bigger than it looked onscreen, and I mean that figuratively. You feel a history, a legacy that's woven into the stands and the rusting bars."

Tall and tan at the age of 45, Reynolds kept putting his hands in the pockets of his pants, where he'd squirreled away a fistful of grass from the playing surface for luck. McElhenney, also 45, attractive in a shorter, toothier way, fiddled with his baseball cap. There had been a rush to get everything shipshape before this visit of theirs to Wrexham. Unbeknownst to Reynolds and McElhenney, a painter-decorator had moved into the owners’ lounge, sleeping in a leatherette booth by night as he raced by day to install oak panels, pendant lights, and beer taps. Time ran out. Those pumps didn't yet produce beer; in fact, on closer inspection, they were only cut-out photographs of pumps. An en suite bathroom was still unplumbed. On arrival, Reynolds and McElhenney were told, however anxious you get, do not use that toilet.

Reynolds had never met McElhenney in person when the two began hashing plans over DM to buy Wrexham AFC together.

Patrick McElhenney / FX

Wherever they went in this city, an unblinking scrutiny was directed at them, with cameras and crowds trailing them around as they juggled obligations, crouching for selfies with starstruck residents, delivering pep talks for the athletes and coaches now on their payroll, answering questions about their motives, their expectations, about the uncanny and coincidental similarities between this fish-out-of-water endeavor of theirs and the fictional premise of the popular sitcom Ted Lasso. Trying hard to satisfy everybody, the pair were especially careful to avoid Lasso-esque gaffes of protocol and language. They had to keep reminding themselves that, in this part of the world, the ties are known as draws, the games might be matches but never match-ups, and soccer is always, always, always called football. (From now on I will call it football myself. To keep doing otherwise, as a Brit, is to write under a light sweat, with intermittent shivers.)

The scrum that followed Reynolds and McElhenney everywhere around Wrexham that week in October included a sizable film crew who were present at the owners' invitation to document their takeover. Welcome to Wrexham had been commissioned for two seasons by FX. As two of its producers, Reynolds and McElhenney were adamant that the series should foreground the stories of local people as much as their own. "It's raining stories, this town," Reynolds told me at one point, launching into a flight of surreal patter to describe his excitement about the narrative potential he saw. "We need a titanium umbrella," he said, "because there are people hitting it."

As for the story-sodden locals themselves . . . those I met with were confused or perhaps only indifferent about a docuseries pointing global attention Wrexham's way. This was a humble place. A one-team town. More than anything, everybody wanted to get uncomplicatedly excited about a fresh chapter for Wrexham AFC. They wanted to watch their team ascend from its position in the middle reaches of a middling league—maybe even win a championship. They had no idea that week of Reynolds and McElhenney's visit just how exciting things would get before the end of the season in May.

Now the strains of a song drifted in through the doors of the owners' lounge. It was a Brit-pop-like ballad, written by a musician from the city to commemorate Reynolds and McElhenney's takeover. "Bring on the Deadpool," went the flattering, singalong chorus, "and Rob MACK-er-LAY-nee." The two owners stepped on to the balcony to cheers. In the opposite stand there was a fan wearing a tight scarlet jumpsuit that paid homage to Reynolds in his superhero movies. Someone's handmade sign read, not so truthfully, "It's always sunny in Wrexham.” In their Hollywood guises, McElhenney was about to debut a record-breaking 15th season of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Reynolds, having recently finished shooting a musical version of a Dickens novel, had a comedy costarring Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson ready to premiere. But here the two men stood, beside a billboard that advertised asbestos removal. Reynolds and McElhenney's to-do list at Wrexham was long and various. They had to try to revive the fortunes of a team adrift, while persuading a city to trust them. They had to fix this one weird door, deep in the bowels of their stadium, that inexplicably oozed grease.

All such concerns were forgotten when the afternoon game kicked off, to massive roars and chanting. Encouraged, Wrexham's players dashed around the sun-slapped turf beneath the balcony. With gratifying speed they scored an early goal. The outrush of noise was deafening. What a boost for the new regime! Reynolds and McElhenney had enough room on their perch to rush at each other and leap into a flying embrace, without careening over the asbestos sign, without tumbling into the ecstatic crowd below.

Reynolds and McElhenney on their first visit to see their team play in Wrexham, last October.

Patrick McElhenney / FX

This all started in spring 2019, thousands of miles away from Wrexham in a rented office in Los Angeles. It was McElhenney’s  brainwave at first. Reynolds came aboard later. McElhenney was working on a new comedy for Apple, and with collaborators that included his It's Always Sunny colleague Megan Ganz he had cooked up an idea about a group of video game designers. (Eventually titled Mythic Quest, this sitcom would premiere in February 2020.) On a slow Tuesday in their L.A. writers' room, Ganz's husband, the English screenwriter Humphrey Ker, suggested they watch some European football. Two giants of the game, Liverpool and Barcelona, were going toe-to-toe in the latter stages of a knockout tournament. It was a thriller. McElhenney turned to Ker afterward and said, "This is pretty cool." He was then about a year off from deciding to buy a team for himself, and entirely clueless about the sport.

Philadelphia born, an Eagles nut, McElhenney grew up under those sky-blotting sporting totems the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Plenty of Americans, raised on the same diet, come to the world of football later in life and find charm in its differences. No walled-in divisions, no owners concocting protocols to suit themselves, no status-protected franchises. Any professional football team of any size—and there are hundreds of these in England and Wales alone—might in theory travel up and down the many tiers of the system, the best rising up one league every May, taking the spots of cruddier teams who fall. In England and Wales (though two separate countries, their teams compete in the same competitions), the layers of leagues are arranged in a hierarchical ladder, the lucrative and envied Premier League at the very top.

McElhenney began to comprehend this in 2020, when COVID halted useful work on Mythic Quest. Ker suggested that he watch a docuseries on Netflix called Sunderland Til I Die, which tracked the decline of a team from the north of England called Sunderland AFC. (That abbreviation, common to a lot of teams established in the Victorian era, stands for Association Football Club.) In Sunderland Til I Die, the shocking mobility of one football team was put on full display. Sunderland, in the space of about 13 months, tumbled from the Premier League to the league below, then tumbled again to the league beneath that. It was as if the Arizona Diamondbacks had an off year and woke to find themselves part of a farm league. But the European system is built to max out rewards as well as risks, and while every team competes at the threat of demotion, they all have it in their power to be promoted up the hierarchy as far as it goes. Under such conditions, Arizona's double-A team the Amarillo Sod Poodles might one day contest a World Series.

After watching Til I Die, McElhenney turned to his wife, the actor Kaitlin Olson, and told her was going to buy a team like Sunderland. Ker was temporarily relieved from his writing gig on Mythic Quest and told to come up with a short list of possible purchases. Tall and shaggy, with a habit of droll self-deprecation so pronounced it is almost sadistic, Ker conceded to me that his was half-baked research, based on trawls through Wikipedia and hours in the statistics section of a video game called Football Manager. Later, a New York consultancy, Inner Circle Sports, was hired to assist in the research. In admiring emulation of the Sunderland documentary, and in homage to the hardscrabble city from which he hailed, McElhenney made it a search criteria that his money be invested somewhere unflashy and overlooked. He wanted to find a town or city so intent on a centrifugal sports team that it might be lifted, wholesale, by that team's improving results. He was urged toward Wrexham AFC. After some depressing ownership sagas, this team had been taken over in 2011 by a trust of about 1,300 of its fans who were empowered to endorse a sale as long as there was majority agreement. This approval was granted in fall 2020.

Wrexham was the place. How McElhenney settled on a co-owner was more random by far. As McElhenney tells it, he simply guessed that the globally renowned Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool personified, husband of Blake Lively, father of three daughters, part-owner of a multimillion-dollar gin brand called Aviation, co-executive of his own marketing firm, Maximum Effort) might be willing to add one more wrinkle in his life. Reynolds told me, "We'd never met physically. I admired Rob for what he'd accomplished and built in the television world. I remember once seeing an episode of Sunny that blew me away and I slid into his DMs to tell him." Theirs was a breezy, distant, online-only bromance when McElhenney sent Reynolds a late-night email in 2020. He pitched him on why they should go halves on Wrexham AFC. Reynolds later told me he might have politely declined the offer had McElhenney not explained how the leagues were arranged, for those upward and downward lurches.

McElhenney gamely joins a team practice as Wrexham players Dior Angus, left, and Adam Barton look on without judgement.

Patrick McElhenney / FX

Reynolds was a Hollywood lifer. He surely recognized these terms: the incremental gathering of credit and respect, the patience necessary for success, the dread, with rivals everywhere and threats to your spot. Back in 2011, Reynolds had starred in a blockbuster called Green Lantern that flopped. Afterward, it seemed he was reputationally relegated to the lower tiers of movie-making until Deadpool was released in 2016, reviving him, promoting him. "It's easy to look at Ryan now and say, 'Oh, he's always been this mega movie star,’" McElhenney told me. "But I know he was trying to make Deadpool for, like, seven years." At this, Reynolds, who sat nearby, put a fist to his mouth and coughed: "Ten." McElhenney corrected himself. "Ten years! Begging people to make that movie." He had meant to praise his friend's tenacity and suggest the spirit they'd import to Wrexham. It was a Green Lantern situation from which they meant to fashion a Deadpool.

Without consulting his wife, Reynolds said yes to McElhenney’s scheme. Both men were in their mid-40s, if not quite in midlife crisis, as McElhenney put it, then at moments of "midlife inflection." For years, Wrexham had been stuck in a scrappy, hard-to-escape league that was five rungs below the Premier League. In a giddy dream scenario, by securing back-to-back-to-back-to-back promotions, Reynolds and McElhenney might get Wrexham all the way to the top by 2025. McElhenney told me he was already used to skeptics dismissing the idea of them ever reaching the Premier League, regardless of the timeline. "But I truly don't understand, based on the way the system is set up, why wouldn't we go for all of it? Why wouldn't that be our goal?" As he saw it, there was little difference between “pragmatism and an acceptance of stasis.”

They were able to buy the team by agreeing to invest $1.2 million each in non-redeemable shares. This cleared organizational debts, leaving some money left over to spend on player acquisitions and stadium renovations. The sale was finalized in February 2021, becoming worldwide news. The creators of Ted Lasso snuck a gag about the improbable deal into a scene. McElhenney replied with a jokey cease-and-desist message. As a long-distance owner, he now had a two-faced clock, a gift from his wife, that told the time in Wrexham and (eight hours behind) in L.A. He was waking before dawn on Saturdays to watch games via pixelated feed on his kitchen counter, while Reynolds, three hours ahead in New York, chaperoned his daughters at their Saturday sports clubs. Reynolds told me he would slyly check his phone for the latest scores as his newfound passion for his Welsh football team turned him into "that schmuck in the corner, only pretending to watch my children grow and play and thrive."

In Wrexham, a new staff was hired that included the experienced football CEO Fleur Robinson, as well as a new head coach, Phil Parkinson. Ker was installed as the team's executive director, tasked to travel back and forth between Wales and America, acting as capo and lingo translator for Reynolds and McElhenney. He set up a group text "meant for strategic conversations," Ker said, "although it quickly devolved into a 'general football shenanigans' message thread, filled with expletives on matchdays." For months prior to their first visit to the stadium in October 2021, this was how Reynolds and McElhenney tracked their team's development, with half an eye on other work, thumbing each other ecstatic or miserable messages every Saturday. "Rob can get hot," Reynolds said to me of these written exchanges. McElhenney agreed. "I tend to go zero to 10. Abject despair when we go 1-0 down. Then we score and I'm, like, 'WE MIGHT GET PROMOTED TO THE PREMIER LEAGUE IN FOUR YEARS.'"

That afternoon in October 2021, as they leaped into an embrace on their stadium balcony, they witnessed each other's up-and-down passions in the flesh. Wrexham led 1-0 for much of the game, but gave away a late goal, at which point the buoyant atmosphere in the stadium flattened out. When it finished 1-1, Reynolds hurried off to catch a nighttime flight, while McElhenney descended to the locker room and consoled his players. Crossing the grassy pitch, he was heckled by hundreds of road fans, all of whom were thrilled to have pooped Wrexham's party, all of whom sang in unison at McElhenney, quite cheerfully, "You can stick your fucking Deadpool up your arse."


One chilly day that fall, I went for a drink in Wrexham with Michael Hett, the musician who'd written that catchy "Bring on the Deadpool" song. He took me to his favorite pub, the Turf, which was tucked under the stadium walls like a lean-to. At the bar we met a figure from the community called Johnny Legless, so-called because, well, he didn't always make it to the end of match days on two feet. Legless was the guy who'd been wearing that faux leather Deadpool costume to games. Fifty quid on eBay, he told me. Mask included. We took our pints to a part of the pub that had been turned into a shrine to Reynolds and McElhenney. Their signatures were on a wall. There was a life-size bust, hewn from wood, that depicted Reynolds in the team kit. His likeness loomed beside us as we chatted.

Why wasn't there more local cynicism directed at Reynolds and McElhenney, I wondered? You could find snatches of skepticism on a message board called Red Passion, but not a lot of it, not what you'd expect considering Wrexham's history of flighty, disappointing owners. Reynolds and McElhenney, while conceding that they wouldn't be around forever, had said they were determined to leave this institution in better condition than they found it. Still, Hett had songs in his repertoire about similar abandoned promises, betrayals from owners past. "It's a working-class town," Hett said, after considering my question, "and working-class towns respond to people putting their money where their mouth is." He mentioned donations by Reynolds and McElhenney to a food bank in the city, as well as their support of a disabled fan in straits. Since their takeover, the grass inside the stadium had been relaid. Walls and railings were repainted. It was a matter of their attitude, Legless said. They'd brought along a mood people liked.

In sizing up a partner, McElhenney said he was had always been impressed by Reynolds's tenacity: "I saw somebody resilient. And those are the people you want to spend your life working with."

Hett swung his pint in the direction of the bar, where a sign read “Nobody Leaves Here Sober.” He'd been in for a drink one night when Reynolds and McElhenney stood under that sign, knocking back liquor with the Turf's landlord. The actors had told me about this episode themselves, "doing shots of fireballs like we're 22 and on spring break," McElhenney said, to which Reynolds added, "One of the best nights out I've had in years." So the two hadn't held their noses, Hett explained. They'd gotten to know the city on its own terms. When Reynolds posted a TikTok during his visit, he soundtracked it with an excerpt from Hett's Deadpool song. This musician, who played pub gigs for about 50 people a week, had then seen his song streamed 8 million times.

In common with a lot of Wrexham fans, Hett and Legless were not so thoroughly sold on this documentary that was being made about Reynolds and McElhenney's escapades as team owners. To me, the logic of the project made sense. Ours is the era of Michael Jordan's Last Dance, Tom Brady's Man in the Arena, of every celebrity's lightly flattering Netflix or Amazon doc. If we assume that at any one time there will be 100 shows being made by the famous about themselves, then at least Reynolds and McElhenney were candid about their aims. Welcome to Wrexham would expose the team to a worldwide streaming audience, ideally growing the fan base of merch buyers and match day attendees. Presumably, whatever Reynolds and McElhenney made from the show would take some sting out of their investment in the club, which had grown considerably since their initial outlay. I sensed as well an attitude of waste not, want not. Cameras already followed them everywhere on their visits to Wrexham. If they were going to become content, why not own the content? Hett and Legless reserved judgment for now, waiting to see how their beloved city came over on TV.

We ordered more beers. Leaning beside the Reynolds bust, Hett was counting the games left before the end of the season in May. About 30, he figured. If Wrexham were to overtake the best teams in their league, including the leaders, Stockport, they would need to win about 25 of their games remaining. As things stood, Wrexham weren't performing well enough for that. Hett and I touched pint glasses in wordless commiseration. Same as me, same as a billion other devotees of this sport, Hett had started ingesting football at about the same age as solid food. He knew it in his bones. There were so many teams. Only so many opportunities for glory. As he pensively sipped a pint, I thought back to an exchange I'd had with Reynolds next door, in the owners’ lounge.

Members of the documentary crew had been swirling around us at the time. A runner ferried in to-go bags of barbecue chicken. Reynolds fixed me with a look and said, "Tom, you're from the U.K., right?" The room was otherwise full of Americans, many of them candidly sketchy when it came to football knowledge. Reynolds wondered, "as someone who's forgotten more about football than I'll ever know," whether I believed this project of theirs would succeed. "Maybe we don't make it all the way to the Premier League," Reynolds allowed, "but if this club is promoted, once, twice, that's epic, right? That's history." Why shouldn't it happen for Wrexham, where people had waited so long for positive news?

Why? I hardly knew where to start. Silently, my bones answered Reynolds’s question before my mouth did. Because deservingness in football never quite translates into enough wins (I thought). Because balls sometimes careen off ankles, pitch divots, goalposts, goalies’ backsides, and roll frustratingly into your net. Because crappy single goals secure games. Because crappy single games spoil seasons. Because (I thought) if you live and breathe what the rest of the world calls football, you know that only a tiny fraction of teams can see through a dream season, that disappointment prevails, that Cinderella stories occur once in a generation, that the rest of us continually sweep ash.

But I expressed just a fraction of this to Reynolds, telling him that I appreciated his brio, anyhow. He said he appreciated my skepticism. We left it at that. There were 30-something games of the season left to play.

The owners' adventures in Wales are documented in the new docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham.”


Wrexham's best player, Paul Mullin, was taking a break on the sidelines during a team practice. Under come-and-go drizzle and continual barking by their coaches, Mullin and his teammates had been dashing between plastic cones for an hour, passing to each other in tight triangular formations, popping off shots at the goalkeepers. There was a lot of work to be done if Wrexham were going to become championship contenders, and in order to speed up a turnaround, Reynolds and McElhenney had signed off on an organizational expansion: hiring extra medical and support staff, bringing in newer and starrier players, Mullin among them.

While shots zipped around the training field at head height, lethal as stray bullets, and Mullin watched on from the side, Reynolds jogged out onto the grass to take part in some drills. In no apparent expectation of breaking a sweat, oozing Obama-grade composure even as he miscontrolled the occasional ball, Reynolds wore chinos and an elegant raincoat. Soon he was joined by McElhenney, who had ducked into one of the locker rooms to swap his street clothes for a Wrexham-red training top, baggy shorts, and flat-soled sneakers. A member of the documentary crew murmured, sympathetically, as McElhenney trotted by, "He looks like he's wearing ballet flats." While he was out on the pitch, and trying some of those delicate upward punts known as keepie-uppies, a veteran coach wondered in a thick Welsh accent: Who was going to be the first to kick him? Soon an impromptu penalty shoot-out was arranged. Owners against goalkeepers. After a goal, Reynolds abandoned any regard for his chinos, sinking to the turf to celebrate.

I watched from the sidelines, analyzing the shoot-out with Mullin. A plainspoken 27-year-old who grew up over the Welsh-English border, near Liverpool, he had caused a stir when he agreed to sign for Wrexham from a team in a superior league. A phone call from Hollywood seemed to help him make this decision, but the gamble was paying off for Mullin, an instant sensation at this level, already on track to become a historic scorer for Wrexham. He had the patient, singular focus that most goal poachers do. When I asked him about the curious workplace politics that seemed to underlie this penalty shoot-out—should the goalkeepers let their famous employers score?—Mullin raised an eyebrow. For a moment I thought he was going to hit me.

"It's still footie, isn't it? You're not gonna let anyone score." He shook his head. "I know there's been a lot of bother around the club. But I think I speak for a lot of the lads when I say, these two owners are successful in their business, they're famous all over the world . . . but they're in football now. And if they want to be successful in football, it doesn't matter what's gone before." America's longest-running live-action sitcom for McElhenney? Movie grosses in excess of $2 billion for Reynolds? Trivia, in the insular world of lower-rung football. These glamorous owners would be remembered in Wrexham according to one metric: how far up the leagues they were able to propel a glamour-starved team.

Mullin would do what he could to assist them by scoring. Goals, goals, goals. There were times through November and December of 2021 when Mullin's opponents did not seem able to contain him. The coach Phil Parkinson had whipped Wrexham into an energetic smash-mouth unit, inelegant but increasingly effective as they won 5-0, 6-2, 5-0 in the weeks before Christmas. They jumped from eighth in their league to sixth, from sixth to fourth. In January, Reynolds and McElhenney paid for a new striker to partner with Mullin, a veteran called Ollie Palmer, bearded and corsair-like, with a wide rascally smile. Reynolds expressed particular delight about the acquisition, because Palmer looked like a visual mash-up of himself and McElhenney. "Like someone boiled you both down and poured the results into a mold," Humphrey Ker agreed.

I had presumed their antic approach to team ownership would become stiffer and more serious when the stressful final months of the season rolled around. Nope. One day in February 2022, a printed sheet of office paper appeared on the bulletin board at the Turf, brass-tacked between scorecards for pub quizzes, announcing that the owners had put 365 free drinks behind the bar to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their takeover. That month, Reynolds attended the Super Bowl in Los Angeles, hours after which he boarded a private jet and flew to Wrexham again, looking in at the Turf to say yo to the landlord. During that visit he persuaded several players, the unsmiling Mullin among them, to appear in a commercial he was shooting at the stadium. It was an ad for a cybersecurity company, 1password. Reynolds, portraying a more tyrannical employer than he really was, mushed his nose against Mullin's, threatening to stick a yellow card up the striker’s backside for insubordination.

It is sometimes said of elite athletes that they perform better with a chip on their shoulder. Think of the draft slide in 2005 that spurred Aaron Rodgers to NFL greatness, or Jordan, who late in his career had to dig up increasingly obscure grudges to feel motivated. The accepted wisdom is not the same in football. Happier players play better. In 2016, at odds of 5,000 to 1, Leicester City became Premier League champions against better staffed opposition by riding a wave of joyful swashbuckler camaraderie. Today, the finest footballer in the world is Liverpool's Mo Salah. He plays grinning. Vibes seem to count in this sport, and vibes were something that career entertainers like Reynolds and McElhenney knew how to manipulate. I had seen this in person, how they labored to win over a scrum of British journalists, eventually reducing these suspicious and cynical beings to admiring sighs. When Reynolds used an F-word during a live BBC broadcast he received no serious rebuke.

So of course they could put Salah-like smiles on the faces of their employees. Those staffers whose contracts predated the takeover told me that working at Wrexham had become fun, and funny, for the first time. Players I spoke to did not seem bothered by the extra scrutiny that came with having well-known owners, insisting that they were elevated by insults thrown at them on the pitch. They repeated to me some of the better jibes they'd heard. "Deadpool, Deadpool, what's the score?" "Go back to Philadelphia!" "Put that on Netflix."

This last insult missed the mark a bit. Welcome to Wrexham will air on Hulu in America and on Disney+ in Europe. One player, a midfielder named Kwame Thomas, told me that the presence of a film crew at Wrexham's games had upped levels of competitiveness. "Other players see the cameras and think, I'm not losing on Netflix." As sports documentaries proliferate, it has become second nature to pro athletes that their performances might be mediated at a later date, the footage sweated down and edited, then put before a new audience who might only ever see the manipulated version of reality. This alters stakes. It invites new risk. When Sunderland AFC brought in a film crew to capture its anticipated rise, the team fell. Steadicams that circled the Wrexham staff all season were preventers against complacency, reminders to the younger players especially that nobody wanted to lose on Netflix (or on Hulu, wherever) because it was then that the cruelest memes were crafted.

"Maybe we don't make it all the way to the Premier League," Reynolds said​ at one point​, "but if this club is promoted, once, twice, that's epic, right?"

Into March, Wrexham kept winning. Mullin maintained his form, and his partner Ollie Palmer was just as prolific. Spurred by Mullin and Palmer, Wrexham routinely ran up tallies of four, five, six goals in a game. At one point (a feat almost as improbable on paper as Leicester City’s championship run), modest Wrexham had scored more goals in 2022 than most of the giants of Europe, Liverpool, and Barcelona included. “Deadpool, Deadpool, what's the score? 3-0, 2-1, 2-0, 4-1, 2-0. On a hot streak, Wrexham climbed to second place in their league. When they won a sixth game in succession, McElhenney was watching from a back lot in Studio City, headphones around his neck, halfway through directing an episode of Mystic Quest. Meanwhile, in Wales, the musician Michael Hett immortalized Wrexham's six-game streak in song. Quickly his lyrics were outdated. Wrexham won a seventh.

They drew their next game, then went on another run of victories. The players seemed to have imbibed from their owners a talent for the dramatic. In early April, Reynolds jetted to Wales to watch a game that almost finished goalless. Mullin scored in the dying moments, keeping Wrexham's latest streak alive—at which point Reynolds turned to a colleague beside him and burst into tears. Here was the recipient of a Canadian medal of honor, an investor whose portfolio was so diverse I once heard McElhenney mistakenly accept that Reynolds owned a piece of an actual mountain (instead of the ad tech company MNTN). With all he had, with all he'd done, Reynolds described that Mullin winner as "a top-10 life moment."

When Wrexham thrashed the best team in the league, Stockport, and leaped over them into first place, a championship seemed not only possible but probable. There was one week left of the regular season left to play. Why not Wrexham?


Because this sport, the most popular on the planet, one of the oldest, purest, most accessible pursuits we have, can be a mean and contrary bastard too. Because football seems to defer its traps, keeping back twists until late in a season to maximize heartbreak. Because that round checkered ball might look innocent, but do not be fooled, it knows when you've come to believe, it knows when you've let down your guard, it remembers weaknesses, it is the Count of Monte Cristo, it is Arnie's first Terminator, it is Leo's Revenant, and it will get you. Because Ryan Reynolds shed tears of love for his team in full public view, and by doing so he showed football how much he cared.

That May, a team called Boreham Wood—technically inferior to Wrexham and further reduced by a red card—somehow rallied late in a game to score a penalty. Had Wrexham held on a few minutes more they would likely have gone on to win the league. As it happened, no, the fatal turning point came with a bit of carelessness on a week night in Boreham Wood, as Reynolds was dressing for the Met Gala in New York and McElhenney followed the game via laptop in L.A. Stockport were soon confirmed as league champions. Second-place finishers, Wrexham had a chance to join them in promotion, but only if they could fight their way out of a playoff.

At the end of May, Reynolds and McElhenney were in Wales to watch Wrexham play a team from the east coast of England, Grimsby Town. Nerves abounded in the lounge. Ker had experimentally taken up smoking, operating on the belief that this brought goals. McElhenney was pale. Reynolds paced. He once estimated that he averaged about three miles per game in that lounge. They tried to be positive, staring off the balcony into a stadium they'd overhauled, hearing the roars of a fan base they'd given permission to believe. "A huge reason Rob wanted to do this in the first place was to find somewhere that was deserving of some good news and a good time," Ker told me. "I think he gave them that."

The referee blew his whistle. During a match a week earlier, Reynolds and McElhenney were made to look like football novices, all over again, when they were filmed celebrating a would-be goal—long after a referee's assistant had waved his flag to signal that this goal did not count. Their loyal capo Ker had taken pains to remind his bosses to look out for any such flags today, but still McElhenney was distraught early in the Grimsby game when it seemed to him that Wrexham had conceded. Ker politely nudged him. The learning curve for these two would carry on for years, for as long as they stayed at Wrexham. "Right, right, gotta look at the flag," McElhenney said, apologetically acknowledging that Grimsby's goal had been disallowed.

Soon there were goals that did stand. Paul Mullin scored. Grimsby replied with two of its own, then Wrexham went ahead again, 3-2. It was another of the team's drama-filled spectacles. They fell behind 4-3. They leveled, 4-4. This was a playoff and there had to be a winner, so time was added on to settle the outcome. With two minutes remaining, Reynolds and McElhenney received the season's final gut punch—a Grimsby goal. For Wrexham, that was it, hopes of a promotion would have to be deferred a year. Thousands of fans stayed inside the stadium to cheer off the players and sing buck-up songs. Michael Hett was out there somewhere, joining in with his own chorus of "Bring on the Deadpool." Johnny Legless was well on his way to leglessness.

Up on the balcony, McElhenney asked Ker to translate some of the chanting. Ker tuned his ear to the great guttural choruses, explaining that the Wrexham fans were telling the Grimsby fans (who after all came from a coastal town) that they stank of fish. The Grimsby fans had taken this on board, coming up with a response that seemed to capture football in all its brilliant, wounded, contrary strangeness: "We stink of fish! We stink of fish!" McElhenney nodded. Back in the fall, he and Reynolds had been asked in a press scrum how far they might take Wrexham. Their answer was brisk and funny. "Space," they said. In fact, what transpired over the season was almost as far-fetched. For a moment, Wrexham stood among the biggest scorers in Europe. They had rushed so fast and so far up their league, their own bard could not keep pace.

The team had not managed to get promoted. But as long as they started ascending through the leagues, the following May there was still enough time for Reynolds and McElhenney to take Wrexham to the Premier League by 2026, just shy of their 50th birthdays. They didn't own a mountain together, instead, a mountain of a task. McElhenney had long been convinced they could do this. The first time I met him, he was merrily teasing Reynolds about notable duds from the actor's filmography. "Hey, what was your character in that Sandra Bullock movie?" asked McElhenney, in reference to 2009's The Proposal. Reynolds bowed his head and pretended not to remember. "How about the Jason Bateman movie, the one where you switched bodies?" He meant 2011's The Change-Up. Reynolds feigned cluelessness again. At that, McElhenney turned to me and said when he saw those movies, he didn't see an actor on a bad run. He saw an actor surviving a bad run. "I saw somebody resilient. And those are the people you want to spend your life working with."

Anyone who'd been in show business as long as these two understood how to take a humbling, ultra-conspicuous defeat—and weather it, continuing on. After the Grimsby game, Reynolds and McElhenney departed Wrexham by taxi, already putting questions about the future of their team to the group text, spitballing ideas, making plans. Permissions had been sought to demolish that condemned and weedy terrace inside the stadium. They were going to build a better one. A permanent scoreboard was coming. And that mysterious door, the one that oozed grease? A stadium employee had fixed it. Things were looking okay. There were 70 days to go before the start of the new season.

Tom Lamont is a writer based in London. He wrote about Charles Leclerc, Carlos Sainz, and Ferrari’s Formula One team for the September issue of GQ.