Even a Hollywood superhero couldn’t rescue Wrexham: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS gives his verdict on the documentary that follows A-list owners of a lowly football club
Welcome To Wrexham
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Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney face a daunting job. They’ve bought Wrexham FC, vowing to see it promoted back into the football league.
The goal of the multi-millionaire actors is to propel their club into League Two – the old Fourth Division. Welcome To Wrexham, an eight-part docuseries on Disney+, charts their progress.
Late news from the Racecourse Ground: it’s Hollywood 0, Harsh Reality 2. The club is currently on the cusp of the play-off places, after failing to get promoted last year.
But if they have an uphill struggle, spare a thought for Disney’s subtitles writer. Most of the more challenging dialects have to be captioned for a US audience – and confronted by the rich variety of British accents, the subtitler has the thankless task of translating them into… well, American.
Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney face a daunting job. They’ve bought Wrexham FC, vowing to see it promoted back into the football league
North Walian is tricky enough. But he’s expected to cope with Brummie, with Manc, with Scouse. Inevitably, there’s a lot of paraphrasing. When goalie Rob Lainton pats his biceps and declares, ‘I think I’m in good nick,’ it’s subtitled as, ‘I think I look good.’
Elsewhere, the captioner has to rely on guesswork. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said in a Wrexham accent, sounds a lot like ‘at the moment’ to an American ear, apparently.
But when beer is involved, the task becomes impossible. A bit of exuberant and inventive ranting by a fan was simply subtitled, ‘???’.
One character who doesn’t need captioning is McElhenney’s friend Humphrey Ker, a 6ft 7in Old Etonian comedy writer who acts as the go-between for club and new owners.
‘I’m going to be a conduit,’ he told the players. It’s a pity they didn’t have the benefit of subtitles, because you could easily mishear that word ‘conduit’.
Ryan Reynolds is best known as the star of Deadpool, a superhero movie franchise. You might not recognise him with his mask off.
You probably won’t recognise Rob McElhenney either, because he’s chiefly known for a long-running US sitcom rarely seen in Britain, called It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.
Both men have the doppelganger face of Hollywood leading men – long jaws, self-deprecating grins, interchangeable beards. If you made a movie of their lives, Ioan Gruffudd could play either of them.
The pair didn’t know each other, except through social media, before going into business together. Rob was frank about why he approached Ryan, a much bigger star: ‘I had TV money, but I needed superhero movie money.’
How much they paid for the club in 2020 wasn’t revealed. We’re told that 98 per cent of the supporters’ club backed the takeover, but the financial details are never mentioned.
This is a show about the emotion of football, not the accounts. Despite its efforts to paint Wrexham as the British equivalent of an industrial city in America’s ‘rust belt’, it does evoke the passion of the game.
Most of the first two half-hour episodes consist of Ryan and Rob insisting that this isn’t a vanity project.
That’s difficult to swallow, coming from men with teeth like aircraft landing lights, but I believe them. Thousands wouldn’t.
Asked why they chose Wrexham, the world’s third oldest club, Rob went into a long explanation of how much the Philadelphia Eagles, an American football club, meant to him. He’s undoubtedly sincere, but it still doesn’t explain, ‘Why Wrexham?’ Ryan flashed his goofy smile and confessed he was trying to live up to the dreams his late father had for him.
They are shaky on the rules of the game, and even the documentary makers were flummoxed by the rules governing promotion and relegation.
One graphic was littered with errors – citing the wrong number of teams in a league, the wrong number of clubs demoted each year, that kind of thing.
The pair didn’t know each other before going into business together. Rob was frank about why he approached Ryan, a much bigger star: ‘I had TV money, but I needed superhero movie money’
Basic terminology, such as the meaning of ‘nil’, baffled them. Watching one match, Rob attempts to explain what is happening on the pitch: ‘He got the red card which means he is immediately ejected from the game.’ In a Zoom call, Ryan tries to look suitably impressed as Humphrey extols the talents of a striker. ‘Thirty-four goals in all competitions? Wow!’ he gasps – clearly clueless about what that actually means.
But the duo are serious in their desire for success. On the final day of the season last year, Rob woke at 4am to watch the game live from his home in Los Angeles. Wrexham could manage only a draw and failed to make the play-offs.
That brought out the Californian serial killer instinct.
Wrexham’s manager, his backroom team and ten of the players were axed.
This was dressed up in LA therapy jargon, of course. ‘Not everyone can come on the journey with us,’ Humphrey regretted. As the series progresses, we see less of Rob and Ryan. It’s not that the lack of instant success means their interest is waning, heaven forbid.
Instead, the film-makers are mirroring other streaming video shows about football, such as Netflix’s Sunderland ‘Til I Die, and Amazon Prime’s All Or Nothing: Arsenal.
This shifts the emphasis on to fans, players and volunteers at the club.
We meet the local band who have recorded a Wrexham anthem, and a disgruntled painter and decorator whose love for the club keeps him going in a job he hates.
And we eavesdrop on two middle-aged ladies who sit outside a coffee shop to dissect the manager’s tactics each Saturday. We all know that middle-aged ladies and their cappuccinos are the backbone of every British football club’s fanbase… at least, in the Hollywood version.
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