Reynolds, Mac say 'Welcome to Wrexham' is about community, not football

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney said their Emmy-winning docuseries "Welcome to Wrexham" documents a community's transformation more than a football club's rise, speaking to ABC7 Los Angeles ahead of the Season 5 premiere Thursday on FXX and Hulu.

Season 5 covers the Wrexham Red Dragons' Championship League campaign and their bid for Premier League promotion — a historic three-year rise the co-owners attribute not to celebrity strategy but to stepping back and letting football professionals lead.

Reynolds and McElhenney purchased the Wrexham Red Dragons in 2021, inheriting a club founded in 1864 that ranks as the third oldest football club in the world. The pair sat down with ABC7 Los Angeles ahead of the Season 5 premiere to discuss their ownership philosophy and the stakes of the current campaign.

Reynolds described what hangs in the balance if the team wins promotion. "The playoff match, the one that decides who's going up into the Premier League and who isn't, is considered the most expensive sports match on earth," Reynolds said. "One team reaches the Empyrean heights of success, is immediately granted the TV ad revenue for an entire league, an ungodly amount of money that almost instantly evaporates into infrastructure, players, salaries, wages, everything you would need to be equipped for a Premier League team."

McElhenney laid out the organization's guiding principle. "Our mission statement, our maxim, as an organization is to make our community proud," he said, according to ABC7 Los Angeles. "If you win and lose your soul along the way it will have been for nothing."

Reynolds credited the club's back-to-back-to-back promotions to restraint rather than celebrity intervention. "You can't write this, you can't plan for this," he said. "Letting those people who are qualified to do so do their job and do it well has been the secret sauce here."

Season 5 features the story of fan Bailey Jones, who died in 2023 after suffering a brain bleed and whose organs were donated. McElhenney said the storyline captures what the show is really about. "This isn't a football documentary. It's not even a sports documentary," he said. "Football just happens to be the reason that they're gathering on Saturdays."

Reynolds pointed to the club's 162-year history as proof that the community — not its celebrity co-owners — is the true custodian. "We are a blip in the historical timeline of Wrexham AFC," he said, according to ABC7 Los Angeles. "They are the ones, they alone are the ones that will guard and be that kind of emotional moat around the club."

"Welcome to Wrexham," which has collected 10 Emmys across its first four seasons, has been renewed through Season 8. New episodes air weekly on FXX and Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ internationally.