Old news from the Football thread: Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney purchased a Welsh football club, Wrexham AFC.
Current news in the TV thread: Welcome to Wrexham is a documentary show on Hulu about the process of purchasing and running Wrexham AFC.
Having watched two seasons of Ted Lasso, I’m something of an expert on British football (or as they call it, “football”), and this show is strangely compelling. Basically, Hollywood stars Reynolds and McElhenney bought a low-level football club–similar to an A or AA baseball team in the U.S.–and they’re trying to get it promoted to a higher league, which is a near-impossible feat. Will they be successful, or will they fail miserably?
Four episodes are out so far, and two episodes come out weekly. Airing on FX and Hulu. Highly recommended.
At the National League level, 24 teams are competing for two promotion spots: The top team is promoted, and then the next six compete in playoffs for the second spot. So maybe not near-impossible, but near-improbable?
The show goes into the psychological effect that relegation has on the town. Imaging being a Yankees fan, and then after a few bad years suddenly they’re an AA baseball club playing the Lake Country DockHounds and the Rocket City Trash Pandas.
I don’t have to imagine it. I support Oxford United. We fell from the second tier out of the League entirely in a little over a decade. And now we’re back in the third tier.
Maybe this is a larger question (or a dumb question), but how does that affect the town as a whole? Is it just something that affects general morale, or does it have an impact on people moving into the town, jobs, things like that??
Depends on the town. Oxford isn’t really a football town, so not a huge impact compared to, say, the fortunes of Mini/BMW. But for somewhere like Derby, a huge impact on morale. Jobs and the rest, probably not.
I have loved the show so far, and have really enjoyed learning about the promotion/relegation system, which is completely foreign to a US sports fans.
We have teams that purposely do bad so that they can draft good players.
I also don’t know if the relegation system, is very perfect either. It basically makes it impossible for smaller market teams to compete at the highest level. It is nice to be able to have teams like Green Bay or Buffalo able to play for championships on national tv.
I think both systems of professional sports have problems. On its face, the relegation system seems more fair, but it is also brutal for some markets as populations change.
It is kind of funny how the U.S. has a much more “socialist” system of professional sports than the U.K.
Football and the league aren’t exotic unknowns to me. But I’m really enjoying this series. The documentary is nicely shot, the story is compelling and Ryan and Rob add a nice slightly bewildered touch to the story.
Exactly, an underdog story from so low down that up is the only possibility . . . besides it not working out at all and everyone goes home to lick their wounds. Coming from Appalachia/Midwest, it hits me right in the small-town feels.
I haven’t finished the series yet (trying not to binge). So not sure whether that’s a spoiler for the end of the season.
I’ll say this: I’ve been enjoying the documentary a lot. It’s made me laugh at times. But I didn’t expect it to make me cry. The episode I watched tonight (about Arthur) did though.
No spoiler, I was only half way through and wasn’t talking about the actual game results in any way, just that it’s a go-for-broke underdog story. I don’t yet know which way it goes, but it’s a common and great plot.
Also enjoying it. Well made and entertaining. Really interesting contrast to the Amazon “All or Nothing” premier league series; the top league series has such higher production values and the world the players/staff live in is so different.
