Can American Soccer Learn From Wrexham's Popularity?
Wrexham AFC gained attention on the back of a documentary series and celebrity owners, but there is more behind the Welsh club's appeal.
The attention afforded to an association football club from North Wales, playing in the fifth-tier of the English leagues, has caused a stir in American soccer.
No, this is not a fictional sentence, and neither is this next one. The actor Will Ferrell attended a National League game at Wrexham AFC, the club owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, when the team faced Wealdstone FC last Saturday.
Surreal — not least for longtime Wrexham fans — and fascinating for many sports (not just soccer) fans in the United States and Canada who have adopted this club as one of their own.
This marriage of celebrity and soccer, propelled by a fly-on-the-wall TV series called Welcome to Wrexham, of which Reynolds and McElhenney are among the executive producers, has been part of the reason for Wrexham’s newfound popularity, but that alone would not be enough to sustain interest.
Ferrell himself might have realised this on the back of a far less popular documentary, We Are LAFC, on the Los Angeles club he part-owns in Major League Soccer.
There are many other contributing factors that have led to such intrigue and interest in Wrexham, and if American soccer can bring them to the fore in the sport in the United States, it might be good for the game there. More importantly, it will be good for the communities that participate in it, whether as supporters, players, staff, or volunteers, and will help those soccer communities grow.
Welcome to Wrexham has resulted in fans travelling from North America to watch the team at the Racecourse Ground and visit the Welsh town, including the main filming locations such as The Turf pub/hotel. To many viewers, the locals themselves have become celebrities.
"We saw the documentary and it spoke to us: the townspeople, the heart of this town,” fans from Los Angeles told BBC 5 Live ahead of Wrexham’s FA Cup tie against Sheffield United at the Racecourse Ground in January.
“Being in LA we've met and known some celebrities, but this is much stronger than that.
“We're invested in success but also people. We feel like you get to the heart of the people.”
In the pockets of North America and its sports fandom where there has been furore around Wrexham, it has been met with enthusiasm by many, but among some soccer fans there’s a hint of an emotion landing somewhere between jealousy and confusion.
Some have wondered why fans of Welcome to Wrexham, and now of Wrexham AFC, don’t show the same enthusiasm for their local teams back home.
Even if some of this response from American soccer fans has seemed negative, defensive, and envious, it is in many ways understandable. There is something to learn from it, from the Wrexham story, and even from the way it has been presented.
It has also led to some interesting, important, questions being asked about soccer in the United States, and introspective assessments of the game there.
A common discussion point when comparing Wrexham with American soccer is that of the story. Is it that soccer in the United States doesn’t have stories, or is it that they are not told?
To begin to answer this question we need to enter the minefield of a topic that is the structure of American soccer and, in particular, the de facto top division in the United States.
There are some good stories to be told in that division — namely Major League Soccer — but a lack of relegation from the league, and no new teams being promoted to it, plus it being a single entity1 organisation means stories can be limited in scope or not so freely told.
Telling the best and most intriguing stories in MLS in recent times would contain elements that might not necessarily reflect well on the league, so they might have to open with a cautionary message:
Warning — contains scenes MLS may find offensive
One of the most recent such stories could be Inter Miami’s first couple of seasons in the league, during which they were far from the expected powerhouse under their own celebrity owner, David Beckham.
Did someone mention celebrity owners (again)? Reynolds and McElhenney are often cited as the reason Wrexham might be more appealing to American sports fans, but MLS clubs have celebrity owners too, including Beckham at Miami, Ferrell and Magic Johnson at Los Angeles FC, and Matthew McConaughey at Austin FC.
The documentary and the celebrity are certainly part of what has drawn soccer fans to Wrexham, but what has made them stick with the club is the community in the North Wales town, the possibilities afforded by promotion to a higher level (and the possible heartbreak of relegation), participation in the historic FA Cup which involves all teams throughout the league pyramid, the club’s history itself, and all the people involved in that history — the ups and the downs.
Here’s where fans of American soccer clubs might be justified in feeling a little annoyed that others have attached themselves to Wrexham rather than their local clubs.
There are community clubs in the United States, there is a historic national cup competition, the US Open Cup, that has been running since 1913, and soccer has been played in the country for as long as it has anywhere else in the world since the laws were exported from Britain ages ago.
The history is there. The community is there. The stories are there, even if these might mostly be evident in ‘lower divisions’ or in the Open Cup.
The stories of these ‘lower league’ clubs are rarely told, but the attention on Wrexham might indicate there is an audience for ‘minor leagues’ when it comes to soccer.
Editors are understandably wary about covering them, though, as there’s a worry, and in some cases previous evidence, that such stories can be met with the publishing equivalent of tumbleweed.
But a one-off article on this area of soccer is not enough to create interest and arouse curiosity, and it is not fair to judge potential interest based on an isolated piece. It needs to be a sustained narrative, one chapter setting up the next, one episode leading to another.
MLS itself has discovered this over the years and has become increasingly good at creating its own content around its clubs.
But this can be very insular — perhaps understandably given its single-entity nature. MLS may see the development of other leagues and competitions, especially the US Open Cup and the increasingly appealing and community-oriented USL, as a threat.
An example of the attitude of some mainstream media and MLS itself is sometimes accused of having towards ‘lower league’ or non-MLS soccer was on display in the buildup to the final of the US Open Cup in 2022.
Orlando City, a team who had played in USL prior to becoming an MLS expansion team in 2015, faced USL Championship team Sacramento Republic who had knocked out MLS clubs San Jose Earthquakes, LA Galaxy, and Sporting Kansas City on their way to the final.
In one MLS promotional tweet, the graphic did not mention Sacramento, and the club’s account wasn’t even tagged.
In other places, Orlando’s victory was declared their first cup win, despite the fact that during their time in USL, they had topped the regular season standings in three of their four seasons and won two USL playoff championships.
To this day it is often incorrectly referred to as Orlando’s first trophy.
None of this is to say MLS clubs don’t do good work in their communities or have dedicated fanbases whose passion for their club runs as deep as that of any soccer supporters anywhere else in the world.
Some fans of MLS teams are among those miffed at the attention Wrexham is getting. McElhenney’s native Philadelphia, for example, has one of the best community-oriented MLS clubs in the shape of Philadelphia Union. A successful one at that, with a reputation for bringing through young talent (Brenden Aaronson, Auston Trusty, and Mark McKenzie to name a few) and for being active, aware, and responsible in their community in southeast Pennsylvania.
And none of this is to disparage MLS which itself is a fascinating league for many reasons, good and bad — as is the case with almost any league around the world. But it might be beneficial to MLS to tell its own stories, warts and all, and maybe embrace the rest of American soccer rather than block it out.
If it can’t, or won’t, then an independently made look at the evolution of MLS itself could make for an interesting story.
It could all be more wholesome, interesting and beneficial if the focus was on soccer in the United States and not just one league.
For that to happen you would need independent media covering soccer as a whole and not exclusively MLS. A lot of the (often really good) content you get on soccer is produced by the league and clubs themselves, but more independent coverage would make the stories richer.
Who is available to tell that story, and whether they are afforded the space (whether online or in a newspaper) and time to do so is another story of its own.
It is worth mentioning that many soccer writers had to work hard even to get major league soccer in their outlets. We have those writers, and others at local outlets, to thank that soccer gets its stories told at all and that we are in a position to push for more variety and more of them to be heard.
The popularity of Wrexham also introduces the idea that maybe the quality of play is less important than we thought. What might be more attractive to fans, especially at local level when teams are looking to the communities beside them to get involved and to attend games, is to be part of something that has the potential to grow. Not for it to hit a brick wall when it reaches a certain level.
New teams are added to MLS via expansion, but there is no way for a ‘lower league’ team to rise through the divisions organically, as is possible for Wrexham. This forms a big part of their story.
There is hope for all involved that Wrexham can reach the top. Even if it might take many years with many ups and downs along the way, even if reaching the very top (the Premier League) might never happen, that hope will always be there.
In the American league system, there is no such hope, although the hope that this could change may itself provide motivation.
Local clubs with good stories and an identifiable local culture will naturally attract interest from elsewhere, both nationally and internationally. Fans who support their local team in the United States can help to add local characteristics to said club.
The hope in US soccer lies in tournaments such as the Open Cup, in the exciting prospect of burgeoning lower leagues, and in the potential for a pyramid built on state leagues (the country’s regionalised political geography almost implores it and is in many ways already naturally set up for it).
Perhaps most of all this hope lies in the push for all teams to have a chance to progress, rather than stagnate, via the concept of promotion to the next league.
It won’t all be smooth sailing. It certainly hasn’t been for Wrexham throughout their history, and there will still be bumps in the road even with their new ownership, but there is something to be part of and something to hope for.
American soccer doesn’t have to copy Wrexham, copy Welsh or English football, or copy European or South American football. American soccer is actually better for its quirks, its goofy team names, its football markings on pitches, and even for its American sports traits such as playoffs and conferences. But from Wrexham’s stories, it can perhaps learn what it will take to write its own, more proudly and unreservedly.
ends
Related Recommendations
TheCup.us. An independently run outlet exhaustively covering the US Open Cup competition — from qualifiers to final, from regulations to revelations.
Protagonist Soccer. A media outlet covering lower-tier soccer in the United States.
Feuerstein's Fire American Soccer Show. A radio show that regularly covers the lower leagues in US soccer and the US Open Cup. By Daniel Feuerstein.
Alive and Kicking: The Incredible But True Story of the Rochester Lancers. A book by Michael Lewis.
“No sports thrives or lives in a vacuum.
“American soccer did not begin when Major League Soccer kicked its first ball. It did not begin during the 1994 World Cup. And it did not originate when Pele made history with the New York Cosmos in 1975, or when the North American Soccer League took its first steps in 1968.
“The Sport goes back more than a century, for better or worse.”
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Extratime Radio. An MLS podcast covering everything about the league, not always uncritically, and will mention soccer outside of the league it covers.
There will be more related links in future editions of this newsletter, which might also contain random music recommendations at the end of posts.
Teams and player contracts belong to MLS. “Owning” a club is more like owning a share in MLS and at club level, these owners can be described more accurately as investor operators. An older version of the MLS website contained the passage: “Major League Soccer is structured as a single, limited liability company (single-entity). In the single-entity business structure, club operators own a financial stake in the League, not just their individual team.”