What a kick! Reporting a soccer story that became something more.

Episode transcript

Stadium announcer, as audience cheers: Incredible! What an end to the game! Scott for Notts County. Saved! Saved by Foster! Massive moment in the title.

Kendra Nordin Beato: Hear that? Get excited. The Monitor had a reporter in that stadium.

[music]

Welcome to “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Kendra Nordin Beato. Today we’re going to dive into the saga of a football club in Wrexham, Wales, the subject of a story by today’s guest, writer Stephen Humphries, and also the focus of “Welcome to Wrexham,” an FX television series that launched its second season this week.

First, our American listeners might appreciate a primer on just exactly where this Welsh football club fits into the galaxy that is English soccer. You may have heard about Arsenal or Manchester United, both part of the Premier League, the top 20 teams in men’s professional soccer. But think of it like a pyramid.

The total number of teams across the entire English football system is something like 7,000 clubs, [all] ever trying to reach the level above. Just below the Premier League sits three levels of the English Football League, made up of 72 teams. Wrexham had spent a frustrating 14 seasons trying to level up into the football league until last year,  when two American actors help bring about a Hollywood ending that might not be an ending at all.

OK, now let’s hit pause.

Stephen, why did the Monitor decide to write about a sleepy Welsh town and its lackluster football club back in May?

Stephen Humphries: Well, we were having a conversation among the editors and myself about how do we cover the last, final season of [the Apple TV series] “Ted Lasso.” And as a reminder, "Ted Lasso" is the hit comedy about an American college football coach who inexplicably becomes a coach of a top tier British football team, or as we call it here, soccer.

Nordin Beato: Right, and that’s when I weighed in to say the soccer fans in my house who are watching "Welcome to Wrexham," a documentary produced by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who had bought its football club and were trying to save and revive it. I mean, it was like a real life version of “Ted Lasso,” wasn’t it?

Humphries: Absolutely. And there’ve been a lot of comparisons, justly. So, because you have these two very big name Hollywood stars who swoop into this tiny town in North Wales, Wrexham, and buy the football club, and these are two guys who know very little to absolutely nothing about British football.

They come in and they produce a documentary about how they invest in this struggling team, and it turned into a big hit. And, suddenly, this documentary becomes popular all over the world, and it starts to have a transformative effect on the town itself. There are tourists coming from all over: they’re coming from mostly North America, but also places like Australia and Iceland and China, and people all want to be kind of a part of this phenomenon.

Nordin Beato: Wow! But they’re obviously not all soccer fans, right? So, in many ways, this story isn’t about a football club. It’s a story about a town and its identity and its long suffering fans. What did you observe when you finally got to Wrexham?

Humphries: It’s a working-class town. The main industries there have always been coal mining and steel manufacture. But those industries really died at the late end of the 20th century. And ever since then, the town has struggled. It’s lost a lot of population. People have moved to the larger nearby town, Chester, which is kind of a rival town in football as well as economically. Even through all that, there’s always been this football fandom. And that goes back to, I think, 1864.

And for people in the town... Going to the football games was the main form of recreation for decades. It used to be that the games would regularly get 15,000 attendees. That dwindled down to about 4,000. But those 4,000 fans, I mean, talk about a hard-core remnant. In 2011, 2,000 of these faithful fans teamed together and they raised a staggering amount of money within 24 hours to be able to buy that football team. And it was that fandom and that dedication and that passion that eventually drew the attention of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

Nordin Beato: One of the reasons this is such a great story for the Monitor, and probably because, for the similar reasons for why "Ted Lasso" resonated with so many viewers, is that at its core, It’s a story about hope and joy told through a sports team.

Humphries: Yeah, there is this sense of hope and joy, and you feel it when you go into the town. It’s the one story I’ve had where absolutely everyone asked for an interview was happy to talk, because that’s how the Welsh are. In fact, the only person to turn me down for an interview was Ryan Reynolds.

Nordin Beato: Oh, whoops! [Laughs.]

Humphries: Understandably so. He was being pulled in so many directions after the game, but I did get a great interview with Rob McElhenney. But there is that joy for this team that goes to the town, and when you visit, There’s a pub that literally touches the stadium called The Turf. And you go in there and you hear people singing. And there is a song called “Welcome to Wrexham” that is the sort of unofficial anthem of the town. And it was written by a part time hobby punk band called the Declan Swans. And the song, “It’s Always Sunny in Wrexham,” has lyrics that go: 

Music, by Declan Swans: “Less than a mile from the center of town, a famous old stadium crumbling down, no one’s invested so much as a penny. Bring on the Deadpool and Rob McElhenney.”

Nordin Beato: Oh, that’s terrific. So the lyrics are actually about Ryan Reynolds as the superhero Deadpool and Rob McElhenney starring in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” It’s almost like the town has reached out and embraced them as insiders into their own town spirit.

Humphries: Everyone in that town knows that song. You’ll walk past pubs, you go to the stadium and people just spontaneously start singing it. And, you know, they’re so excited about what’s happened. But what has happened is that that joy has just been amplified. It was always there, and now they’ve been having this great moment with the series and the economic effect it’s had, and the effect it’s had on the morale of people in the town.

Nordin Beato: And you were there in a couple of days leading up to the match that you wrote about for the Monitor. Is that right?

Humphries: I did, and got to walk around and interview some of the locals. And, all the pubs are full, all the restaurants are full, the hotels are full. I saw lots of Americans. I met a woman called Jan from New York. She’d flown in just for the game. She’d never watched football before that, but she watched the TV series. And she became an ardent fan. You know, she wanted to be part  of this phenomenon. So there was this buzz and this electricity in the town for what has been called the biggest game in that league’s entire history. And it was a must win game for the club.

Nordin Beato: So the anticipation was huge. The TV series had delivered this moment. You had American viewers, you had the press there, you had people from all over England and Wales showing up to watch this. What did it feel like walking into the stadium as a spectator? What did the crowd feel like?

Humphries: I mean, if you think it’s hard to get tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, this was triply so. This was the ticket that everyone wanted. This was a must win match against the arch rival team, Notts County, and what had happened was that... In the previous game, Wrexham had a shocking loss.

It was a game that they should have won, that would have kept them at the top of the table, and now their arch-rivals who are also vying for promotion come in, and there’s a lot of pressure on Wrexham at this point, because they’d had this investment from the two Hollywood actors the previous season, and they’d failed to get promoted.

So they needed to win this game. The buzz and the electricity and the tension. I mean, people were.... They’re telling me that they couldn’t sleep the night before.

Nordin Beato: As a culture writer, how often does this happen to you? That you can feel like you are about to catch a wave? And how often does that happen in your reporting that you feel like you’re about to capture a crescendo as you’re reporting it?

Humphries: I don’t think I’ve ever had that experience, really. I have been to ... rock concerts to report on them and things like that and Broadway shows and such, but never an occasion like this where you could tell that everything felt like it was on the line for this town. And for these fans, they’d been waiting 15 years for a chance of promotion [to a new tier].

Wrexham was the “bad news bears” of football, and the game starts. And right away, Notts County, the rival team, scores a goal.

And there was this sort of collective groan in the stadium. And everyone thought, it’s going to be like the last game. They’re going to, they’re going to lose this game. But then, Wrexham comes back, and they score two goals.

So, this game’s a humdinger, and when Wrexham’s ahead, the other team comes back, and they score again, and the score is tied, and it goes into overtime, and there’s still no score, and so it goes down to a penalty shootout. Now, that’s sort of like, that’s in soccer.

Nordin Beato: The worst.

Humphries: The worst and the best, because it comes down to which team is gonna walk away because they score more penalty goals than the other team.

So, Wrexham has a goalkeeper who’s kind of a big name. His name is Ben Foster. He used to be the goalkeeper for Manchester United, and he’d retired, but came out of retirement because Wrexham invited him, and he said it took him, you know, less than five minutes to say yes.

He’d lost the sort of the buzz and the excitement of playing football. That’s why he retired, and he was getting up there in years. And he said that coming to play for Wrexham, which was the first team he ever played on when he was very young, gave him that buzz again. He’s standing in the goal, and it comes down to this one final kick. He has to save it.

Well, the team lose the game and they potentially lose the season, right? Ben Foster, the goalie, told me afterward that he’d studied data about this kicker and that this kicker tended to strike for the left side of the goal. But the goalkeeper had this intuition that he should actually dive to the right, and he did it and saved. The goal in dramatic fashion. It was a spectacular save. And the place erupts. It’s absolute bedlam. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

Nordin Beato: Did you cry? I think I would have cried. 

Humphries: No, but I think a lot of other people did. I met a football fan who had been attending games for over 70 years and he said it was one of the greatest games he’d ever seen. It really was a true classic game. Everyone talked about it as being a classic game that will be one for the ages. 

Nordin Beato: That’s something that the Wrexham fans can probably come back to, because the oldest narrative in sports is the long suffering franchise. How do you think this glow is going to sustain them in the weeks and months to come, no matter what happens?

Humphries: The league that they’re now playing in is a much tougher league. And they’ve had a really rocky start to the season. Wrexham’s star player, Paul Mullen, got injured when he came over to the States during the summer to play some exhibition games, and he’s still not back.

And Ben Foster, the great hero goalkeeper for Wrexham, suddenly became leakier than a sieve. He was letting in so many goals that he decided to retire for good just a couple of weeks ago. So they’re sort of in the middle tier of the league at the moment. They have a lot of time. They could come back.

But, I think, even if they don’t have a great season, that doesn’t matter because there is that glow, and it’s bigger than just the football. It’s the whole phenomenon of what has happened to that town.

And the series is really about the town. It’s not about the two Hollywood celebrities. And as Rob McElhenney said to me, that was what they wanted from the start. They said that we didn’t want it to be about us. We wanted it to be about the town. And that’s what’s resonating with people. They’re seeing how people stick together, and what a great community looks like.

Nordin Beato: Thanks for listening. Find our show notes with links to the story discussed here and other stories by Stephen at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Kendra Nordin Beato, and edited and produced by Mackenzie Farkus, Clay Collins, and Jingnan Peng. Our sound engineers were Jeff Turton and Alyssa Britton. Original music is by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.