Patrick McElhenney/FXIn 2020, Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) and Rob McElhenney (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) formed The R.R. McReynolds Company and purchased the fifth-tier English soccer club Wrexham AFC. The duo had no knowledge of sports team ownership, leading many to wonder if this was a joke.
A character in the comedy Ted Lasso — in which Jason Sudeikis plays a hapless American college football coach hired to manage an English soccer club — wondered the same thing in a Season 2 episode. Reynolds and McElhenney responded with a tongue-in-cheek cease and desist order.
Actually, they’re quite serious about their team, its supporters and its community. Viewers can follow along every step of their effort to turn Wrexham around in the new FX documentary series Welcome to Wrexham, premiering with two episodes on Wednesday, August 24, at 10pm ET/PT.
Actor/writer Humphrey Ker (American Auto, Mythic Quest) is an integral part of the club’s operation, serving on the team’s board of directors and working closely with the owners. He gave us an insider’s peek into the world of Wrexham and the TV series:
You’re executive director of the Wrexham Football Club. What do your duties entail?
Humphrey Ker: The way I have come to describe it is that I translate Hollywood into football and football into Hollywood. By day, I’m an actor and writer based in Los Angeles. I’m from the U.K. originally, but I’ve been over here for about 10 years. I liaison between Rob and Ryan, and between Fleur Robinson our CEO, and Shaun Harvey our strategic adviser to the board, and act as essentially a translator between those two elements. What do Rob and Ryan want and need from the club? What are the club’s wants and needs from Rob and Ryan? And how best to maximize the success of everything we’re trying to do.
What was the state of Wrexham before Rob and Ryan bought it?
Historically, Wrexham is one of the great clubs of English football insofar as they’re the third oldest professional football team in the world. And we had a great history of huge crowds and some success, and they’ve won the Welsh cup 23 times and all sorts of things to be very proud of. But over the last 15-20 years, the club has really declined in a big way and has suffered under the ownership of a few groups of people who were less interested in the success of the football clubs than they were in trying of squeeze as much money out of it as they possibly could. At the point in which we took over, Wrexham was in pretty dire straits, to be honest. The fans had saved the club from some of these unscrupulous owners, but they just didn’t really have the resources to make the club particularly competitive. What we’ve tried to do, and what I hope people will see over the course of the first season — however many seasons we do of the show — that one of our big objectives has been to try and return that competitiveness to Wrexham Football Club.
Thank you to all the players, staff and fans of @Wrexham_AFC for a very special first full season. We will be back, we will be stronger and we will be honoured to do it for the people of this great town. #WxmAFC
— Humphrey Ker (@thehumphreyker) May 28, 2022
Was there some skepticism among Wrexham supporters and the community when Rob and Ryan purchased the team?
Fans of Wrexham Football Club have been, from the jump, really welcoming to us and really excited by the stewardship of Rob and Ryan. And they’ve always been incredibly friendly to me. I think lots of fans of other clubs wanted it to be more suspicious than it was. There’s a fair bit of jealousy, I think, around the rest of the football league, because there’s lots of foreign owners of English football clubs. It’s become a very popular place for people to lose money, because that’s what you do when you own a football club. People have become used to seeing foreign owners, but I think what we’re not really used to is having foreign owners who are massively popular already, and ones that have shown as much passion and interest and love for the football club as these two have.
What did you think of Ted Lasso’s joke about Ryan and Rob buying Wrexham?
Well, funny enough, I believe that reference was inserted thanks to a friend of my wife’s. My wife, Megan Ganz, was a writer on Modern Family for a long time. Bill Wrubel, who was a writer there, is also a writer on Ted Lasso. So we were forewarned of the reference. Often when people first hear about this or talk to us, they’re like, “Oh, it’s just like Ted Lasso. Are you Ted Lasso? How does this work?” It’s been an interesting experience to kind of have that blow up around the same time that we are doing this, because it’s given a lot of people a reference point that they maybe wouldn’t have had previously.
How much of a cultural or language barrier is there with Wrexham being a Welsh football club?
We are very proudly a bilingual club, very proudly a Welsh club. As people see when they watch the show, there’s a lot of signage in Welsh and we make our announcements to the games in Welsh and English. It’s something that we know our fans take a great deal of pride in. I think Wales and England have a traditionally rocky relationship. We are all part of Great Britain, but the English invaded Wales in the 1300s and the Welsh have not forgotten about it. They remain ticked off about the English invaders. Luckily, my mom’s Welsh, so I’m always able to break that out anytime anyone takes umbrage with my Englishness. Rob has made a real effort to learn Welsh, and Ryan has had his films subtitled in Welsh. Our relationship with local council and the Welsh government and all that stuff has been really strong because they see our arrival as a massive opportunity, just as we see our arrival to help drive principles and programs and things that promote Welsh culture and help with the promotion of Wrexham and Wales as wider entities.
Are Americans still allowed to call it soccer?
Certainly! As long as it’s not the gridiron football that people are talking about, that’s all we care about. It can be soccer, it can be football, it can be pêl-droed, which is Welsh for football. There’s any number of things.
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