Fantasy football: here come TV's Welcome to Wrexham rip-offs

The Guardian

19 hours ago

It was the crossover that no one in the entertainment industry, or the sports world, saw coming: the stars of Deadpool and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia aligning in February 2021 to purchase a beleaguered professional football club in the north of Wales. Four years on from that blockbuster deal, which looked all but doomed to end in disaster, Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac (legally changed from McElhenney, a tongue-twisting trip wire apparently) have not only proven to be eminently noble stewards of 160-year-old Wrexham FC; in hindsight, they look even cannier for deciding to make a great show of their attempt to reverse the club's fortunes.
Welcome to Wrexham – their Ted Lasso-like hourlong series documenting the club's historic ascent from fifth division English football to, now, the Premier League doorstep – has been an unqualified hit with American audiences and critics, many of whom came into this premise as clueless as the new owners themselves. So it figures now that Wrexham has nabbed eight primetime Emmy nominations, Hollywood finds itself scrabbling to turn Reynolds and Mac's offsides run into a proper reality TV subgenre, with three new Wrexham knockoffs hitting small screens starting from last week.
Amazon's Built in Birmingham: Brady and the Blues follows Tom Brady's quest to turn around Birmingham City. From the kickoff, the seven-time NFL champion bristles at any attempts to frame his interest in City as a vanity project; that's even as his series serves up another test of the Patriot Way, the TB12 method and other winning formulas that fueled his gridiron Cinderella story – a favorite chestnut. 'What's the difference between football and soccer'?' he asks, rhetorically. 'Nothing.'
Throughout the five-part series, Brady fancies himself a visionary and disrupter only to be revealed as a classic American know-it-all. 'I'm a little worried about our new coach's work ethic,' he says, hinting at some buyer's remorse over former England captain Wayne Rooney – who turned out to be a complete disaster as manager. Brady would have been far better served making a documentary on his conflicting interests as an NFL owner (of the Las Vegas Raiders) and the league's highest-paid game analyst. The alternative, his Prime Video series, is as satisfying as a solitary morsel of dark chocolate – once a TB12 nightcap staple, bitter and unfulfilling. And that's despite the excess of clips from Peaky Blinders. (Show creator Steven Knight is an executive producer on Birmingham.)
FX's Necaxa, the official Wrexham spinoff that debuted Thursday, offers a deeper dive into Liga MX – Mexican fútbol. Surprisingly, Mac and Reynolds also feature prominently as executive producers and talking heads in this five-part series. The job of actually reviving the team falls to Eva Longoria, who further seizes the opportunity to reconnect with her Mexican roots. Apart from Mac and Reynolds's cameos, the series is told completely in Spanish – a language that Longoria, a Texas native who grew up speaking English, is openly self-conscious about speaking. The obvious play here is cultural representation, and it will surely find an audience in a league that was once more watched in the US than the Prem.
Only one Wrexham knockoff really scores: ESPN+'s Running of the Wolves. At first blush the idea of a third-division Italian team owned by Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, daytime TV's impossibly good looking real-life married couple, couldn't seem more far-fetched. But Consuelos isn't playing a part here. In fact, he spent chunks of his formative years on the boot, grew up rooting for Juventus and speaks fluent (if heavily American inflected) Italian. It was in 2022 that he and Ripa joined the group that owns Campobasso FC, a properly downtrodden outfit. But you wouldn't know it from the way Consuelos cheerleads for them on Live!, syndicated TV's morning colossus.
Campobasso is a real-life fantasy team for Consuelos. He bolts to Italy at a moment's notice to participate in personnel meetings and stir enthusiasm around town. ('Really good haircuts, great tattoos and they smell amazing!' was how he assessed the team after greeting them coming off the bus before a friendly.) When co-owner Mark Rizzetta rings long distance from Italy to strategize about acquiring a star player who once seemed out of reach, Consuelos doesn't hesitate to interrupt dinner at home with the wife to take the video call.
Wolves doesn't just nod at Wrexham and open with Ripa and Consuelos interviewing Reynolds on Live! about the club. (That's as trash talk between Brady and Mac spices up a matchup between City and Wrexham … ) Wolves tweaks the Wrexham formula to more winsome effect over the course of its four hourlong episodes. Reynolds and Mac look like kings of comedy until they're set against two former soap stars closing in on 30 years of marriage. 'In my next life, I want to be an Italian football problem,' Ripa sighs as Consuelos and Rizzetta scramble to put a deal together at the transfer deadline. Throughout, Ripa makes clear to her husband that she'd have an easier time accepting the inconveniences if he'd just buy them a villa already.
Where Birmingham City is just another mountain to climb for Brady, who never cottoned to the role of stay-at-home dad, Consuelos is at pains to make his football dream a family affair. After one Wolves win Consuelos dances with his daughter inside the team's rickety stadium, a far cry from the hallowed cathedrals of English football. (Square that with Brady mocking Birmingham City's much nicer but still humble headquarters as he's pulling up …) Consuelos attaches to players – not least Abdallah Soulemana, a lightly used Ghanan-American defenseman from the Bronx. In the pilot, Consuelos can't bear the idea of cutting Soulemana and losing out on his potential, so he arranges a loan to another team and makes the extra effort to seek him out on the field to gently break the news.
Still, once you get past the game highlights and human interest stories, there will be no missing these Wrexham knockoffs for what they truly are – hackneyed exercises in marketing and self-promotion, with a bit more spit and polish. And there's no mystery to why American celebrities, masters of this dark art, are making reality TV the cornerstone of their global football exploits. Since Reynolds and Mac bought Wrexham, they've seen their initial $2.5m investment in the team mushroom into a roughly $475m asset and the town of Wrexham reborn as a global tourist trap. Talk about faking it till you make it.
It's not hard to imagine Michael B Jordan (Bournemouth), Snoop Dogg (Swansea City) and more celebrity football owners getting into the international TV game. But it is hard to imagine them replicating Consuelos's genuine enthusiasm for the actual sport. You get the sense that if the day ever comes when he's forced to sell the family stake in Campobasso, it'll be to make way for owners with more cash to put them at the top of Europe's football table – or to score Ripa her dream villa. In all likelihood, their particular football problems won't feel quite so first world to sports fans who know from struggle.