Reynolds was brought into the project by Rob McElhenney, co-creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. McElhenney, who grew up in Philadelphia, says he saw similarities between Wrexham and his hometown, and was attracted by the story of the club’s struggle to regain Football League status after relegation in 2008. The duo bought the club in September 2020, since when they have invested heavily in players, and are rebuilding a stand at the Racecourse Ground. Attendances have doubled to around 10,000. For years, Wrexham had been battling to survive. One former owner tried to evict them. Even before the FA Cup third round win over Coventry and the draw against Sheffield United (both three divisions above Wrexham), Reynolds and McElhenney were regarded as saviours.

Other clubs may feel resentful of their financial resources, and there was a certain amount of schadenfreude about their defeats in the finals of both the promotion play-offs and the FA Trophy last season. But Reynolds and McElhenney appear to be what they claim to be: two blokes with money who fancied buying a football team. There has been no self-aggrandisement and, as far as possible, a sensitivity to the habits and customs of the British game that has been notably absent from, say, the US billionaire Todd Boehly at Chelsea. They seem genuinely invested in Wrexham, the club and the town, and that they are making a documentary about their experience feels natural enough. They are, after all, film-makers, and the series, Welcome to Wrexham, can only raise the profile of the club — already this season, they’ve sold 24,000 shirts. Yet the presence of Reynolds and McElhenney raises the issue of what a football club is and who its owners should be.

In Britain, where modern football began, clubs were initially societies for enthusiasts, and competitions were then invented to provide structure and significance to their matches. When it became apparent that thousands of people would pay money to watch, the dynamic changed. Liverpool, for example, came into being in 1892 because the owner of Anfield needed a team to play there after Everton relocated to Goodison Park, and Chelsea were founded in 1905 because the owner of Stamford Bridge needed a team to play in his athletics stadium. Even in football’s pioneering early days, finance was never too far in the background. But whether they were founded for love of sport or for monetary gain, football clubs soon took on a symbolic role. They were somehow representative of their town or region, or of a section of society within their area. As Jonathan Meades observed in his 2009 documentary The Football Pools Towns, swathes of places are known almost entirely because of their presence in the Saturday evening litany of classified scores.

Outside the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, built on the crook of the river where the Monkwearmouth Colliery once stood, there is a bronze statue depicting a family dressed in ragged Thirties clothing. Behind two children, a mother holds up the arm of a flat-capped father, face creased by hardship, presumably a miner. “All generations come together at the Stadium of Light,” reads the plaque. “A love of ‘The Lads’ has bonded together supporters for more than 125 years and will for many more years in the future… Supporters who have passed away have their support carried on by today’s fans, just as the supporters of today will have their support continued through family and friends.”

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The World Cup has never been beautiful

By Jonathan Wilson

Perhaps it’s trite. Perhaps it’s a skilful piece of emotional manipulation from a club that, in 1997, was desperate to sell the move from Roker Park to sceptical fans. But it seems also profoundly aware of the role football clubs have come to play as repositories for memories of home or family, a means of achieving a continuity with the past, a sense of belonging in a world in which other institutions are breaking down. And in the case of Sunderland and other post-industrial towns, the football club is also a means of memorialising a past in which the city mattered. They may not have won the league since 1936, but Sunderland are the seventh-most successful club in English history because the town used to have mines and shipyards whose owners used their profits to entice the best professionals from Scotland.

All of which is to say two slightly contradictory things. Firstly, that football clubs perform a vital community function, that while they may legally be just like any other business, in reality they represent something rather more precious than that. And secondly, that money has always played its part. When the mine-owner Samuel Tyzack was visiting Scottish grounds disguised as a priest in the 1890s to put together Sunderland’s “Team of all the Talents”, he was different from Ryan Reynolds only in being from the town whose club he funded and in doing the recruitment himself.

It may be that there’s no such thing as the perfect owner, that none of them is entirely pure, running the club to be the best club it can be. They’re probably all in it for some form of gain, be that financial profit or prestige. But since Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, there has been a change. There had been fabulously wealthy owners before, people as diverse as Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers and Brooks Mileson at Gretna, who had taken over the club they supported, invested heavily and achieved a level of success that seemed out of keeping with their fanbase and facilities. But not as fabulously wealthy as the Russian oligarch and not as detached; Walker and Mileson were both fans of the clubs they ended up owning.

The scale of Abramovich’s spending, in an era in which increased global television coverage meant clubs were less reliant on gate receipts, effectively decoupled financial clout in football from on-field success. He had no need to make a profit because that was not his aim; he is estimated to have lost £900,000 a week over his 19 years at Chelsea. What Abramovich actually sought to achieve by buying the club remains unclear, but he was followed by the sportswashing states: Abu Dhabi at Manchester City, Qatar at Paris Saint-Germain and Saudi Arabia at Newcastle. Most Premier League owners — the Glazers at Manchester United, Fenway Sports Group at Liverpool, Stan Kroenke at Arsenal, Boehly and Clearlake Capital at Chelsea — are in it for the money, which inevitably creates tensions with the match-going fans who are more concerned with winning and/or enacting their age-old rituals. Set against that background, Reynolds and McElhenney, with their obvious enthusiasm for Wrexham itself, seem almost a relief. Yet with their documentary about the club, they are part of another trend in modern football, which is the club as producer-of-content.

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There have been behind-the-scenes documentaries about clubs before. The early ones, about Leyton Orient and Sunderland in the mid-Nineties, were notable for capturing sweary rants from under-pressure managers. The more recent series Sunderland Til I Die (covering 2017-22) managed to be moving about the fans and their need for the club to be something they could have pride in, while simultaneously portraying a series of directors as vainglorious spoofers. But they were independently made, quite happy to expose such absurdities as an Old Etonian co-owner telling sceptical staff that they should change the running-out music from Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” to something “a bit Ibiza” as everything collapses around him.

The trend has been towards more managed documentaries, such as the Amazon’s All or Nothing series which followed Manchester City, Tottenham and Arsenal. They tend to be bland, concerned with preserving and projecting an image of the club, with little to excite anybody who is not already a fan. The tone of Welcome to Wrexham is different, but it is still club-produced PR rather than journalism. At a much higher level, the director general of Real Madrid, José Ángel Sánchez, and the former CEO of Manchester United, Ed Woodward, have both suggested Disney should be the model. Clubs are no longer reliant for revenues on getting spectators through the gate but must appeal to a global audience in other ways, by providing content for them to consume. That can be short clips on social media — ranging from the mundane, moments in training or visits to fans, to the more inspired, such as Carlos Tevez trying to teach Mario Balotelli how to wrap presents. Or more ambitious products: one major European club has seriously considered an “Entourage-style” fictionalised soap opera set in their club offices.

One level below Wrexham, in National League South, the former England striker Peter Crouch became a director at Dulwich Hamlet in 2021 for a Discovery+ reality show in which he would use his new coaching qualification to “save a failing football club”. That announcement was met with fury by some Hamlet fans, in part because of their objection to his role as a brand ambassador for PaddyPower but also because they didn’t want to become somebody else’s content. Crouch stepped aside last summer, the series apparently discontinued.

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Football died after Pelé

By Jonathan Wilson

It may seem academic, but it matters which came first: is a TV series a useful way to promote the club, or is the club content for a TV series? Might team selections be made to favour more marketable players? Could a season drifting into mid-table irrelevance be given a dramatic boost by signing a controversial and newsworthy striker? Even at the highest level, as anybody who witnessed Woodward’s obsession with social media interactions in his presentations to Manchester United shareholders will know, there can be times when it seems celebrity outweighs footballing considerations.

Again, it should be stressed, McElhenney and Reynolds appear ideal owners. But their presence at Wrexham highlights a tension that runs throughout the game. Football has never just been about the game but this recent Disneyfication rubs uneasily against more Romantic notions of what a club represents to its community. Paradoxically, Reynolds and McElhenney have reawakened that spirit at Wrexham: an official 4,782 fans (and in the event probably many more) will travel to Sheffield United for the replay on Tuesday.

Sadly I was saddled with the Magpies as a child, and although they’ve been spoiling my weekends for several decades now, I still hold a season ticket in the Gallowgate End. But with fans locked out of the Premier League, I’m scratching the football itch elsewhere.

On top of this recent move by Premier League clubs to charge £14.95 to watch their games on a pay-per-view basis might be the final straw for many football supporters. It’s not so much the cost that irritates me, but the relentless grasping venality of professional football — so it was great to see Newcastle United supporters respond by raising over £20,000 for a local foodbank rather than giving more money to the Premier League.

Instead I’ve found joy with the Ebac Northern League, the second oldest football league in the world (founded in 1889), and the stage for some of the great names of amateur football: Bishop Auckland in their light and dark blue halved shirts (started by theological students from Oxbridge exiled in the north); “the Lawyers” from Tow Law FC, whose Ironworks Road ground, perched on the freezing slopes of the North Pennines, is reputedly the coldest in English football; and the famous West Auckland, “World Cup” winners in 1909 and 1911 when a team of Durham pitmen somehow inveigled their way into an international tournament against professional European sides and won, twice (including a famous victory against Juventus).

The first non-league side I ever supported was West Allotment Celtic, a North Tyneside pit village team who played in the Northern Alliance. The father of a school pal was their club secretary so we got to hang out with the “committee men” in their matching V-neck sweaters, raid the post-match “buffy” (buffet) for plate pie and pease pudding, and travel to away fixtures against exotic opposition like Carlisle Gillford Park or Spittal Rovers (the most northerly team in England).

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Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

But I’d grown up with stories of the most famous non-league team of them all: Blyth Spartans. My great-grandfather, despite being wounded at Arras and Passchendaele, had been the Pep Guardiola of the coalfields, as a combative halfback and then manager at Croft Park — the Nou Camp of North East amateur football.  Blyth might not look much like ancient Sparta, but the locals shared a similar devotion to hard work and athleticism, and there can’t be many football grounds where Plutarch is quoted above the grandstand: “Spartans do not ask ‘how many are the enemy, but where are they.’”

The stand in question is known as “the Fed Shed”, after the Federation Brewery, a cooperative run by local workingmen’s clubs, and the cooperation that was such an essential part of the coalfields transferred naturally to team sports like football. Indeed, almost all of the greatest British football managers emerged from the mining communities of northern England and Scotland: Shankly, Paisley, Busby, Chapman, Stein, Robson and Kendall are all well known, but there was Jack Greenwell too (a member of that all-conquering West Auckland side and who went on to manage Barcelona), and Jimmy Hagan, formerly of Washington Colliery FC, who coached Benfica and Sporting Lisbon in the 1970s.

As much as the sport itself, I’ve always loved the social history of football, especially the relationship of teams to places. Prof John Tomaney, a Sacriston lad like Bobby Robson, well understands the affection that people still feel for the towns and villages of Northern League country, and has written powerfully in defence of the “parochial” against the “condescension of the cosmopolites” who see in it something morally suspect, exclusionary and culturally limiting. Instead, Tomaney argues, “its cultures and its solidarities are a moral starting point … in all human societies and at all moments of history”. For as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “we are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for histories”.

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Jack Charlton's vanished world

By Dan Jackson

I’ve long been fascinated by the history of my own birthplace, North Shields, and proud of its achievements. The motto of the old Borough of Tynemouth Messis ab Altis (“our harvest is from the deep”) was a clever reference to the fish and coal that made the town prosperous, and this, plus the three crowns for the Northumbrian and Scottish kings buried at Tynemouth, still adorns the red shirts of North Shields FC — the team I follow.

“The Robins” have a famous history, founded in 1896 and twice Wembley winners (in 1969 and 2015), they now play in a well-kept ground on the fringes of the famously tough Meadow Well estate. I just love going there, not least as Shields have a really good side this season, the matches are usually entertaining blood and thunder contests, and, frankly, I can take the dog with me. The badinage is consistently good too. At one game in January this year a fussy young referee caused a despairing voice from the Shields bench to cry out “How ref! Did you get that fucking whistle for Christmas!”.

Although I’m evangelical about watching football at this level, not everyone is convinced, among them the West Ham fan Prof Helen Thompson. Prof Thompson has seen some raucous football crowds in her time, but after dabbling in non-league she thinks that the supporters of Dulwich Hamlet seem to be “acting out a pastiche of 1970s/1980s football that I am pretty convinced most never experienced, where the atmosphere is entirely unrelated to what is happening on the pitch”. There is certainly a different dialogue between non-league players and spectators, but North Shields crowds (whose derby match with cross-Tyne rivals South Shields is known as “El Workingclassico”) have a humour and authenticity that I find hard to resist.

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England has always been two nations

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Harry Pearson is the uncontested laureate of Northern League football. His hilariously well-observed The Far Corner and The Farther Corner are essential introductions to the joys of the non-league scene, and North East culture more broadly.

Both these books are also like gazetteers of the Red Wall, and Pearson has some trenchant views on why in 2019 so many of the Northern League towns, from Sedgefield to Blyth Valley, fell out of love with an increasingly bourgeoise Labour Party that didn’t seem to share its values. “Those people don’t go to these places,” he observed in a recent interview, “football fans do. And what you have at Northern League clubs are working-class people running them. No one interferes, no one tells them what to do. They are left alone by the middle class, people like me, and they do it really well.”

The Northern League is certainly doing well. Crowds are healthy, the football is consistently good, and my friend Terry Mitchell has just steered the “Steelmen” of Consett AFC to Wembley for an all-North East FA Vase Final against Hebburn Town (Northern League teams have won eight out of the last eleven Vase finals). It’s hard to pinpoint what explains this success, but after years of watching these teams I can say that the qualities that Northern League fans value most are hard graft, intelligence and courage above all.

The football writer and Sunderland fan Jonathan Wilson has done more than most to help us appreciate why the way the game is played is worthy of serious study (and was himself a former turnstile operator at Whitley Bay FC). Wilson reminded me recently that it was a Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano who once encapsulated what football can tell us about place and identity, and why it deserves our attention. “A style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different,” Galeano wrote. “Tell me how you play, and I’ll tell you who you are.”