In the Running: Emmy Contenders in Conversation with The Ankler is a special series featuring Ankler Media awards editor and Prestige Junkie host Katey Rich’s chats with top talent from Disney networks and streamers, including ABC, Disney+, FX and Hulu. In the Running is presented by Disney.
When Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac teamed up to buy a fledgling, fifth-tier English football club in 2021 for £1 (a little under $1.40 at the time) plus the promise of an additional £2 million investment (around $2.8 million), they got the town for free.
But as depicted in the Emmy Award-winning docuseries Welcome to Wrexham, the Wrexham A.F.C. club and its hometown residents are inseparable.
“The town and the club — you can’t grow one without growing the other,” says Reynolds. “I’d argue that we’re doing much less than people realize. We’re shining a light on something that’s just there — and it’s there in a lot of places that have fallen on hard times as well.”
When the series started shortly after Reynolds and Mac acquired Wrexham A.F.C., both team and town were in a difficult period — brought about by losing seasons and the economic hardship of the pandemic. In the years since the acquisition, however, fortunes have shifted: The Wrexham club accomplished an unprecedented three consecutive promotions (graduations to higher leagues). The 45,000-resident town, meanwhile, has seen the kind of surge you might expect from all the attention from the series: Between 2023 and 2025, tourism revenue increased by £120 million ($160 million).
“We weren’t sure whether people would welcome us the way they have,” says Mac. “We’ve become so close with so many of the members of the town. We text with them and speak with them often. When they come to the States, they’ll stay with us, which has happened a number of times.”
Since its debut on FX, Welcome to Wrexham has received broad acclaim and won 10 Emmys — including two for best unstructured reality program. Ahead of season five’s May 14 premiere, Disney renewed the series for three additional seasons last month.
“The appeal of the show, on some level, is that there are Wrexhams all over the place, and people see themselves in that,” Reynolds says. “Rob and I are very cursory elements on camera. We really try to stay out of it because we’re not necessary since everyone has a story. It’s so riveting to hear these people speak and really open up about their experiences — and their experiences are not terribly dissimilar to those of people in rural parts of Pennsylvania or in every state in the union. They see that the community can sort of circle the wagons around something really beautiful and something that has a real heartbeat to it.”
Welcome to Wrexham was launched almost on a lark: Reynolds and Mac weren’t even friends, but the Deadpool star had reached out to Mac through social media to say he was a fan. Later, when Mac was inspired to create what would become Welcome to Wrexham, he contacted Reynolds.
“One of the great things about having shared experiences with other people, especially in stadiums, is you check everything at the door — your political ideology, your sociological status, all of it,” says Mac. “You sit down in that seat, and you are all in unison together.”
That sense of harmony is increasingly rare, as Reynolds points out. “It’s fascinating to see identity politics vanish in a stadium,” he says, noting live events are a last vestige of communal gathering — and that sports, due to its unscripted nature, is an especially potent venue for building bridges.
“No matter what you do,” he continues, “you don’t know how this is going to end.”
