Wrexham had never seen anything like it: thousands of fans cheering their team as an open-top bus made its way through the city’s streets. On board, Wrexham’s footballers celebrated their side’s promotion back to the English football league. The club’s star owners, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, were there too – and with them, as usual, came the cameras.
The rise of Wrexham has become the subject of a hit Disney+ documentary, Welcome to Wrexham. It’s a feel-good story about Ryan and Rob, two rich and handsome actors from the other side of the Atlantic, taking over a down-and-out club in a depressed industrial heartland and giving it hope.
Wrexham is not the only football club to have let the cameras in. Manchester City, Tottenham, Sunderland and Arsenal have all been the subjects of docu-series in recent years. These programmes satisfy an insatiable appetite for football content. Broadcasters fight for rights to show games, but that is expensive: the current deal for the Premier League, which runs from 2022 until 2025, is worth £4.8
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