English 5th division club experiencing boom after purchase by Hollywood actors

`The cameras were rolling even before actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney were sure there was anything to film.

In November of last year, the two were eagerly awaiting to find out whether their bid to acquire Wrexham, a Welsh club stranded in England’s fifth division football, would survive a vote by the Supporters’ Trust, the fan council that rescued the team. bankruptcy and had been keeping it in operation, with a meager budget, for years.

The actors had reason to feel confident. When they presented their ideas to the board in a video chat, the reaction was positive. But, waiting for the phone call that would inform them of the result of the vote, they didn’t know whether they would receive good or bad news, and this somehow put them in a tight spot.

McElhenney came up with the idea of ​​buying a football club after watching fascinated two seasons of “Sunderland Till I Die,” a Netflix series that portrays the highs (passengers) and lows (frequent) of another declining club in post-industrial UK. “He told me this is what we needed to do: buy a club and make a documentary,” said Humphrey Ker, one of McElhenney’s writers and the person who recommended the Sunderland documentary to him.

If Wrexham’s board rejected the actors’ offer, the plan would be destroyed: no club, no documentary. But for the documentary to work, it was necessary to accompany the duo’s football adventures from the very first step. So, while waiting for the call, McElhenney and Reynolds had to decide, in practice, which comes first: content or club?

Wrexham is not the only club facing this issue. Football has been fertile ground for film and television for a long time, but the rise of streaming platforms — with their insatiable appetite, generous budgets and hit series involving entirely fictional football clubs — has sparked a deluge of new productions.

Some, like Amazon’s “All or Nothing” documentary series, attempt to explore the inherent attractions of some of the biggest clubs on the planet, shifting multiple camera crews to follow clubs like Manchester City, Tottenham and Juventus across the world. season.

Others chose to reject the editorial control — and the sizable payments — demanded by the sport’s superpowers in exchange for a more authentic aesthetic, as “Sunderland Till Death” personifies: the club is less the subject of the documentary than a backdrop before which human stories unfold.

But there is a crucial difference between many of these new projects and their predecessor. In Sunderland, the producers were simply club observers. In the case of Wrexham, and other clubs, they are something else: they are actors in the drama.

“Football clubs are the best investment on the planet in the field of content,” said Matt Rizzetta, president of creative agency North Six Group and, since 2020, main shareholder of Campobasso, a team in Italy’s third division. “They represent a set of values, and they are able to create an automatic connection with people that almost nothing else can surpass.”

Rizzetta said his decision to invest in football was driven by the heart — owning a team was “the dream of his life”, he said, and especially of a club located in the region of Italy where his grandparents came from. But his reasoning behind the Campobasso purchase was ruled by the brain, above all.

“We studied about 20 clubs, all in that region,” said Rizzetta. Campobasso stood out. In the past, the club even moved up to the second division, but in recent years falling has become much more frequent than rising. The club is located in the city of Molise, a region that complains of being disregarded by the rest of the country: “Molise Non Esiste” (Molise does not exist, in the Italian translation), as the local self-deprecating says.

This worked perfectly for Rizzetta. His strategy was based on “content, storytelling, marketing and media,” he said. “Being a club owner today is different than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Provincial teams, in particular, need new revenue streams to reinvest in their product, and content is one of the least used channels.”

To remedy this deficiency, Rizzetta’s North Six Group signed a contract with Italian Football TV, a YouTube channel, for a series of documentaries that would accompany Campobasso in its (perhaps successful) attempts to get its first promotion to the top division in decades.

“It was a story that needed to be told, a team from a part of the country that had been forgotten,” said Rizzetta. The obscurity helped to make the project viable, to some extent. “It was a small, sleepy club,” he said. “It looked like a startup. We had a blank page, in a way. Nothing we could try would be wrong.”

Not all fans welcome this kind of approach positively. Halfway through this year, it came out that Peter Crouch, a retired English football striker, would become a board member of Dulwich Hamlet, a club based in a well-heeled south London region that he had played a handful of times in the beginning. of your career.

The decision had not been motivated entirely by altruism. Crouch’s experiments, reported news published days later, would serve as the basis for a documentary funded by the Discovery+ streaming service. According to several people involved in the project, the company had explicitly conceived the idea as an opportunity to create its version of “Sunderland Until Death”.

Receptions for the project were “conflicting,” said Alex Crane, former chairman of the Dulwich Hamlet fan council. “Some fans are genuinely excited,” Crane wrote in a WhatsApp message. “Others are very skeptical and want to know what the club has to gain from it.”

The documentary’s apparent theme — that Dulwich Hamlet faces a “dark future” and Crouch parachutes in to save the club — was not accepted by all. The Brixton Buzz, a community news outlet, suggested, with the use of some expletives, that “television storytelling” was designed solely to serve the series.

That trap — manipulating the message to make it easier to promote — is something Rizzetta insists clubs need to avoid. In September, the North Six Group added Ascoli –from the Italian second division– to its club collection. The company attracted the interest of the former owner of the team, who saw it as a “strategic operator” capable of replicating the success it achieved with Campobasso on a larger scale. Among the first things the new owners did was sign a contact with Italian Football TV.

“Content is a big part of our strategy,” said Rizzetta. “But it will have to be done in a different way. Ascoli has a different message, brand and history. And it is sacred to its community.”

Reynolds and McElhenney were equally explicit about their plans. “The documentary is a huge part” of the project, McElhenney said during their first visit to Wrexham in October. “We feel this is the best way to really immerse yourself in the community. The games can be televised, but if we don’t follow the stories of the players and the community, in the end nobody will care.”

Wrexham has already begun to feel the benefits of its approach to Hollywood. Many expensive signings arrived in the interseason to reinforce the team. And there was also investment in the club’s infrastructure.

“The stadium is being renovated,” said Spencer Harris, who was the club’s director before the takeover. “The senior team training center has improved a lot. The club is building for the long term. The process looks sustainable.”

Part of the new money came from ticket sales – attendance has increased this season – and part from shirt sales. By October, Wrexham had already sold 8,000 shirts, equivalent to nearly a full year’s sales in past seasons. And the Christmas shopping spree hadn’t started yet.

But perhaps a more significant – and profitable – detail is that the uniform itself has changed. The jersey the club wears to away games is now green and gray, the color of the Philadelphia Eagles, McElhenney’s hometown team. Ifor Williams Trailers, which was Wrexham’s main sponsor, has been replaced by a much more recognizable brand, TikTok. And the Expedia logo now adorns the shirt.

Although the club’s first game of the season was broadcast live on English TV, it’s not the audiences that follow the National League on BT Sport that have convinced major brands like these to invest in Wrexham. What attracted them was the prospect of appearing on prime time TV.

In May, Reynolds and McElhenney announced, in the sarcastic style that has characterized their direction of the team thus far, that they had sold two seasons of their documentary, “Welcome to Wrexham,” to the FX channel. The images will include the moment when the two received the phone call informing them that the purchase proposal had been accepted by the fans. Everything was captured by the cameras. In other words, content and club go together.