Despite the star power, the main character is Wrexham itself
There’s a featured band in “Welcome to Wrexham” named The Declan Swans. For the purposes of the show, at least, they practice and play just one song, over and over again:
Less than a mile from the center of town
A famous old stadium crumbling down
No one’s invested so much as a penny
Bring on the Deadpool and Rob McElhеnney
It’s clever and catchy in the way many songs designed to be sung by crowds of drunken football supporters are clever and catchy. The only difference for The Declan Swans is that people are actually singing it. “Nobody’s ever sung any of our songs before,” drummer Mark Jones tells the camera, smiling a little in disbelief.
The song that “Welcome to Wrexham” sings over and over again is a love letter to the town, its people, and the supporters, staff and players that come together at The Racecourse Ground, the unofficial heart of the city. While the owners and stars of the show here are larger-than-life, the players and fans are anything but. And the show shines brightest when it drills down into the minutiae of those people’s lives: their family troubles, their professional triumphs, their medical scares. For what feels like the first time, someone is singing their songs, too.
That’s not to say the show is completely without a sense of show business and obviously scripted bits, and those will most likely rub some people the wrong way. For that matter, the entire enterprise of how the series came to be is certainly not above criticism: is it morally right and correct to become owners of a team knowing that you want to turn the process into content?
For their part, Reynolds and McElhenney make no bones about wanting to make owning Wrexham into a documentary series, and even say as much in their pitch to the Wrexham Supporter’s Trust before the group votes on whether to sell the club to the pair or not.
