Wrexham's "Summer of American Love" is about to kick off
The Welsh club that has stimulated great interest in the US comes to America this summer
NOTE: THIS IS PAID CONTENT INITIALLY BUT WILL BE FREE TO ALL READERS ON JUNE 19
Wrexham are coming to America this summer, with four dates that have been confirmed below.
To me Wrexham FC reminds me so much why I love football. And as we’ve seen in the last nine months, so many Americans have gravitated to the club because of the story, the authenticity, and the struggle. It’s not all about glitz and glamour.
Many football clubs have made documentaries about themselves. Some like Sunderland Till I Die were excellent while others like All of Nothing-Arsenal amounted to little more than club propaganda for a club whose worst finish in the last 25 years was finishing 8th in the Premier League.
But no documentary has ever has the impact of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s “Welcome to Wrexham” which aired on FX and Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK and Europe.
When they launched the series “Welcome to Wrexham” I feared it would be another club propaganda documentary. Instead it proved an amazing insight into a working class town and a club down on its luck - this story and the storytelling associated with it, is why Wrexham is a sensation.
Football, a sport with strong working-class roots, is about community and culture- period. Casual fans might be motivated to watch Super Clubs like Manchester United, Real Madrid and PSG. But for so many core supporters, being a fan is about your local community, socioeconomic, ethnic or political reasons or a connection to club abroad based on some sort of family connection (for this reason, I almost supported Crystal Palace and flirted with Oldham Athletic) or exposure. As I detailed in my book, Blue With Envy, this is how I became a Manchester City fan - they played a friendly in Fort Lauderdale and I was a ball boy. At the time they had just been relegated to the old Division 2 (Now the Championship) in England, despite having been oh so close to winning an FA Cup Final a few years earlier. (A concession I am not sure I made in the book, but will admit here- Manchester City’s colors also were a factor. Oh how easily I would been swept up by Coventry had they visited Florida!)
Manchester City is now a hugely successful club, European Champions in fact, but for most of the time I supported them, they were not. My bond to the club came from fighting relegation and pushing for promotion, not from fighting for that elusive UEFA Champions League trophy that motivates glory hunters, and many more recent City converts.
So this brings us to US Soccer, USL and MLS. What MLS tends to produce- a conveyor belt of top players (by North American standards) that organize a tournament that in many ways feels like a manufactured hyped exhibition for much of the year - new clubs pop up in the division every season and it’s hard to keep track of where players are and build any real identity around individual clubs. Even with arguably the best player of all-time now holding court in MLS, something about it will always seem inauthentic or manufactured.
There are exceptions of course (Seattle, Portland, etc), and MLS top-to-bottom quality-of-player (but importantly not of play thanks to the time of year the league plays) might be among the best in the world already - we really don’t know because geography and when the league plays its season (the hottest months of the year) make it VERY difficult to compare with other leagues (but similarly provides an excuse if MLS is actually failing in these departments to offer a comparison).
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