Today, every sport from cricket to padel wants to break America. Soccer is already a major cultural force across the United States, but its inroads into the American sports psyche is being led by MLS and Europe’s top leagues, particularly the English Premier League. If you’re an away club in English Football League Two, how exactly do you stand out to the average US football fan? How does the midweek cup clash between Accrington Stanley and Fulham Under-21s fit into a footballing world full of volcanically exciting top-flight fixtures and potential super leagues?
One solution for a lower league club struggling for international attention could be to be bought by Hollywood celebrities and broadcast an expertly produced, multi-season documentary chronicling the club’s quest for promotion through the lower tiers of English football on a popular US cable network. This, of course, is Wrexham’s famous solution to building a following among the American public; The third season of Welcome to Wrexham will premiere in the US on April 18. The Welsh club, owned by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and currently sitting third in League Two, are looking to build on their recent success to help all 72 clubs in the English Football League’s three tiers gain a foothold in the American market.
“The USA will always be very important to the EFL because there is such a strong market and fan base for football and work has already been done by the Premier League to gain a foothold in this space,” says former CEO Shaun Harvey. He is from the English Football League, having been a director of Wrexham since 2021 and an advisor to the club’s owners. “The challenge now is for clubs in the EFL to leverage that relationship and use it to build their own following in the US.”
Relating to: Is this real life or just a fantasy? Welcome to Wrexham, where TV cameras blur the lines
Lower league English football is now shown on ESPN+ in the US and iFollow, the EFL’s exclusive global streaming service; It’s a surprising confluence of platforms and networks, one of many parts of global soccer struggling for visibility in the United States. No sport likes to have its broadcast rights split across many different locations, and for lower-league English football as it tries to build an identity in America, this fragmentation has proven particularly challenging.
Wrexham regularly boast the largest international following of any EFL club, including traditional giants of English football such as Leeds United and Leicester City who currently compete in the Championship; but the actual number of subscribers it manages to retain for live streams in the US is relatively small on iFollow. “There are probably 5,000 households in the US that have an annual subscription to watch Wrexham games live,” says Harvey. “That may not seem like much on its own, but compared to most other clubs in the EFL it is a huge amount.”
The EFL is currently in the process of negotiating a new international rights deal that runs from next season until 2027-28, and Harvey believes at least some lower league matches should be broadcast live and free-to-air in the US. “Access is absolutely key,” he says. “From a marketing perspective, the best rights deal for the US or any other market is one that ensures matches are broadcast for free and available to anyone who wants to watch. “There is a balance to be struck between visibility and financial return, so combining free streaming with direct-to-consumer subscription-type channels makes sense.”
Despite refusing to reveal the viewership numbers that led FX to confirm the documentary’s upcoming third season, Harvey describes Welcome to Wrexham as “the club’s greatest commercial asset”. Thanks to the visibility and global profile provided by the documentary, Wrexham, unlike many other clubs in English football’s lower league, can afford the luxury of prioritizing free-to-air broadcasting rather than the guaranteed revenue that would come from restricting matches to cable or streaming services. But Harvey believes other clubs in the lower leagues can learn from Wrexham’s example and find new ways to stand out in a culture saturated with sport and sporting “content”.
“Our documentary is not a film built around telling the story of elite athletes in a pressure scenario, but about a football club on a journey to the top,” says Harvey. “This is a story that resonates with many people who can relate to what Wrexham and its supporters have been through in some part of their own lives.”
There is no dispute that Wrexham’s celebrity ownership has been the main driving force behind the club’s rise to global popularity, but this model of control is in many ways contrary to the trend in European football, where professional clubs have become the playthings of wealthy individuals rather than giant investment funds. .
Compared to most of the high-profile clubs in the Premier League, which seek to maximize short-term returns and are run at the behest of vast investment portfolios, there is something almost charmingly nostalgic about the spectacle of two wealthy North American amateurs playing ownership. They are at the football club of a small former mining town and throw themselves into the life of the local community.
The themes and narratives at the heart of the documentary – the life and quirks of the town, the club’s fight against the odds to gain promotion in the EFL, the characters off the field and those struggling on it – make up Welcome. Wrexham offers a very different viewing experience to, say, Amazon’s All or Nothing series or Apple TV+’s chillingly boring final series about Leo Messi’s arrival in Miami.
Harvey believes the reason the documentary has become such a global success is because of its human dimension – “The town is the much weaker side in this story than the football club” – as well as the drama of promotion and relegation across the league’s three tiers. The EFL, combined with lower league soccer’s mix of underdogs and fallen giants, could help English soccer below the Premier League carve out a meaningful cultural space for itself in the United States. Can the low-fi casual pleasures of lower-league English football save the global institution of the fly-on-the-wall sports documentary from collapsing under the weight of its own importance?
Relating to: Wrexham’s Hollywood-backed show continues but the real stars are locals | Barry Glendenning
As Harvey points out, the story of lower league clubs is as much about changing demographics and urban regeneration away from the UK’s core population centers as it is about football – and it’s a story that will remain powerful, not just for Wrexham but for all clubs. .
In many ways, the ideal future he paints is one in which the EFL, as the flip side of what has become football, gains mindshare with the American public as a kind of antidote to the big-spending excesses of top-flight football in Europe. At the elite level, it has become a game of runaway wage inflation, private equity myopia and serial financial fair play violations. But critically – some might say paradoxically – with teams like MLS and the Premier League establishing such a strong foothold for football in America, the EFL can only build that identity for itself.
“There is no point in the EFL going head-to-head with the Premier League on schedule slots,” says Harvey. “We need to work with broadcasters showing Premier League matches and look at marketing EFL games behind the key hook that brings fans to the station in the first place.”
Harvey refuses to say whether this means Wrexham would support the EFL signing a new rights deal with existing US Premier League rights holder NBC. But as English lower league football begins to seriously consider expanding its presence abroad, clubs will have to use the same marketing tools – merchandising, social media campaigns, documentaries and internal accounts – that teams in the European elite are familiar with. It represents a fundamentally different version of the sport than what viewers can get by subsisting solely on a diet of Man City v Newcastle and Champions League knockouts.