EToday’s sports, from cricket to padel, want to crack America. Football is already a major cultural force in the US, but its entry into the American sports psyche is being led by MLS and Europe’s top leagues, most notably the English Premier League. If you’re a club competing in England’s Football League Two, how exactly do you stand out to the average American soccer fan? What place does a midweek cup match between Accrington Stanley and the Fulham Under-21s have in a football world full of volcanically hyped top-level fixtures and potential super-leagues?
A solution for a lower-league club fighting for international attention could be to get bought by Hollywood celebrities and launch a slickly produced, multi-season documentary about the club’s quest for promotion through the lower tiers of British football on a popular American cable network. That, of course, is the solution Wrexham famously came up with to build its following among American audiences, with the third season of Welcome to Wrexham premiering in the US on April 18. Now the Welsh club, owned by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and currently third in League Two, is looking to build on its recent successes to help all 72 clubs in the three tiers of the English Football League gain a foothold in the American market.
“The US will always be hugely important to the EFL because there is such a strong market and fan base for football and the Premier League has done all the work to gain a foothold there,” said Shaun Harvey, the former CEO . of the English Football League, who has been director of Wrexham since 2021 and 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.”
English lower-league football is now shown in the US on ESPN+ and iFollow, the EFL’s bespoke global streaming service – one of many segments of global football vying for US visibility on a bewildering patchwork of platforms and networks. No sport likes to split broadcasting rights across a number of different locations, and for British lower-league football that fragmentation has proven particularly challenging as it tries to build an identity in America.
Wrexham regularly claims that it has the largest international following of any EFL club – including traditional giants of English football currently in the Championship such as Leeds United and Leicester City – but the actual number of subscribers it has been able to retain for live broadcasts in the US on iFollow is relatively small. “There are probably 5,000 American households who have an annual subscription to watch Wrexham matches live,” says Harvey. “That may not sound like much on its own, but it is a huge amount compared to most other clubs in the EFL.”
The EFL is now negotiating a new international rights deal that will run from next season to 2027-2028, and Harvey strongly believes that at least some lower league matches should be broadcast live and free-to-air in the US. “Access is absolutely critical,” he says. “From a marketing perspective, the best rights deal, for the US or any other market, is one that broadcasts matches for free and makes them accessible to anyone who wants to watch them. There is a balance to be struck between exposure and financial returns, so it makes sense to combine free-to-air with a direct-to-consumer subscription type channel.”
Although he refuses to reveal the ratings that led FX to approve the documentary’s impending third season (“Ratings are a closely guarded secret”), Harvey describes Welcome to Wrexham as “the club’s largest commercial asset”. Thanks to the visibility and global profile the documentary has created, Wrexham – unlike most other lower division clubs in English football – can afford the luxury of prioritizing free-to-air exposure over guaranteed revenues that would result 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 differentiate themselves amid a culture steeped in sport and sporting content.
“Our documentary is not built around telling the story of top athletes in a pressure scenario, it is about a football club on its way to the top,” says Harvey. “It’s a story that resonates with so many people who can identify with what Wrexham and its supporters are going through in part of their own lives.”
There is no doubt that Wrexham’s celebrity ownership is the main driver of the club’s global popularity, but in many ways this model of control goes against the trend in European football, where professional clubs are becoming less the playthings of wealthy individuals than giants investment funds. .
Compared to many of the Premier League’s high-profile clubs, who have been squeezed to maximize short-term profits and operate according to the dictates of huge investment portfolios, there is something almost charmingly nostalgic about the spectacle of two wealthy North American dilettantes playing owners. at the football club of a small former mining town and immerse themselves in the life of the local community.
The themes and stories at the heart of the documentary – the life and idiosyncrasies of the city, the club’s against-all-odds quest for promotion through the ranks of the EFL, the characters off the pitch and the fighters on the pitch – make Welcome to Wrexham offers a very different viewing experience than, say, Amazon’s All or Nothing series, or Apple TV+’s cringe-worthy recent series about Leo Messi’s arrival in Miami.
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Harvey believes it is the human scale of the documentary that has made it such a global success – “The city is the underdog in this story, even more so than the football club” – and that the drama of promotion and relegation in the three levels of the EFL, combined with the mix of underdogs and fallen giants from the lower divisions, could help British football below the Premier League carve out a meaningful cultural niche for itself in the US. Can the low-fi, mundane pleasures of lower-league English football prevent the global institution of the fly-on-the-wall sports documentary from collapsing under the weight of its own importance?
The story of lower league clubs, as Harvey paints it, is as much about changing demographics and urban revitalization away from Britain’s core population centers as it is about football – and that’s a story that will retain its power for every club, not just Wrexham. .
In many ways, the idealized future he portrays is one in which the EFL takes market share among the American public as a kind of antidote to the excessive spending of top-flight football across Europe, as the other side of the coin that football has become. at the elite level in a game of runaway salary inflation, private equity myopia and serial breaches of financial fair play. But critically – some might say paradoxically – the EFL can only build that identity for itself now that the likes of MLS and the Premier League have established such a strong beachhead for football in America.
“There is no point in the EFL going head-to-head in program slots with the Premier League,” says Harvey. “We need to look to work with broadcasters who are showing Premier League matches and trying to market EFL games through the key that brings fans to the channel in the first place.”
Whether that means Wrexham would back the EFL to strike a new rights deal with current US Premier League rights holder NBC, Harvey refuses to say. But as English football in the lower divisions begins to seriously consider expanding its presence abroad, clubs will need to use the same marketing tools familiar to teams in Europe’s elite – the merchandising, social media campaigns, documentaries and inside accounts – while insisting that they represent a version of the sport that is fundamentally very different to what viewers would know if they were subsisting solely on a diet of Man City v Newcastle and Champions League knockouts.