The fifth season of Welcome to Wrexham was set to begin Thursday on FXX and Hulu, arriving just days after Wrexham’s run of annual promotions ended and the club was left in the second-tier EFL Championship. The Emmy-winning docuseries has spent five seasons following a lower-division soccer club in North Wales and the town around it, not just the results on the field.
That broader story is what made the series travel far beyond football fans. Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac bought the Wrexham team five years ago, and by the time the first season was released in September 2022, Google searches for Wrexham had jumped about 30%. The town’s profile rose with it, as the region became a major Welsh tourist hub drawing more than 2 million visitors annually and generating a quarter-billion dollars in revenue.
The numbers behind that change are hard to miss. Wrexham had the third-lowest employment rate in Wales by 2022, a reminder of how far the area had fallen after the mines and factories that defined it for generations closed by the 1980s. As the series continued, metrics tied to employment, per-capita GDP, social-service spending and mental health improved significantly, turning a local revival into something that could be measured far beyond the stadium gates.
Wrexham itself is a town in North Wales with roots that go back to the Middle Ages, but its modern identity was forged by coal mining, then steelworks and manufacturing. When those industries declined, the town entered a long post-industrial slide. The series made that backdrop part of the story, with the club’s rise framed as inseparable from the people who live there.
Reynolds has said he was drawn to the project because there was nothing more romantic than sports, while Mac described it as a story not just about a football team but about a working-class town in the north of Wales. Reynolds also said he could not think of many sports stories with that kind of arc and drama, with so much at stake for both the club and the town around it.
That is why Saturday’s end to the promotion streak matters as much as the new season on Thursday. Wrexham became the first team in English soccer history to earn promotion in three consecutive seasons, rising from the National League to the EFL Championship before the run stopped. The club is no longer climbing every year, but the series has already changed the scale of what Wrexham means, and the next chapter is less about whether the town can be found and more about what happens now that the whole world knows where it is.
