Welcome to Wrexham’s biggest heroes are neither the A-list owners nor the players
Ahead of the return of the sports documentary, Tom Murray looks at what the fan-favourites – from painter Shaun Winter to pub landlord Wayne Jones – have been up to since series one
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Your support makes all the difference.We’ve got to get out of this f***ing league,” Wrexham AFC co-owner Ryan Reynolds says at the end of Welcome to Wrexham’s first series, which sees his newly acquired football club languishing in the National League, five whole tiers below the likes of Arsenal and Manchester United. His team finished just a few points off promotion to the highly coveted English Football League (EFL), the first big step in the ascent of professional English football. The beauty of a documentary series that trails behind reality is, of course, that we know Wrexham do make it out of “this f***ing league”, in events that will be shown in the FX series’ second run, out on Disney Plus in the UK on 13 September. The football club, which is nestled just over the Welsh side of the Wales-England border, near Cheshire, got its Hollywood ending this year when it was finally promoted to League Two, ending 15 years of EFL exile for its devoted fans.
The club’s historic comeback was overseen by Deadpool’s Reynolds and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Rob McElhenney, who purchased Wrexham in November 2020 for £2m. The two actors have since pumped significant sums of their Hollywood earnings (or in Reynolds’ case, his $610m gin company sale) into rejuvenating the club’s historic Racecourse Ground and making record fee player signings such as Paul Mullin and Ollie Palmer. The real stars of the show aren’t on the pitch or in the boardroom, though. They’re in the stands.
In the first series, Reynolds, McElhenney and their pro footballers were totally overshadowed by the fans, whose stories were often twisty and tragic. There’s local painter-decorator Shaun Winter (“My grandad was a painter, my dad’s a painter. And I f***ing hate it”), who casually reveals to his mates at the pub that the mother of his children has left him. And cancer survivor Michael Hett, lead singer of a local band, The Declan Swans, whose song about Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s takeover became a surprise hit.
Ahead of the second series’ imminent release, The Independent has tracked the journeys of Welcome to Wrexham’s cast of Hollywood stars, footballers and fans.
See what they’ve all been up to below…
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Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney
Reynolds and McElhenney are still the owners of Wrexham AFC. It wasn’t a long-winded practical joke, after all.
The purchase came about thanks to an unlikely third character, Humphrey Ker, a British comedy writer and actor. Kerworked with McElhenney on his Apple TV+ comedy Mythic Quest, and it was during this time that he introduced the American star to football, or “soccer” as they say.
After watching Netflix’s lauded football docuseries Sunderland Till I Die, McElhenney was obsessed. “We should do this. Buy a football team. But do it in reverse, by buying a club already struggling and try to turn it around,” he told Ker.
McElhenney had Ker put together a shortlist of struggling clubs that were in dire need of rejuvenation. Hartlepool, Macclesfield and Bolton Wanderers were considered, but Wrexham came out on top.
As McElhenney puts it in the series, he had “TV money” but he needed “movie money” to buy a football club. Who better to help than actor-turned-business-mogul Reynolds, whom McElhenney had only ever spoken to through social media?
Reynolds and McElhenney are now perceivably thick as thieves – blowing millions of dollars on a lower-league soccer club will, presumably, do that. “I consider him one of my closest friends, and I didn’t even know him three years ago,” McElhenney said of Reynolds in a recent interview.
Series two will see them welcome a whole host of their celebrity friends to the Racecourse, including Reynolds’s wife Blake Lively, Will Ferrell, and Paul Rudd, who was present for Wrexham’s promotion-earning victory over Boreham Wood.
One of the biggest concerns is that these multi-hyphenate stars will get bored and sell off the club, plunging the fans back into the ownership chaos from whence they came. For now, at least, they seem genuine about their ambitions to take the club to the premier league, and they’re putting their money where their mouths are.
Humphrey Ker
Even Humphrey Ker isn’t quite sure how Humphrey Ker became the executive director of a football club. The plummy 40-year-old attended Eton, studied at the University of Edinburgh and began a career in entertainment with an award-winning show at the Fringe (he won Best Newcomer in 2011). He appeared on panel shows like Have I Got News For You before moving to the US to write scripts for TV pilots, where he met McElhenney.
His best fish-out-of-water moment comes in the first series’ second episode where he awkwardly explains his role as liaison between the owners and the club to the current Wrexham squad. As he leaves the meeting, the room bursts into laddish chuckles as if a particularly hapless supply teacher has just left the classroom.
Ker is still very much on board and doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. He told The Athletic in a recent interview: “I’ve had a very privileged life and had some really fun jobs as an actor and writer. But I was saying to Rob on the bus, I love our day jobs but you just don’t get this in TV, with 40,000 people taking to the streets to shout ‘Great show’ at you. That’s why this has honestly been the best three years of my life.”
Phil Parkinson
Series one saw Reynolds and McElhenney keep their faith in manager Phil Parkinson, investing in his transfer targets despite a disappointing run of games at the start of their first full season. The enthusiastic Lancastrian proved his worth, getting the team into second place by the end of the series and narrowly missing out on promotion.
Following the events of the 22/23 season, Parkinson is still the manager of Wrexham AFC, which is now, of course, a League Two side. Parkinson has the kind of form Wrexham need – he previously led the promotions of Colchester to the Championship in 2006, Bradford to League One in 2013 and Bolton Wanderers to the Championship in 2017.
Paul Mullin
The Impact of Paul Mullin’s arrival cannot be overstated. The affable, Liverpudlian dynamo had just won League Two’s Golden Boot award before his arrival at the Welsh side, after helping Cambridge United reach League One. It was a massive statement of intent from the owners that they were prepared to spend big in order to move Wrexham forward.
Mullin didn’t fail to disappoint in the National League, scoring 32 goals in all competitions in his debut season for Wrexham.
We now know that Mullin was pivotal in the team’s promotion to League Two, scoring 38 goals in his second season, many of which came at crucial moments.
The club has unsurprisingly extended Mullin’s contract, keeping him until the summer of 2026.
Unfortunately, Mullin has been absent from Wrexham’s League Two campaign this year. In the third match of their pre-season US tour, Manchester United goalkeeper Nathan Bishop charged into Mullin, who crumpled to the floor. After walking off the pitch wearing an oxygen mask, the forward was later diagnosed with a punctured lung.
On 29 August, Parkinson revealed that Mullin had begun non-contact training.
Jordan Davies
Local lad Davies was one of the players in the spotlight in series one. Davies is an amazingly gifted midfielder who came up through the Wrexham academy. However, one of the most difficult moments in the show’s first series came off the pitch when he and his girlfriend suffered a stillbirth after previously having a miscarriage.
On 2 May this year, Davies had good news: he announced the birth of their daughter, Harlow Navy Davies, on Instagram. The birth came before the end of the 22/23 season, so it’s likely we’ll see this happy moment depicted in the forthcoming series.
Ben Foster
One of the best footballing stories of the year came when former England goalkeeper Ben Foster came out of retirement to help win Wrexham promotion. With a CV boasting Manchester United and West Bromwich Albion, it’s safe to say that Foster was somewhat over-qualified for the role, even at the ripe age of 40.
It was a marriage made in heaven, though, thanks to the keeper’s already-sizeable social media following. In his later years at Watford, Foster racked up hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers by taking fans inside the goal in his matchday vlogs (video blogs).
On 10 April, Foster was responsible for the most pivotal moment in Wrexham’s promotion season. Wrexham were leading Notts County, their closest rivals for automatic promotion, 3-2 when they conceded a penalty in the 96th minute. Foster dived the right way, pulling off one of the saves of the season and securing Wrexham a vital three-point lead with only a few games left in hand. “Rob kissed me fully on the lips and Ryan called me a double handsome bastard – I’ll take that from him,” Foster revealed after the game.
With his mission accomplished, Foster retired (again) four games into Wrexham’s League Two season in August this year. His impact at the club could not be overstated by Reynolds who wrote upon news of his retirement: “He built memories I’ll never let go of for as long as I live. I love this guy. Thank you for everything, Ben.”
Shaun Winter
Shaun Winter is one of the local figures for whom the club’s success means everything. He hates his job as a painter and is dealing with the fallout of his break-up with his children’s mother in series one. For Shaun, supporting Wrexham is one of his only outlets. “I just sit in the bath every night, and it’s just like, there’s gotta be something more to life than this,” he says in the show.
In a recent YouTube Q&A with Wrexham’s Brazilian fanbase (yes really), Winter revealed he has quit drinking and wants to travel the world meeting international fans of his home side. He is now the host of a YouTube series about the club, titled This Is Wrexham: The Late Show with Shaun Winter.
Wayne Jones
Wayne Jones has seen his Wrexham pub, The Turf, go from dive bar to tourist spot thanks to its regular features in the series. “I’m sitting there having a pint with Will Ferrell,” the breakout star told The Athletic in a recent interview, “then my phone pings and it’s Ryan Reynolds, asking if I’m looking after Will. I said to my wife afterwards, ‘What the hell has happened to my life in the past 18 months?’”
Jones’s pub is now buzzing with people from all over the world and particularly the US. “I can’t remember if it was Rob, Ryan or Humphrey [Ker, Wrexham’s executive director] who said it just before the documentary came out, but one of them told me, ‘Brace yourself for what will happen next,’” Jones recalled. “I just laughed, thinking, ‘We’re just this tiny little town in north Wales where no one knows where it is.’”
Kerry Evans
Evans, who has been confined to a wheelchair since the age of 30 following a bleed on the brain, was one of the breakout stars from series one. The documentary showed how she had been volunteering at the Racecourse Ground to improve access and create a quiet zone for families with autism. Her job was formalised, and to this day she is working full-time as the club’s disability liaison officer.
In a March interview withThe Athletic, Evans talked about how her life has changed in recent months, saying: “I get asked to do motivational speaking from time to time. I absolutely jump at that. I finish by saying, ‘If I can do this, anyone can’. I also stress how everyone is good at something.
“I did a speech at one of the National Autistic Society’s balls. There were people coming up to me at the end saying, ‘I’ve written my son off but, having listened to you, I shouldn’t have’. I think that is really important. Everyone has something to give.”
Michael Hett
Few fans have felt the stardust rubbing off on them quite like Michael “Scoot” Hett and his Declan Swans bandmates Mark Jones and Ben Jones. In December 2020, the local North Walian band released “Always Sunny In Wrexham”, which featured heavily in the FX series and was promoted on social media by the owners.
Since then, the song has racked up around 350,000 plays on Spotify and the Swans have even supported Kings of Leon at their two gigs at the Racecourse in May. “Normally, we just mess about and have a few beers, but I think we better practice before Kings of Leon,” Hett joked in an interview ahead of the concert with the BBC.
Hett, whose experience of having chemotherapy for colon cancer was featured in series one, revealed her had the all-clear in April this year.
Wrexham AFC Women
One thing fans should be particularly excited about for series two is the introduction of the Wrexham women’s team. McElhenney teased their forthcoming appearance in a tweet earlier this year, writing: “The excellence continues. Cannot wait for the world to meet these women.”
The semi-pro team competes in the Adran Premier, the first tier of women's football in Wales. Like the men’s side, series two will see Wrexham AFC Women win promotion.
On 27 June, 2023, the club announced that 10 players had signed semi-professional contracts, a first in club history.
‘Welcome to Wrexham’ is out on 13 September on Disney+
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