Wrexham A.F.C. lost to Stockport 1-0 on Saturday… not that anyone asked.
Burton Albion, Crawley Town, Leyton Orient, Stevenage. What do these four things have in common? They aren’t just all football clubs that currently play in EFL League One—the third tier of the British Football league hierarchy—they each have Instagram followings below 80,000.
Wrexham A.F.C., known formally as Wrexham, is also in EFL League One, but it has north of 1.4 million followers on Instagram. How did it become such an outlier? This football club was bought in 2021 by American actors Rob McElenney and Ryan Reynolds. With the purchase, the two Hollywood icons became a presence in a Welsh town of no more than 45,000.
For years, Wrexham fans could be compared to the fans of the Bills, Browns, Cubs, and Mariners in the United States—all delusionally hopeful in waiting for an ever elusive championship. But for Wrexham, they were graced by the presence of two icons of popular culture, as described by Andi Zeisler (2008) as any entity with vast consumer bases, not just in America, but around the world (p. 1).
The team and its brand are not the only things that have gone through an epic transformation—so have the players. Notwithstanding an aggressive increase in spending coming from Wrexham’s front office, allowing for players with much higher talent levels, the team’s fan base and audience is quite small. Nevertheless, some of these footballers who could not even have been considered random are now celebrities. This is especially due to the recent FX docuseries, Welcome to Wrexham, which premiered its first season in August 2022. In the last 30 days (through 11/20/24), Welcome to Wrexham has an audience 18 times larger than that of the average TV series in the U. S. according to Parrot Analytics, a streaming metrics platform. As the show has rocketed through the American societal landscape, so too have its characters.
Take Paul Mullin, for example, who was just a random footballer from Northwest England before he signed with Wrexham on a three-year deal—his entrance into the culture industry. Now, in addition to his 224,000 followers on his Instagram account, he even has an IMDB page given his cameo in the recent blockbuster “Deadpool &. Wolverine” film starring Ryan Reynolds—two giant boosts in social capital. Mullin exemplifies German academics Theodore Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s idea that “mass culture and communications stand at the center of leisure activity [and] are important agents of socialization,” as described by UCLA professor Douglas Kellner (Kellner, 2017).
This pop-culture take over of sports has been evident off the Welch pitch as well. Last weekend, YouTube sensation turned boxer Jake Paul fought the legendary heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. The bout had so many people across the globe streaming it that it basically crashed the Netflix server. And despite the fight being a dull match in terms of athletics, both men earned multi-million dollar paydays from the massive notoriety of the event.
In the National Basketball Association, Lebron James superseded the normal meritorious promotion of players to orchestrate his team, the Lakers, into drafting and playing his son Bronny. The lead story on ESPN’s Sportscenter and other news outlets for days was the phenomenon of father and son—both worldwide celebrities—playing together, despite the son’s lack of NBA skills. Australian academic Graeme Turner remarks that the notion of a celebrity itself becomes a product, “the celebrity commodity, [which] can be manufactured, marketed, and traded by the promotions, publicity, and media industries" (Turner, 2010, 14). Thus the pop-culture aspect of the legend Lebron getting to play with his son professionally trumped the fact that it was staged.
This concept of “sports entertainment” is not new. Professional wrestling, after years of staging its matches, finally added the nomenclature above to legitimize its product, and subtly let its audience know that while athleticism is clearly inherent to its sport, the outcomes are determined in a way to maximize audiences. Winning and losing has been superseded by the other aspects of the game both on and off the field. When the pure sport is diminished for the sake of 15 minutes of Andy Warhol-esque, Instagram, social media novelty then the reason so many people have watched sports for years will be gone. Apparently though, that older more diehard audience will either get replaced by the fans of the pop-culture phenomena or join them.
This past Saturday November 16, Wrexham lost to Stockport one to nil. Stockport’s Louis Barry hit a goal in the 24th minute which was enough for the Stockport victory. And guess what: no one cares.
References
Kellner, D. (2017). The Frankfurt School.
Turner, G. (2010). Approaching celebrity studies. Celebrity studies, 1(1), 11-20.
Zeisler, A. (2008). Feminism and pop culture: seal studies. Seal Press.
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