LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are turning their surprise purchase of Welsh soccer team Wrexham into a TV series, the FX network said on Tuesday.
“Welcome to Wrexham,” will trace the efforts of the two actors, both of them novices when it comes to British soccer, to improve the fortunes of the small club which has never competed in top-flight English soccer.
Reynolds, the star of superhero comedy movie “Deadpool,” and McElhenney, the creator of TV series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” bought Wrexham in February from the club’s supporters, who owned it.
The club said the actors had invested some 2 million pounds ($2.76 million) as part of the takeover deal.
“We can never truly ‘own’ the world’s third oldest club. All (we) can do is try to improve the club for its true and forever owners – the community of Wrexham,” McElhenney tweeted on Tuesday.
FX said the series would “track Rob and Ryan’s crash course in football club ownership and the inextricably connected fates of a team and a town counting on two actors to bring some serious hope and change to a community that could use it.”
FX did not say when the documentary series would air in the United States, or whether it would be available in Britain.
The actors announced the series with a tongue-in-cheek video on their social media accounts, featuring a Welsh translator.
“There is no way these two can manage a football club. And the one with the toupee thinks Wales is in Scotland,” the translator says in Welsh.
Wrexham, known as the Red Dragons, was founded in 1864 and currently plays in England’s fifth-tier soccer league.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
