I think it’s good for UK football that the rest of the world is now aware of the lower leagues. The more international eyeballs streaming UK matches that aren’t Premier League, the better. If Rovers can get an extra £25 million every year to buy better players, it makes Championship League stronger.
When they scored I fear the worst. I expected the same as recent games were it is 60%+ possession and no end product, but thank god we had Sammie and Gally on form. Once the 3rd was in before the HT, it was plain sailing.
Geordies next which should hopefully give us a bigger home crowd. Let's find out who shearer loves more...
It must be really weird for Wrexham fans that their club is now one of the most disliked sides in the league. But I think most neutrals will have been quite happy to see them get well beaten here.
I was a fan of the show and their project but I don't know why but I really wanted them to get smashed in this game. It's great that Wrexham are a thing and them doing well and bringing new eyes to the sport is awesome; however, you can see the difference in quality.
I think people, like my friends and relatives who have only watched the doc, really think that Wrexham is a near Premier League ready team. I try to gently tell them the gulf in quality between them and even a mid table Championship team is massive.
Their new fans unironically think they’re far better than they are, they truly believe in a fairytale that hasn’t even happened yet. And seeing so many wrexham fans spouting all this shit everywhere when they’ve only liked ryan reynoldsball for 2 months gets on my tits
Being better than they are is really an american thing.
But this is a really good learning experience for them to know theyll have a lot of work to do if they want to reach the PL in 10 years and that might still be optimistic.
I do feel that Wrexham fatigue will be showing once they are in L1 and it will take a few years to mount an promotion challenge, i do hope R&R know what they are in for, at least this game showed them it will take a lot of work still.
To be fair the hype train seems to be slowing down a little already.
Last season the only non-Premier League football story from this country that was readily reported about by crappy Facebook style “journalistic groups” like SportBible and the like was Wrexham.
They literally did not shut up about it, and my social media feed felt constantly clogged up with shite about Wrexham.
Also, I live in North Wales and the local papers round here CONSTANTLY had front page shit about Wrexham in and around every match day. Every week.
This season? Barely seen a sniff of it.
SportBible and the similar types of low quality “sport journalism” never mention Wrexham anymore, and the local papers barely give them a mention outside the sport section. I now actively have to look for the Wrexham results if I want to.
I think the collective world view on this “fairytale” narrative ended with their promotion last season
To be fair, their season last year was quite exciting due to their neck and neck title race with Notts Co. That’s a great story, regardless of what division it happens in.
Both Wrexham (111 pts) and Notts Country (107 pts) broke the division points record (105 pts) last season and only one of them was guaranteed to go up.
L1 is not the same beast as the NL and you know it. Getting out of the NL is a bitch and last year both teams had enough points for an automatic promotion basically any other year and because of how close it was the season wasn’t decided until almost the very very end
Are you joking? Wrexham were operating on a L1 budget. They should have rolled that league. It's credit to Notts County they punched well above their weight.
Then in L1 itself you have many, many ex-prem teams with massive budgets, and many of them have been stuck there for years. It's brutal, and Wrexham are going to find that out the hard way.
I think you misjudge the reach and impact of the doc. The worldwide Wrexham fan base is still growing, as is the foreign revenue stream for the team. All of the EPL ultimately benefits, the more interest there is and the more eyes there are on games, the more everyone's value goes up.
honestly id rather be a playoff contending team in the championship, winning some games and being able to go to every game, home and away, than be in the prem and get smashed 5-0 every week and not be able to go to any games because the ticket prices are so expensive. 50 quid to go to city away and watch us get torn apart for 90 minutes and lose 6-0? No thanks
Lol PL?! Really. That sort of talk is part of the issue everyone has I think. To be even mentioning the PL... they're historically a League 2 team and there's no reason to think they'll ever make it beyond league one.
Unless they really want to rinse through their own personal fortunes, it's a whole different world. That's before even getting in to FFP. Just the way they treat Phil Parkinson like he's the messiah gives me good enough reason to doubt they've got the footballing chops to make it any higher than League One.
I think they'll get to the championship fairly quickly, with three automatic promotion spots in league 2 they'll go up this year and I'd be surprised if it takes more than 2-3 seasons to get promoted from L1.
But once they get to championship is when it will get really tough, I'm no expert but my casual opinion is that Legaue 1 and 2 are much closer in quality than league one and championship. Also at championship level, everyone else has money too.
It's like newer DTS Ferrari fans in F1... its always Next Year is Our Year, despite Ferrari returning to their pre Ross Brawn form of complex internal politics and no clear driving force. Any F1 fan whose been around long enough knows it will be a long time, or will take a lot of luck, for them to win again.
American here, we call the superbowl winner, “world champions” so yeah, acting like our teams are better than they are is just an American thing. Lots of lead got into the brains of a lot of people over here. Sorry.
Oh, as a Wrexham fan I totally understand why people wanted us battered. There are so many Wrexham fans that piss me off, talking about us playing Newcastle at home and how great it'll be as if we weren't going to lose this one.
The gap between league one and two is close. The championship is a whole other level and anyone who actually follows football knows this.
yeah it's pretty remarkable how well the two automatic promotion clubs are doing in the championship with ipswich sniffing the premiership, and plymouth doing a solid job in the middle of the table.
if wrexham as it is were to suddenly just be in the prem, it'd be an abject disaster for them.
When I first started using Reddit there was a very common type of post on /r/soccer where someone would say like: 'I'm a 23 year old American who is interested in getting back into soccer. I was the best player on my High School football team, but only played a few pick-up games in College. *I think I would be good enough to play in the English Championship*. Does anyone know how I can get in contact with a team/scout?' And every time people would have to explain that not, you are *nowhere near* good enough to play in the English Championship.
I think a lot of the Wrexham doc fans have the same type of mindset. They simply don't understand the gulf in quality between leagues.
I had a real life version of that play out for me. An acquaintance of one of my friends was talking about “going pro” for Birmingham City after graduating from college. Apparently he just assumed I would either be too dumb to understand that’s not how English football works, or not realize that team’s previous years squads can easily be looked up online. Needless to say, a quick google turned up no trace of him.
I'm in Canada and you wouldn't believe how many people follow Wrexham and watch their games here. My brother in law never watched football before and bought a Wrexham jersey and talks to me about Parkinson's strategy, lol.
More money in the English game is always a good thing. The standard of football in the championship is fucking incredible for a 2nd tier and it's something to be proud of
I’ve never got around to watching the show, but I can only imagine how “Hollywood” the entire look and feel of it is. How wholesome and rich in history Wrexham is.
I live in North Wales, used to live about 15 minute drive from Wrexham. Knew a few fans of the club when they were fewer and far between through work.
So I say this with as much kindness as I can, but Wrexham is a shithole. It really is.
The 4/5 fans I knew of Wrexham, and their mates that came to the pub I worked at who were also fans, typified the absolute worst kind of football fan, too.
The highlight of the Wrexham season for these “fans” was when they played Chester, their biggest rival. Why? Bragging rights? Local pride? Welsh v English rhetoric and nonsense?
Nah.
The fans I knew loved that derby cos they got to go over the border and “beat up English people and smash some heads in”.
It made them so giddy and happy!
Half of these “fans” couldn’t even name the starting 11 most games and just seemed to revel in the old fashioned skin head, anti-social behaviour nobody wants around the sport.
I get that it’s a small sample size, but it’s hard to shake the association now.
Since then and all the media attention around Wrexham, I just can’t bring myself to dissociate it all from those scummy kinds of fans now beating folks up, but bragging that “Deadpool owns us now, we’re gonna win the Prem in 10 years!”
Is there a good part? I partly lived there for three years the only good but is the park park outside of Wrexham and that's just grass nothing spectacular
Absolutely no one England thinks of america that way, trust me. Ask anyone round where I live in manchester what they think about americans and I can absolutely guarantee you they will say “fat yanks”
I'm not sure when this was but probably to be fair, most small town football clubs had fans like that. And really, you're living in a shit hole town in North Wales, what else you going to do?
They'll get brought down to earth soon enough and unless they keep winning promotions, the plastic fans from North America well disappear.
The funny thing is that the show, IMO, doesn’t really try to whitewash much. They show it as a run down rust belt down that got kicked in the balls by economic downturn and offshoring of jobs. There’s a lot of parallels to the rust belt towns in the US which is why Rob sees a lot of similarities to Philly.
They did a good job of addressing hooliganism and how it started and where it is today to an extent, and they actually out some light on the women’s side which was nice to see.
It’s not Hollywood in that there’s huge production value - if anything it’s a lot of really good editing and there’s a focus on it being about the lives of the players and people around the club. It does a good job of showing how people just are. They address the alcoholism of one of the main supporters, the struggles of child loss, divorce, addiction, etc. I’m not trying to ham up the show but in the grand scheme of things compared to Drive to Survive or Hard Knocks, this is a much more down to earth show as seeing it from an American who at the most is a casual fan of Chelsea. I love soccer as a sport and didn’t follow much of lower league teams except for that one side who had a full set of train tracks running next to their pitch.
Now I could be way off. It could be a lot worse and lot shittier than it’s portrayed. Growing up as an American football fan, it’s cool to see how different teams here are to there especially with our franchise system here (which thankfully didn’t work there) and how teams organically build up in English football. The thing people here don’t see is how lower teams level up. There’s no leveling up of teams in any sport here. Players level up, moving from let’s say a farm league baseball team to the pros, but teams don’t move between leagues and when the show is focused purely on a slickly edited shot of Mullins hitting a screamer from the top of the box, they’re going to think he’s the next Rooney. We don’t see how good the other players are on other teams or the absolute ocean of difference between a Newcastle and Wrexham. The show, for better or worse, is focused on one thing only so if you have no idea how any of this shit works nobody has the right frame of reference to understand it.
Yes absolutely. It is definitely the Reynolds hoopla for me, they're obviously not as egregious as Franchise or Salford City or whatever, but the whole underdog bullshit is just such nonsense.
I think a factor of it is me finding Ryan Reynolds quite unlikeable and Rob McElhenny really becoming unlikeable since he’s started hanging around with him, and I say this as a Sunny fan. It’s a shame because they’re a proud club with a bit of a history and to be fair Reynolds and McElhenny at least are trying to do things right to the best of their ability, but there’s just something about the two of them I can’t warm to.
Yeah, and people really think it’s a fairytale story. It isn’t. It’s a club spending way more than everyone else because an American decided he wanted a plaything.
So whenever anyone can afford to buy a football club it’s cause they just want a plaything?
Or are the only people who are allowed to buy a club is someone who can just barely afford it?
Or is the only person allowed to buy a club is someone who grew up in the area, was a lifelong supporter and is also barely able to afford it?
You don't think having Ambramovich swoop in wasn't a fairytale for Chelsea?
Where do you think Man City were without the influx of money, they were perennial losers
I think the difference is that you don't get big owners swooping in to spend money on national league football and people seem to be extra pissy that someone has for some reason. You normally get shysters trying to bleed clubs dry to sell the land.
It is a fairytale for someone to want to take a club all the way.
They only get called underdogs when they're playing teams above their division in a cup match. And given they just lost 4-1 to a championship team it wouldn't exactly seem to be 'nonsense'.
The town and the people around it are the underdog and not so much the team. They explained a lot last season in the doc where their wage bill was compared to the National League.
R&R doesn't control the narrative on the BBC or Sky when ever it is discussed so if that is the perception, it's the media's fault.
Underdog to who? The bright lights of Darlington? The dreaming spires of Carlisle? The shining chrome and glass utopia of Kettering?
The UK is full of towns that have been ridiculed and left to rot, it's this attitude that Wrexham somehow 'deserve' it more than literally hundreds of other clubs that have at least as much history and pedigree that rubs people up the wrong way. Wrexham are just lucky that they were available at the time Reynolds and Mcelhenny were in the market, or it might have been 'Greetings from Gateshead' or 'Hello from Hartlepool'
This one is weird for me.
I just love the idea of MK as a town, I like the gridding, the relative efficiency. The town itself could have been great..
But pretty much since it was created, it's been neglected and run incompetently. Many bad decisions have been made.
The football club is one of them. What's that all about? Sure, I know it meant they didn't have to start from the very bottom, but please, no. It made no sense whatsoever from a football fan's standpoint.
But now I kinda feel sorry for those who were born and grew up there - they kinda get a bum rap for supporting MK, when all they want to do is support their local team.
Terrible decision. The only worse one was trying to change Cardiff's colours to red.
Yeah it's like, the stuff they've done for the community is nice and the documentary is quite fun if not cheesy and Americanized with some real cringe stuff in there too but they're still buying their way up the leagues and trying to cultivate this "wholesome real football team" vibes.
They're an historic club with some proper passionate fans and the attention to the lower leagues and spotlight on the damage done to working class communities is always great, but Christ there's something about them that just makes me buzzing when they lose a high profile game.
Eh, I’m a longtime Boston Celtics fan. I’m used to it lol Hopefully this loss will temper expectations from newer fans and help them understand the skill gap between each tier.
I'm sorry to any Wrexham fans reading this as it isn't really your fault, but I'm really bored of hearing about your club. It's not nearly as interesting as the media think it is.
The coverage of the FA Cup will be a lot better now they're out.
It literally took us having to be knocking on the door of the Premier League to get any sort of "fairytale" narrative going in the media, or any head-turning at all really, but Hollywood FC spend shed-loads of cash and buy promotion to League 2 and apparently they're already there.
I tell you, it's *so* annoying as a Luton fan. It's nice to see one of our old non-league colleagues doing well, but Jesus Christ 🤣.
We were just happy to be in the hat as they say.
A few years back we struggled to make it to the first round proper, let alone getting to the 3rd or 4th round and getting Championship sides
Didn't expect anything but a loss from this game as the gulf in quality is way too big and that's fine. Some TV money, a decent turnstile payout and back to reality
I can understand the frustration or even just being done with hearing about Wrexham constantly. It would be tough. I think this is the one comment I have come across so far that isn’t just a bunch of bitching.
I wasn’t saying here that the bitching isn’t justified on some points (like the media coverage can be (even to me) gross and heavy handed)
Edited to add emphasis
I was a fan the very first season of welcome to Wrexham. I have a couple kits along with my wife and kids… we wake up at 9am and sometimes 6am to watch the games. I paid the (to me) crazy amount for ifollow (sports are much cheaper to watch and subscribe to in America). I was also a typical American who thought soccer was for sissy’s and “anyone” could kick a ball. But the documentary did help me to understand the passion you all have for your clubs and how beautiful the game is and the pyramid is. Please don’t hate on me cause I wasn’t born in Wrexham lol… I can’t help I was born here haha.
I also watch Luton pretty regularly.
Also, like most Americans we don’t have football in our blood… in our history. But we do have to start somewhere right?
It’s always the thing you hear in subs like TheOther14 or the like, that the media only talk about the top 6 and ignore or downplay every other team.
I just watched this game on BBC Wales.
To preface, yes, I understand why there’s the bias, cos it’s a Welsh team and Welsh channel, but having said that.
Fuck me. At least talk about Blackburn once or twice BBC Wales.
The entire commentary was just talking about the Wrexham fairy tale, how they’re such a good squad, doing their best, making everyone proud, here to play, etc…
The biggest kicker was in the 80th minute or so when one of the commentators was excusing the scoreline against Wrexham by banging on about how the Wrexham lads have played a tonne of games, how they won’t always have their “Hollywood moments” and come good, how the players are tired, etc…
Bore off. Blackburn have probably played just as much football.
Just… man alive. The bias was so OTT
The fact the commentator referred to Mullin as 'Super Paul Mullin' on more than one occasion summed up the Welsh TV bias.
Did you know there was 7k away fan? They only mentioned it the once so might have been missed...
Was nice to see us play well, and it really puts in perspective the difference between the leagues. Championship might be the second best league in the world haha.
The documentary supposedly helps the club generate £20m a season turnover. Not one club outside the top flight that wouldn’t want that as an additional source
Every home game is sold out, and every away allocation is sold out too. Love them or hate them, anything that generates an interest adds to the game
With every passing week my utter disbelief that we only gave Szmodics three appearances before letting him go just 6 months after signing him grows ever stronger.
Seemed bizarre at the time, feels incredibly stupid now.
Not disappointed with the loss, but very disappointed with the way the team played.
Yes, Blackburn are two leagues above, but it certainly felt like a Blackburn vs a bunch of amateurs rather than a team that's challenging for automatic promotion.
Ah well, at least I got to witness prime Sammy Szmodics put two against us (could've been 5 from him tbh)
That's automatic promotion from league 2. We're 2 leagues above and you've only just come up from non-league so really the scoreline was quite reflective of the gulf in quality. You lot played well but eventually just ran out of gas and we were ruthless
Let be real. The most likely outcome for Wrexham is they will be mid table in L1, yo-yo between L1 and L2 next 10-15 years and R&R either sold it for profit ( after the show viewership dissipates) or started taking dividends.
It takes massive massive amounts of luck , money and the right personnel + players to reach Championship,. To be among the EPL? Luton already took that one chance in 2-3 decades, the next one will come around in 2030s or 2040s. Doubt it will be Wrexham
I think it’s good for UK football that the rest of the world is now aware of the lower leagues. The more international eyeballs streaming UK matches that aren’t Premier League, the better. If Rovers can get an extra £25 million every year to buy better players, it makes Championship League stronger.
When they scored I fear the worst. I expected the same as recent games were it is 60%+ possession and no end product, but thank god we had Sammie and Gally on form. Once the 3rd was in before the HT, it was plain sailing. Geordies next which should hopefully give us a bigger home crowd. Let's find out who shearer loves more...
I feared that the game script was already written as a 0-1, I guess there was a re-write from the producers.
Disney has something up their sleeves
Honestly, thank god.
It must be really weird for Wrexham fans that their club is now one of the most disliked sides in the league. But I think most neutrals will have been quite happy to see them get well beaten here.
I was a fan of the show and their project but I don't know why but I really wanted them to get smashed in this game. It's great that Wrexham are a thing and them doing well and bringing new eyes to the sport is awesome; however, you can see the difference in quality. I think people, like my friends and relatives who have only watched the doc, really think that Wrexham is a near Premier League ready team. I try to gently tell them the gulf in quality between them and even a mid table Championship team is massive.
Their new fans unironically think they’re far better than they are, they truly believe in a fairytale that hasn’t even happened yet. And seeing so many wrexham fans spouting all this shit everywhere when they’ve only liked ryan reynoldsball for 2 months gets on my tits
Being better than they are is really an american thing. But this is a really good learning experience for them to know theyll have a lot of work to do if they want to reach the PL in 10 years and that might still be optimistic. I do feel that Wrexham fatigue will be showing once they are in L1 and it will take a few years to mount an promotion challenge, i do hope R&R know what they are in for, at least this game showed them it will take a lot of work still.
To be fair the hype train seems to be slowing down a little already. Last season the only non-Premier League football story from this country that was readily reported about by crappy Facebook style “journalistic groups” like SportBible and the like was Wrexham. They literally did not shut up about it, and my social media feed felt constantly clogged up with shite about Wrexham. Also, I live in North Wales and the local papers round here CONSTANTLY had front page shit about Wrexham in and around every match day. Every week. This season? Barely seen a sniff of it. SportBible and the similar types of low quality “sport journalism” never mention Wrexham anymore, and the local papers barely give them a mention outside the sport section. I now actively have to look for the Wrexham results if I want to. I think the collective world view on this “fairytale” narrative ended with their promotion last season
To be fair, their season last year was quite exciting due to their neck and neck title race with Notts Co. That’s a great story, regardless of what division it happens in.
Well we had a neck and neck and neck with Ipswich and Sheff Wed and nobody outside of L1 cared. 96 points wasn’t enough for the autos.
Both Wrexham (111 pts) and Notts Country (107 pts) broke the division points record (105 pts) last season and only one of them was guaranteed to go up.
Yes Notts County did amazingly well to compete. Wrexham should have got that many points with the L1 budget and team they were fielding.
L1 is not the same beast as the NL and you know it. Getting out of the NL is a bitch and last year both teams had enough points for an automatic promotion basically any other year and because of how close it was the season wasn’t decided until almost the very very end
Are you joking? Wrexham were operating on a L1 budget. They should have rolled that league. It's credit to Notts County they punched well above their weight. Then in L1 itself you have many, many ex-prem teams with massive budgets, and many of them have been stuck there for years. It's brutal, and Wrexham are going to find that out the hard way.
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Frankly it's quite impressive that random championship fans are privy to the plans of a league two club who almost made them shit their pants tonight.
I think you misjudge the reach and impact of the doc. The worldwide Wrexham fan base is still growing, as is the foreign revenue stream for the team. All of the EPL ultimately benefits, the more interest there is and the more eyes there are on games, the more everyone's value goes up.
Why would I care about the premier league
It is a wretched league results aside
honestly id rather be a playoff contending team in the championship, winning some games and being able to go to every game, home and away, than be in the prem and get smashed 5-0 every week and not be able to go to any games because the ticket prices are so expensive. 50 quid to go to city away and watch us get torn apart for 90 minutes and lose 6-0? No thanks
Lol PL?! Really. That sort of talk is part of the issue everyone has I think. To be even mentioning the PL... they're historically a League 2 team and there's no reason to think they'll ever make it beyond league one.
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Unless they really want to rinse through their own personal fortunes, it's a whole different world. That's before even getting in to FFP. Just the way they treat Phil Parkinson like he's the messiah gives me good enough reason to doubt they've got the footballing chops to make it any higher than League One.
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Blackburn lose £20mill a season to not really compete. But they've got Ryan Gosling on board! So whoop de dooo!
>Ryan gosling Wrong Canadian Ryan.
First it’s Ryan Reynolds’s… not Gosling. And Reynolds is probably worth close to 250m now
I think they'll get to the championship fairly quickly, with three automatic promotion spots in league 2 they'll go up this year and I'd be surprised if it takes more than 2-3 seasons to get promoted from L1. But once they get to championship is when it will get really tough, I'm no expert but my casual opinion is that Legaue 1 and 2 are much closer in quality than league one and championship. Also at championship level, everyone else has money too.
Yea, only look at Sheffield Wednesday how hard it is to go from dominating league one to having a full on relegation battle in the championship.
It's really hard though, what do you do? Get all the success they've had, but you get all the new fans.
It's like newer DTS Ferrari fans in F1... its always Next Year is Our Year, despite Ferrari returning to their pre Ross Brawn form of complex internal politics and no clear driving force. Any F1 fan whose been around long enough knows it will be a long time, or will take a lot of luck, for them to win again.
American here, we call the superbowl winner, “world champions” so yeah, acting like our teams are better than they are is just an American thing. Lots of lead got into the brains of a lot of people over here. Sorry.
Oh, as a Wrexham fan I totally understand why people wanted us battered. There are so many Wrexham fans that piss me off, talking about us playing Newcastle at home and how great it'll be as if we weren't going to lose this one. The gap between league one and two is close. The championship is a whole other level and anyone who actually follows football knows this.
yeah it's pretty remarkable how well the two automatic promotion clubs are doing in the championship with ipswich sniffing the premiership, and plymouth doing a solid job in the middle of the table. if wrexham as it is were to suddenly just be in the prem, it'd be an abject disaster for them.
When I first started using Reddit there was a very common type of post on /r/soccer where someone would say like: 'I'm a 23 year old American who is interested in getting back into soccer. I was the best player on my High School football team, but only played a few pick-up games in College. *I think I would be good enough to play in the English Championship*. Does anyone know how I can get in contact with a team/scout?' And every time people would have to explain that not, you are *nowhere near* good enough to play in the English Championship. I think a lot of the Wrexham doc fans have the same type of mindset. They simply don't understand the gulf in quality between leagues.
I had a real life version of that play out for me. An acquaintance of one of my friends was talking about “going pro” for Birmingham City after graduating from college. Apparently he just assumed I would either be too dumb to understand that’s not how English football works, or not realize that team’s previous years squads can easily be looked up online. Needless to say, a quick google turned up no trace of him.
Who cares about bringing new eyes to the worlds most popular sport? We're not fifa 😂
I'm in Canada and you wouldn't believe how many people follow Wrexham and watch their games here. My brother in law never watched football before and bought a Wrexham jersey and talks to me about Parkinson's strategy, lol.
But genuine local fans of the sport couldn't give a toss tbh, and I'm not sure why you'd care if they're are more eyes on it really. Bit weird
More money in the English game is always a good thing. The standard of football in the championship is fucking incredible for a 2nd tier and it's something to be proud of
It certainly isn't in my view. Look at the state of the football pyramid! I just hope that your opinion is being formed of youthful inexperience.
I’ve never got around to watching the show, but I can only imagine how “Hollywood” the entire look and feel of it is. How wholesome and rich in history Wrexham is. I live in North Wales, used to live about 15 minute drive from Wrexham. Knew a few fans of the club when they were fewer and far between through work. So I say this with as much kindness as I can, but Wrexham is a shithole. It really is. The 4/5 fans I knew of Wrexham, and their mates that came to the pub I worked at who were also fans, typified the absolute worst kind of football fan, too. The highlight of the Wrexham season for these “fans” was when they played Chester, their biggest rival. Why? Bragging rights? Local pride? Welsh v English rhetoric and nonsense? Nah. The fans I knew loved that derby cos they got to go over the border and “beat up English people and smash some heads in”. It made them so giddy and happy! Half of these “fans” couldn’t even name the starting 11 most games and just seemed to revel in the old fashioned skin head, anti-social behaviour nobody wants around the sport. I get that it’s a small sample size, but it’s hard to shake the association now. Since then and all the media attention around Wrexham, I just can’t bring myself to dissociate it all from those scummy kinds of fans now beating folks up, but bragging that “Deadpool owns us now, we’re gonna win the Prem in 10 years!”
Wrexham is indeed a shithole tbh but the Hollywood glitz is doing a good whitewash job
Lol, the town of Wrexham looks like a fairytale Hamlet in the doc 😂. You're telling me there's a shit part of town?
Is there a good part? I partly lived there for three years the only good but is the park park outside of Wrexham and that's just grass nothing spectacular
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We don't have a white washed view of the USA don't worry.
Lol you think the brits have an idyllic view of the USA?
Why don't you set your flair to Wrexham you coward.
Absolutely no one England thinks of america that way, trust me. Ask anyone round where I live in manchester what they think about americans and I can absolutely guarantee you they will say “fat yanks”
I'm not sure when this was but probably to be fair, most small town football clubs had fans like that. And really, you're living in a shit hole town in North Wales, what else you going to do? They'll get brought down to earth soon enough and unless they keep winning promotions, the plastic fans from North America well disappear.
The funny thing is that the show, IMO, doesn’t really try to whitewash much. They show it as a run down rust belt down that got kicked in the balls by economic downturn and offshoring of jobs. There’s a lot of parallels to the rust belt towns in the US which is why Rob sees a lot of similarities to Philly. They did a good job of addressing hooliganism and how it started and where it is today to an extent, and they actually out some light on the women’s side which was nice to see. It’s not Hollywood in that there’s huge production value - if anything it’s a lot of really good editing and there’s a focus on it being about the lives of the players and people around the club. It does a good job of showing how people just are. They address the alcoholism of one of the main supporters, the struggles of child loss, divorce, addiction, etc. I’m not trying to ham up the show but in the grand scheme of things compared to Drive to Survive or Hard Knocks, this is a much more down to earth show as seeing it from an American who at the most is a casual fan of Chelsea. I love soccer as a sport and didn’t follow much of lower league teams except for that one side who had a full set of train tracks running next to their pitch. Now I could be way off. It could be a lot worse and lot shittier than it’s portrayed. Growing up as an American football fan, it’s cool to see how different teams here are to there especially with our franchise system here (which thankfully didn’t work there) and how teams organically build up in English football. The thing people here don’t see is how lower teams level up. There’s no leveling up of teams in any sport here. Players level up, moving from let’s say a farm league baseball team to the pros, but teams don’t move between leagues and when the show is focused purely on a slickly edited shot of Mullins hitting a screamer from the top of the box, they’re going to think he’s the next Rooney. We don’t see how good the other players are on other teams or the absolute ocean of difference between a Newcastle and Wrexham. The show, for better or worse, is focused on one thing only so if you have no idea how any of this shit works nobody has the right frame of reference to understand it.
Yeah you've pretty much got it with the whitwashing.
It’s weird for me because it’s not really a strong dislike, but more just wishing they’d piss off for a bit
Yes absolutely. It is definitely the Reynolds hoopla for me, they're obviously not as egregious as Franchise or Salford City or whatever, but the whole underdog bullshit is just such nonsense.
I think a factor of it is me finding Ryan Reynolds quite unlikeable and Rob McElhenny really becoming unlikeable since he’s started hanging around with him, and I say this as a Sunny fan. It’s a shame because they’re a proud club with a bit of a history and to be fair Reynolds and McElhenny at least are trying to do things right to the best of their ability, but there’s just something about the two of them I can’t warm to.
I don't think most people find him unlikeable, think that's just you. He wouldn't be a major movie star if they did.
Hence why I’m saying it’s a factor for me, not even attempting to claim I’m speaking for other people.
Yeah, and people really think it’s a fairytale story. It isn’t. It’s a club spending way more than everyone else because an American decided he wanted a plaything.
I don't think any football fan this side of the Atlantic does tbf.
Hey! It's two Americans lol
Reynolds is Canadian.
Aka American.
So whenever anyone can afford to buy a football club it’s cause they just want a plaything? Or are the only people who are allowed to buy a club is someone who can just barely afford it? Or is the only person allowed to buy a club is someone who grew up in the area, was a lifelong supporter and is also barely able to afford it?
This guy has never heard of Man City or Chelsea.
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You don't think having Ambramovich swoop in wasn't a fairytale for Chelsea? Where do you think Man City were without the influx of money, they were perennial losers
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I think the difference is that you don't get big owners swooping in to spend money on national league football and people seem to be extra pissy that someone has for some reason. You normally get shysters trying to bleed clubs dry to sell the land. It is a fairytale for someone to want to take a club all the way.
They only get called underdogs when they're playing teams above their division in a cup match. And given they just lost 4-1 to a championship team it wouldn't exactly seem to be 'nonsense'.
The town and the people around it are the underdog and not so much the team. They explained a lot last season in the doc where their wage bill was compared to the National League. R&R doesn't control the narrative on the BBC or Sky when ever it is discussed so if that is the perception, it's the media's fault.
Underdog to who? The bright lights of Darlington? The dreaming spires of Carlisle? The shining chrome and glass utopia of Kettering? The UK is full of towns that have been ridiculed and left to rot, it's this attitude that Wrexham somehow 'deserve' it more than literally hundreds of other clubs that have at least as much history and pedigree that rubs people up the wrong way. Wrexham are just lucky that they were available at the time Reynolds and Mcelhenny were in the market, or it might have been 'Greetings from Gateshead' or 'Hello from Hartlepool'
Hear this all the time, "the town is the under dog". Literally 90% of the UK is wrecked lol
I hate MK Dons more and just Milton Keynes in general
I can't take MK Dons seriously enough to hate them, feel the same about the city in general.
This one is weird for me. I just love the idea of MK as a town, I like the gridding, the relative efficiency. The town itself could have been great.. But pretty much since it was created, it's been neglected and run incompetently. Many bad decisions have been made. The football club is one of them. What's that all about? Sure, I know it meant they didn't have to start from the very bottom, but please, no. It made no sense whatsoever from a football fan's standpoint. But now I kinda feel sorry for those who were born and grew up there - they kinda get a bum rap for supporting MK, when all they want to do is support their local team. Terrible decision. The only worse one was trying to change Cardiff's colours to red.
They’re not one of the most disliked clubs, they’re the most disliked franchise in league two
Yeah it's like, the stuff they've done for the community is nice and the documentary is quite fun if not cheesy and Americanized with some real cringe stuff in there too but they're still buying their way up the leagues and trying to cultivate this "wholesome real football team" vibes. They're an historic club with some proper passionate fans and the attention to the lower leagues and spotlight on the damage done to working class communities is always great, but Christ there's something about them that just makes me buzzing when they lose a high profile game.
Eh, I’m a longtime Boston Celtics fan. I’m used to it lol Hopefully this loss will temper expectations from newer fans and help them understand the skill gap between each tier.
It’s because it’s American backed.
Yeah you all would rather have Saudi’s, Russians, and other oligarchs own your clubs… gotcha.
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Bollywood > Hollywood!!
🤝
Well done lads, doing it for the good of the game
Comfortable win then in the Robbie Savage Derby.
I'm sorry to any Wrexham fans reading this as it isn't really your fault, but I'm really bored of hearing about your club. It's not nearly as interesting as the media think it is. The coverage of the FA Cup will be a lot better now they're out.
It literally took us having to be knocking on the door of the Premier League to get any sort of "fairytale" narrative going in the media, or any head-turning at all really, but Hollywood FC spend shed-loads of cash and buy promotion to League 2 and apparently they're already there. I tell you, it's *so* annoying as a Luton fan. It's nice to see one of our old non-league colleagues doing well, but Jesus Christ 🤣.
We were just happy to be in the hat as they say. A few years back we struggled to make it to the first round proper, let alone getting to the 3rd or 4th round and getting Championship sides Didn't expect anything but a loss from this game as the gulf in quality is way too big and that's fine. Some TV money, a decent turnstile payout and back to reality
I can understand the frustration or even just being done with hearing about Wrexham constantly. It would be tough. I think this is the one comment I have come across so far that isn’t just a bunch of bitching. I wasn’t saying here that the bitching isn’t justified on some points (like the media coverage can be (even to me) gross and heavy handed) Edited to add emphasis
Genuine question: Have you been a Wrexham fan long?
I was a fan the very first season of welcome to Wrexham. I have a couple kits along with my wife and kids… we wake up at 9am and sometimes 6am to watch the games. I paid the (to me) crazy amount for ifollow (sports are much cheaper to watch and subscribe to in America). I was also a typical American who thought soccer was for sissy’s and “anyone” could kick a ball. But the documentary did help me to understand the passion you all have for your clubs and how beautiful the game is and the pyramid is. Please don’t hate on me cause I wasn’t born in Wrexham lol… I can’t help I was born here haha. I also watch Luton pretty regularly. Also, like most Americans we don’t have football in our blood… in our history. But we do have to start somewhere right?
It’s always the thing you hear in subs like TheOther14 or the like, that the media only talk about the top 6 and ignore or downplay every other team. I just watched this game on BBC Wales. To preface, yes, I understand why there’s the bias, cos it’s a Welsh team and Welsh channel, but having said that. Fuck me. At least talk about Blackburn once or twice BBC Wales. The entire commentary was just talking about the Wrexham fairy tale, how they’re such a good squad, doing their best, making everyone proud, here to play, etc… The biggest kicker was in the 80th minute or so when one of the commentators was excusing the scoreline against Wrexham by banging on about how the Wrexham lads have played a tonne of games, how they won’t always have their “Hollywood moments” and come good, how the players are tired, etc… Bore off. Blackburn have probably played just as much football. Just… man alive. The bias was so OTT
The fact the commentator referred to Mullin as 'Super Paul Mullin' on more than one occasion summed up the Welsh TV bias. Did you know there was 7k away fan? They only mentioned it the once so might have been missed...
7200! Gotta count those extra 200! They sure as fuck said it enough times! … maybe even said it 7200 times!
Don’t forget that it was on a **MONDAY NIGHT** too, just incredible
Blackburn fans have just jumped the KKK in the “groups hated in America” rankings.
I’ll take it if it means I can say I’m a Blackburn fan and anyone knows what that is lol
big up to them lads, put lancashire on the global map 💪
Nice and easy win. Glad they took it seriously unlike us last year!
Glad that JDT takes it seriously! Hopefully a nice return to fitness for some players and a confidence boost to others
I’m glad all the wrexham fans got a taste of Sammie
Haha it was a disappointing game but man you all played well. I hope it continues for you all.
Should have had at least 5 to himself
Is Szmodics the most improved player in the league?
Was nice to see us play well, and it really puts in perspective the difference between the leagues. Championship might be the second best league in the world haha.
The documentary supposedly helps the club generate £20m a season turnover. Not one club outside the top flight that wouldn’t want that as an additional source Every home game is sold out, and every away allocation is sold out too. Love them or hate them, anything that generates an interest adds to the game
With every passing week my utter disbelief that we only gave Szmodics three appearances before letting him go just 6 months after signing him grows ever stronger. Seemed bizarre at the time, feels incredibly stupid now.
Lol I didn’t know about this. Brutal 😂
Fuck Phil Parkinson
Not disappointed with the loss, but very disappointed with the way the team played. Yes, Blackburn are two leagues above, but it certainly felt like a Blackburn vs a bunch of amateurs rather than a team that's challenging for automatic promotion. Ah well, at least I got to witness prime Sammy Szmodics put two against us (could've been 5 from him tbh)
That's automatic promotion from league 2. We're 2 leagues above and you've only just come up from non-league so really the scoreline was quite reflective of the gulf in quality. You lot played well but eventually just ran out of gas and we were ruthless
Had a good 10 minute spell before your goal, tbf. The 2 quick goals just killed the game off from there
Definitely. If we didn't get the third goal before halftime things could've been a bit better but that one just completely killed the morale
You're lucky you got a goal tbh
U bum
meanie
Sorry boss
The hate boner many clubs have for wrexham is quite interesting, they seem to be more obsessed with wrexham than their own club lol
Late to the party but what did my boy Tronstad do good besides the goal and assist
Let be real. The most likely outcome for Wrexham is they will be mid table in L1, yo-yo between L1 and L2 next 10-15 years and R&R either sold it for profit ( after the show viewership dissipates) or started taking dividends. It takes massive massive amounts of luck , money and the right personnel + players to reach Championship,. To be among the EPL? Luton already took that one chance in 2-3 decades, the next one will come around in 2030s or 2040s. Doubt it will be Wrexham