Wrexham vs Birmingham: Where a mid-table draw becomes a Hollywood thriller

It does not quite come to that. The two detachments greet each other peaceably, before heading off on their unending hunts for content. As a metaphor, it is almost too on the nose. Technically, Wrexham’s meeting with Birmingham on Friday night was nothing more noteworthy than a windswept, mid-table Championship game. Once it is cut and edited and repackaged, though, it will be something else entirely: source material for the storylines of not one, but two shows that will expose these clubs to an audience far larger than most teams would ever be able to access.

It may sound like hyperbole, but there is a reasonable chance that this 1-1 draw – between the sides that started the day in 12th and 16th in the second tier of English football – is the keynote fixture of the weekend, at least if that is gauged by its appeal to international viewers. It might, in time, prove to be one of the biggest draws of the season.

Thanks to Welcome To Wrexham, what was once a down-at-heel club in a down-at-heel Welsh town may now have a claim to be the most popular British football team in North America. In 2023, Wrexham attracted crowds totalling 110,000 to tour games in Charlotte and San Diego. Last year, CBS Sports broadcast every one of their games in League One; all of this season’s have been shown live, too.

Birmingham do not, at this stage, have quite the same pull. The first series of their documentary has been available for streaming only for a few weeks. It has won little critical acclaim; it might yet prove a sleeper hit. Either way, it has not been the same immediate, runaway success as Wrexham’s original.

It is hard to know why that might be. Perhaps Tom Brady, the minority investor cast in a central role to add some stardust, is not quite as compelling as Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac. Perhaps Brady, one of the finest American football quarterbacks of all time, lacks the fish-out-of-water appeal of Wrexham’s Hollywood backers. Perhaps there is a more limited appetite for documentaries about aspirational football teams than anticipated, and Wrexham have already cornered the market.

And yet Birmingham now find themselves in much the same cycle. They are a staple of CBS’s coverage, too: Chris Davies’s team have now played 11 games this season, including their trip to Wrexham, and eight of them have been broadcast live on the network’s sports channel. They have, like Wrexham, become the spearhead of the EFL’s attempt to cut through in the United States.

The league has made no attempt to disguise the fact that it sees North America as its future. Around a third of the teams in the three divisions of the EFL now have North American owners; in March, the EFL gathered all of its teams in New York to explore how it might grow its audience further.

Its data suggests its clubs already have somewhere in the region of 40 million fans in the US; the hope is that number will continue to rise, driven not only by the broadcast deal with CBS – which commits the network to showing 250 EFL games every season – but by the partnership with the sports marketing firm Relevent and the “immersive viewing” venue Cosm, based in Los Angeles and Dallas.

The rationale does not really require any great explanation; it is in the United States, in particular, that the perennially cash-strapped clubs of the sprawling lower leagues feel they have found their growth market, the place where they can attract the revenues that will secure their long-term futures.

And Wrexham are the driving force, the engine not just of their own future but for that of the league as a whole. It is Wrexham, after all, that has a dedicated writer from The Athletic, the sports arm of the New York Times. It is Wrexham that launched their kit this summer with an achingly fashionable event in New York’s meatpacking district, with the drinks and canapés provided by Meta, one of the club’s headline sponsors.

The cost of that seems, by the standards of modern football, relatively light. Of all the ways that the venerable teams of Britain and Europe have sold their souls in recent years, doing so in order to create a heartwarming documentary does not seem especially damaging.

There has obviously been some grumbling about the club losing their identity, becoming unmoored from what they once were. But nothing ever happened in football without at least some grumbling. And the benefits are immediately apparent. Many of the people standing asking the players for autographs as they enter the stadium are American. “We just fell in love with the stories,” said Cheryl Gerry, who has travelled from California. She and her partner, Alec, had to become club members and then enter a lottery to get tickets, such is the demand.

It is difficult not to be struck by the postmodernism of it all. At one point, three people-carriers pull up outside, dispensing a dozen or so representatives from Birmingham. Their crew are in position to film. Wrexham’s stand a little further back, contemplating whether to film that, wondering whether it is just too meta to create content about the creation of content.

A 1-1 draw would ordinarily be quickly forgotten in the maelstrom of the Championship. As a chapter in a story, it will last far longer. Wrexham and Birmingham are visions of the future of the EFL, of British football as a whole: where the act of the game itself is subsumed by the content around it.

Photograph by Nick Potts/PA Wire