Does the Product Come First or the Story?
How much content is too much content? Are you content with this content?
There is a new football documentary in town. This week, FX Networks released the official trailer for Welcome To Wrexham. Like a good lede in a written piece, the central subject of this movie is introduced in the first shot: Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Scroll down, and those are the first two things written in the description. A radio host soon announces them as the new owners of Wrexham AFC.
About twenty seconds in, a young fan at the stadium asks the Hollywood duo - “What’s the connection between you and Wrexham football club?” McElhenney is honest in his response, or at least he starts off on that note. “We had no direct connection. It was just a... feeling.” As the ing trails off, the camera zooms in on some older fans to the background music of Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley.
Sometime between 2019 and early 2020, McElhenney, an American actor, was scrolling through Netflix when he found the show Sunderland ‘Til I Die. This documentary series follows Sunderland and its fans through a tumultuous season in the second tier of English football. Moved by what he saw, McElhenney called one of his writers and said, “Let’s buy a football club and make a documentary.”
Cut to November 2020, and Reynolds was driving home their intentions during the new owners’ first visit to Wrexham. “The documentary is a huge part of the project.” He said some other amazing things during that visit, but we will come to them in a bit.
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Welcome to Wrexham will be the latest in a long, burgeoning line of documentary shows pivoting around sports teams. Amazon Prime has an entire range of All Or Nothing, which puts cameras inside dressing rooms and training grounds. They did something similar with The Test, which followed the Australian men’s cricket team for a year after a scandal. In addition, Netflix has Drive To Survive, a Formula One show that pushed the envelope of access storytelling. In fact, D2S became so popular that Netflix was granted permission to film a similar series for tennis in 2022.
Matt Rizzetta, chairman of the investment company North Sixth Group and principal owner of multiple Italian football clubs, said these remarkable words when asked about football and content:
“Soccer clubs are the best content investments in the world.”
He was speaking about football, but could have just superimposed that to sport in general.
Even when you tune in to any sports broadcast these days, expert commentary is just one of the many channels we are offered by the producers. We get every sinew of access possible, from stump-mics to a race director’s communication with the Mercedes team principal. It all adds to the drama.
One gets why this kind of production is now the norm. In our age of content overload, a Formula One race is just one of many counters at a sprawling buffet of consumable options waiting at a click’s distance. To keep us from looking away, producers must give us more than just the sound of animated commentary and cars flying at 200 miles per hour.
Seriously, how long before special tickets for a cricket match allows buyers to sit at home and watch the game through a GoPro attached to the umpire’s head?
The idea sounds incredible. Recently, Sky Sports experimented with a camera on a fielder’s helmet. The visuals were a bit hazy, but you’ll always have that with fielders because they move around a lot. Umpires give a more stationary platform for mounting a camera. Wait, why does it sound like I am pitching this to a network?
The thing is - not all access content is terrible. Of course not. I am a fan of Drive To Survive. It gets us inside the paddock and minds of participants of a profoundly technical sport. Sunderland’ Til I Die is a fantastic series too. You really feel for the fans, who invest with heart, time, and money, but can only watch from afar as their beloved team tumbles further down the ladder every week. Even The Test is delightful, because it humanises an elite cricket team, making us see all their cuts and bruises.
A vital aspect of these shows is how cameras are mere observers. The narrative plays out without any retro-fitting, or at best is restricted to a negligible amount - Netflix have been accused of taking a few liberties with driver-rivalries on Drive To Survive. A viewer gets a backstage pass to the theatre, which is great if you want that kind of proximity to a sport.
But when Ryan Reynolds says, “We feel that(their documentary) is the best way to really do a deep dive into the community. You can televise the games, but if you’re not following the story of the players and the story of the community, ultimately nobody is really going to care,” you can’t help but pause. For starters, it is incredible that he thinks people won’t care enough about the community of Wrexham if two snapback-wearing chads from sunny North America don’t come down with their crew and do everyone a favour. Secondly, their documentary trailer starts with an empty stadium and the two owners standing on the pitch. “The story of the community,” sure.
The show had to start and end with RR McReynolds — that is actually what those two call their company — because they are the protagonists. They don’t want to be observers. Wrexham Athletic Football Club, a team that has existed since 1864, are just the backdrop. Welcome To Wrexham has been scheduled for two seasons and will include the incredible moment when McElhenney and Reynolds received the call to confirm their purchase of the club. The cameras were rolling before the play had begun.
To their credit, they started well. Tangible improvements were made to the infrastructure at the club; new signings came in; ticket and merchandise sales have increased since they took over. Without wasting any time, McElhenney changed the away kit for Wrexham to use the colours of his hometown club, Philadelphia Eagles. The large sponsor logo on the torso says a familiar word: TikTok. Wrexham AFC, evidently, has spent enough time as a small club from a small town in Wales. It must now be a commercial entity fit for Times Square and Hollywood billboards. The journey, however, can be a little jagged because who has the time to watch a team organically climb the ladder into Premier League? Do you not tune out of TV shows or movies that feel like a slow-burn?
Reynolds and McElhenney are not the first celebrity owners of a football team, and they won’t be the last. But their vision for Wrexham, where they get to script themselves a cool Netflix feature, may well lead to a deluge of such bids. I mean, it would be distinctly American to look at a sport and think - “Yeah, you know, the other stuff is great, but it needs a little pizzazz. A sprinkle of showbiz.” With every new such stakeholder, a shift is inevitable.
This isn’t a 2022 phenomenon, though. Sport turned towards marketability with the advent of cable television. The stuff we watch today is already commodified, tuned to appease markets which bring in the most revenue. For, e.g. European club football has long tweaked match timings to suit viewership in Asia.
The problem arises when the motive is driven by marketability, not the sport and athletes themselves. I earlier spoke about how an F1 race has to compete with an episode of Love Island for mass attention, but when it is even marketed that way, the risk of making an irreversible turn is too big. Once we dive head-on into the product-market race, changes to optimise and push for profit become par for the course.
It would be naive to think Reynolds and McElhenney are consulting with a supporter’s group in Wrexham to help direct the course of their show. What if Wrexham have a middling season where nothing remarkable happens? Can FX Networks afford that?
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Last week, Ben Stokes, one of this generation’s most talented and high-profile cricketers, announced his retirement from ODI cricket. While it isn’t crazy that he thought all three formats could not be pursued with equal intensity in the final few years of his career, what he said in an interview after the announcement begs attention. “We aren’t cars, where you just put petrol and say let’s go. Our bodies can only take so much.”
I will leave the discussion about the pros and cons of too much cricket for another day, but the fact that cricket doesn’t bother with a season anymore is true. There aren’t any breaks in the calendar, just one series after another. The top cricket boards, who also control the international regulatory body, have realised how much profit regular appearances can bring in. Why play for six months when you can hear the ka-ching for twelve? Ben Stokes doesn’t have to play for all twelve months -- the top players get to pick which series they play -- but he will have to train and keep sharp, which eventually gives little breathing space. He won’t get to choose when his board organises a big tournament.
Cricket administrators, like football club owners, want to make their product highly consumable. For that, they need to attract attention, which, in turn, comes through the most recognisable protagonists. Ben Stokes has, without doubt, played at least a dozen meaningless series’ in the last five years. But, as one of the world’s premier cricketers, a centre-piece of its story, he did not have a choice.
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This isn’t a bell of doom for sports, not at all. Most popular sports are flourishing and growing. They are probably too big to be suddenly cut down into something irrelevant. But maybe a question will be well placed in the centrally air-conditioned meeting rooms where the future is decided: does the product come first or the story?
I don’t know what to make of the documentary and the incentives at play that seem to be twisted. I didn’t know about this issue at all and guess who told me about it? You! So thanks a lot. I am still trying to make sense of this different kind of intersection of sport and documentary.
Too much of a game could be a good thing if people find their niche and just play one of these three forms. Maybe a rule ((God we love rules don’t we?)) is in the offing that restricts players to one ‘primary’ form (Say T20) and limiting them to not play more than X number of the remaining two forms.
I am sorry as I failed in bringing some thought to my comment. I have failed, miserably.
But you haven’t! Thank you for helping me make sense of these lines on the grass Sarthak.