On the 24th August 2022, the ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ documentary series premiered on Disney Plus. Since then, the club have seen huge changes in their growth and popularity.
Back in September 2020, Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought football club Wrexham AFC with the dream of getting the club back into the professional football league. The documentary follows Rob, Ryan, their journey with the club, and the ups and downs of playing football in the National League.
It comes as no surprise that the series has attracted a whole new fanbase, and with that, Wrexham’s social media has seen a huge growth.
Wrexham’s leading social media platform is TikTok. The day before the series was released the page had 407,300 followers, but to date, the page has over 450k. This means they’ve overtaken Championship club Burnley FC, and are now not far from overtaking Premier League side Brighton, who have just under 454k followers to date. In total, the page has had over 4.4 million likes across its TikTok’s, and some videos have even had over 1 million views. Even Premier League clubs such as Tottenham and Manchester United have average views in the hundreds of thousands rather than hitting the millions, so for a National League club to be hitting those figures is very impressive.
There has also been significant growth on Wrexham’s other social media platforms, with Twitter growing from 147k to 177k, Facebook growing from 56k to 77k, Instagram growing from 131k to 177k and YouTube growing from 21k to 35k.
In total, over all 5 social media accounts, Wrexham have gained just under a million new followers, with an estimated 911,563 new people following the accounts since the documentary was released. The club believe that it is likely they will hit over a million new followers before the first series concludes.
In addition to the increase in online social media interaction, the club’s online shop has had over 185,289 new visitors during the time since the docuseries has been released. There has been a total of 3543 new orders, with a total value of £290,170 to date, and this is only in the weeks since the series has been released. In the same period last year, the club made £59,674. The impact of the series has over quadrupled what the club was making only twelve months prior, proving the show has been a major success.
It is clear that the series has impacted the club significantly, and just shows what good management and a bit of Hollywood magic can do for a club that had been mismanaged “to the point of near collapse”.
The episodes of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ are roughly 30 minutes long and can be streamed on Disney Plus with a monthly or annual subscription.
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