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Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney confounded both the worlds of sports and entertainment in 2020 when they teamed up to buy the tiny Welsh soccer club Wrexham AFC. The team is one of the oldest in the United Kingdom, but suffered a long and slow decline to the point where it was in danger of vanishing completely.
The pair have successfully breathed new life into the team, raising awareness with the excellent Welcome to Wrexham Disney Plus documentary, and recently being promoted into the EFL League Two after 15 years away.
Many want to be a part of this rags-to-riches story, and now Natalie Portman is officially in talks for a friendly match against her L.A.-based women’s team Angel City FC (itself the subject of a new HBO docuseries) against Wrexham AFC Women, as she revealed to ET Online.
“I’ve been lucky enough to talk to [Reynolds] about his journey, and he’s so inspirational for what he’s done with Wrexham, and they have a women’s team also. So, we have talked about kind of having some friendly matches at some point.”
This could see an all-star squad descend on the small Welsh city, with Portman counting Eva Longoria, Mia Hamm, and Serena Williams amongst her supporters. Portman went into detail on how difficult it was to get this off the ground:
“It was incredible to get the support from all of those friends and it was, it was really moving when people came on board, because it wasn’t obvious, and we got a lot of no’s before we got yes’. And I feel like I didn’t realize what a big lift it was, and that might have stopped me from doing it if I understood how hard it was going to be.”
And a high-profile friendly match like this would be the ideal way to promote women’s soccer. Portman said she wants Angel City FC to be a model to others, fostering competitive sport amongst people who might not otherwise consider it:
“We want to share out playbook so that other people can learn from what we did well and what mistakes we made and have a foot forward when they do their own endeavors to build teams, and we’re seeing it already being replicated in other cities — not replicated but taking kind of certain aspects of our model and then adapting it to their own cities. So, that’s been really exciting to see.”
It certainly sounds like this friendly match is going to go ahead, and we’d be eager to see the results. Wrexham is a fairytale sports story at the moment, with Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s ambitions for the club apparently boundless (they recently half-jokingly attempted to sign Gareth Bale). The sky is the limit for Wrexham, and their new legions of fans around the world are right behind them.