Welcome to Wrexham Recap: Wrexham Is Here to Make Friends, Actually

This recap covers episodes two and three, “The Quiet Zone” and “Nott Yet.”

This week’s installment of Welcome to Wrexham gives us two episodes focused on Wrexham itself — the club, the fans, the haters, and one of the players in particular — to continue building out and providing more context for the world of the show.

“The Quiet Zone” is about the experiences of two families with autistic children, Albi Mullin (age 3) and Millie Tipping (age 17). Albi’s dad is Paul Mullin, the high-scoring forward who Wrexham AFC brought aboard in the first season as one of their first wave of new hires. He’s originally from Liverpool, which is fairly close to Wrexham, so moving closer to family was part of the appeal of the transfer. Millie is a Wrexham superfan and advocate for herself and autistic identities, qualities, and needs.

The episode uses a deft touch to show us the similarities and differences between Albi and Millie, managing to be matter-of-fact and moving without veering into mawkishness. In their separate interviews, Paul and Millie’s mother, Alison, both get quite emotional speaking about their experiences. Paul wells up with tears repeatedly but never gives the impression that he thinks Albi’s life is tragic in some way; he’s sad that his child is going to have a harder row to hoe than most kids and frets that he did something to cause the challenges Albi faces in a world not designed to welcome him. Likewise, Alison is very proud of how Millie has found a meaningful place for herself in the family of Wrexham AFC supporters. She also carries around some relatable grief due to Millie’s strong aversion to touch and her having never told her family members that she loves them. Both parents are loving and supportive in all the ways you’d expect, delighting in their kids’ accomplishments and focused on their well-being.

Millie’s journey to becoming a Wrexham AFC superfan with an enviable collection of team memorabilia began with her joining and playing for the club’s disability team and then their highly ranked ladies’ team. Being dropped from the ladies’ team just before the pandemic led to what sounds like a profound crisis of identity and mental health that only began to improve once Millie was invited by Kerry Evans to attend club matches. Season one viewers will recall Kerry as the dedicated Wrexham AFC fan and motorized wheelchair user who was a full-time volunteer accessibility coordinator for the team. Thanks to Rob and Ryan’s largesse, the team hired her as the club’s actual and paid accessibility coordinator.

By working closely with Millie, Kerry and her team were able to make attendance at home matches responsive to Millie’s sensory needs. There’s now a small section of the stands called the Quiet Zone, dedicated to providing predictable routines — the same seat, the same stewards staffing the section, the same seatmate — and an environment where her noise-canceling headphones are unremarkable. There’s a lovely extended moment where we get to see Millie relishing a match as the roaring sound of the stadium full of fired-up team supporters drops out almost entirely. It’s a small thing and so effective at illustrating how much small things can matter.

The experiences of the Mullin and Tipping families overlap in other ways, as well. Through Millie’s love of the team and the team’s embrace of her, we see how much she cares about Albi and is eager to have a role as a sort of cool grown-up cousin to him. She puts together a little care package of items she’s found useful and comforting — a supersoft blanket, several fidget toys, a stress ball — along with a cute drawing of Albi up on Paul’s shoulders after a game. As she’s putting the goodie bag together, Millie reflects that she considers her autism a superpower that makes it possible for her to see the world differently than neurotypical people; there’s an unspoken hope that Albi will see himself the same way.

The goodie bag is an enormous hit, as Paul is visibly charmed by Millie’s thoughtfulness, and he responds in kind, asking respectfully if she’s willing to receive a hug before coming in for one. Maybe Millie is clairvoyant, or maybe the gifts to Albi have a certain cosmic power; who can say? What we do know is that she correctly predicted the score for that day’s match against Solihull Moors. The Reds beat the Moors, 5-0, with Paul scoring a hat trick for Albi.

One thing I particularly appreciate about “The Quiet Zone” is how it highlights the tremendous care and affection Millie feels for Albi and Albi’s obvious delight in and love for his parents. Without stating it as a specific objective, the episode smashes to smithereens the dehumanizing myth that autistic people lack empathy or can’t make profound emotional connections with others. It’s also helpful to see onscreen some of the various ways that autistic people experience the world and express sensory preferences and needs.

Like “The Quiet Zone,” “Nott Yet” is another episode focused on the community of supporters that make Wrexham AFC so special. Nearly every team in every sport thrives on stories like this (see also: Last Chance U, Basketball or Nothing, Sunderland Til I Die, etc.) for good reason. They’re enormously effective at cementing the bond between teams and their communities, and at driving new fans to teams. “Nott Yet” focuses on the City of Wrexham’s tentatively growing pride in itself and its team.

Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds have made tremendous financial investments in the club, and all those hundreds of thousands of pounds have made it possible for Wrexham AFC to hire talented players and better coaching staff, all of which is contributing to the team having a historically great season as they contend for promotion from the National League to League Two. That’s wonderful! However, Wrexham remains very much the town it was before Rob and Ryan came on the scene. It’s a city where, as the team’s longtime in-stadium commentator Mark Griffiths puts it, having lost all of their big industries, “we’ve felt like we weren’t allowed to have nice things,” and they couldn’t see the true value and worth of the community as a whole without someone from outside pointing it out.

That’s not a problem Wrexham has any longer, as evidenced by both the new fans brought to the team by Welcome to Wrexham itself and the incredible spike in attendance at both home and away matches. Wayne Jones of the Turf notes that 5,000 or more supporters are turning out at away matches, even ones taking place hours away. Eleven games into the 2023 season, there’s an unmistakable giddiness in the air, along with a strong undercurrent of hateration among supporters of rival clubs.

Fans supporting other teams in the National League feel, understandably, that Wrexham AFC are buying their way into promotion. There’s no point in denying it, this is exactly what they’re doing, and it’s not at all a secret. Would the other teams do any differently if they had the resources Wrexham now enjoys?

Most screen time in this rather slight episode focuses on the team’s rivalry with Notts County, who are also having a wildly successful season. As Humphrey Ker puts it, “In every possible way, they are worthy and noble opponents, and I wish they’d all fall down a manhole and sod off.” Despite the team’s best efforts, Phil Parkinson’s locker room pep talks, and his pre-training counsel to each player (again featuring PowerPoint, which I have accepted is going to kill me every time it pops up), Wrexham loses its match against Notts County, snapping a seven-game winning streak.

And yet, the team and its fans are undaunted, or at least far less daunted than they would have been any other year. They’re all quite literally singing the same tune, “Mullin 10,” a little song by a local band of dads called DECLAN SWANS. Composed in honor of super-relatable local working-class lad and team superstar Paul Mullin, the chorus is built around his stadium chant, “We’ve got Mullin, Super Paul Mullin / I just don’t think you’ll understand / He wears the red and white, he’s quick and dynamite / we’ve got Super Paul Mullin!” (There is a notable similarity between the chorus’s structure and that of a minor country-pop hit from the early ’90s, but we’ll set that aside for actual legal minds to sort through.) DECLAN SWANS have progressed from playing “Mullin 10” in pubs to recording it professionally, and the episode closes with them playing it for Super Paul Mullin himself. It’s a very charming moment, and he seems to feel the precise combination of befuddled and pleased that he ought to upon hearing it.

In the end, the widespread hateration and holleration against Wrexham kind of fizzle out, shifting to a grudging consensus of “oh, good for them” feelings among supporters of rival teams. As for those who continue to pour out their wrath on Twitter, Rob and Ryan invite them to do so in their direction exclusively. Ryan remarks that he can’t understand “how you could root against a town that’s been through so much,” while Rob notes that “the Hollywood Idiots definitely deserve” to be heartily razzed.

Up the Town!

• My understanding and experience can only take me so far in evaluating this episode’s presentation of two people’s lives, and I would be very interested in learning what some of Albi and Millie’s fellow autistic viewers think of it.

• The best fun fact from “Nott Yet” comes from commentator Mark Griffiths, whose history as a radio guy goes back to the 1980s, when he worked in hospital radio, which is a service that exists to this day in the U.K. Wrexham AFC’s Supporters Association paid for a dedicated line directly from the Racecourse to the local hospital so patients could keep up with matches as they recuperated.

• A small clarification regarding DECLAN SWANS: I called them a dad band, but I don’t know if all of the band members are actual dads. I do have an eye for tremendous Dads Having a Laugh With Their Mates energy, though, so spiritually, they’re dads.

• Rob and Ryan’s screen time for these episodes is wisely brief. They show up together at the end of “Nott Yet,” and Ryan’s only appearance in “The Quiet Zone” comes when he’s enjoying a video Paul delightedly shares with him of Albi spontaneously counting number magnets. It’s a cute, understated moment of “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!”

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