Going Grassroots: Men in Blazers Shoots This Week in Wrexham Digital Series With iPhones The U.S. soccer digital brand delivers weekly coverage of the popular Welsh club By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital Tuesday, March 19, 2024 - 10:10 am
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The affinity for European club soccer in the U.S. is an interesting cult phenomenon. The love affair that has grown around Wrexham Football Club, though, is another level of implausible. The subject of popular FX documentary series Welcome to Wrexham, the lower-tier Welsh club has attracted attention from across the world in a way that would have seemed impossible just a couple of years ago.
With so much hype surrounding the club's dramatic rise, other content creators are looking to take fans inside its story. Enter the digital brand Men in Blazers Media Network.
Steven Ellis, head of production on Men in Blazers' digital series This Week in Wrexham, shoots a significant portion of the show's footage with an iPhone 15 Pro.
Typically known for covering the latest in the English Premier League, the UEFA Champions League, and international competitions for a North American audience, Men in Blazers has been offering a weekly YouTube series taking viewers deeper into the drama - and the fun - that is Wrexham Football Club. In an interesting production wrinkle, the show's crew is shooting the series almost exclusively with iPhone 15 Pros and handling the file-sharing and editing workflows in the cloud.
The series is hosted by Thomas Lewis, affectionately known as Tomi or Tomi Caws, a lifelong Wrexham supporter who has traveled with the team throughout decades of darkness, and these last few seasons of joy. It takes viewers on a journey inside matches, through the quaint streets of Wrexham, and on spirited away days. The 5- to 10-minute episodes deliver a whimsical yet insightful portrayal of the season, replete with humor and adoration for the small towns that serve as the bedrock of English football's lower professional leagues.
The [FX] series is excellent. Our show fills a very different hole, says Steven Ellis, who leads production for the Men in Blazers Media Network and is a shooter on the series. On the back of the [FX] series, there has been an exponential rise in fans in North America, and there's no real way to follow the stories of the team and the players on a weekly basis. The [FX] series is out once a year, after the fact. We're not trying to compete; they're outstanding. [We do] more of a lighthearted approach to telling the story around the team, the town, and the fans in a weekly episode.
The Improbable Protagonists There are plenty of institutions (the English Premier League, UEFA Champions League) and legendary players (Lionel Messi, Cristiano Renaldo) that deserve credit for attracting U.S. audiences to international soccer. Along the way, however, a more working-class Men in Blazers has played a critical role in educating them on the modern mythology of English football.
Founded as a podcast in the days of ESPN's Grantland in 2010 by television producer Michael Davies and journalist Roger Bennett, Men in Blazers rolled out an informative and often hilarious welcome mat for North American fans new to the English Premier League. The podcast soared to superstardom during the 2014 FIFA World Cup and went mainstream when the show went to TV following a partnership with NBC Sports, which acquired U.S. broadcast rights to the Premier League in 2014. Since then, Bennett has become an icon in the U.S. soccer community.
These days, Men in Blazers is a full-fledged media company with multiple podcasts, digital series, and talent, including transfer specialist Fabrizio Romano, New York Times chief soccer correspondent Rory Smith, and U.S. Men's National Team captain Tyler Adams. It even recently hired former USWNT star and FIFA World Cup champion Sam Mewis to serve as editor-in-chief of its women's football coverage.
The global popularity of Wrexham Football Club, on the other hand, might be one of the more unlikely love affairs in sports today: a small-town Welsh soccer club in the lower levels of the English football-league system made popular by a comic-book antihero, one of the guys from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and a docu-series that has captured the hearts of viewers around the world.
FX's Welcome to Wrexham, which chronicles the purchase of Wrexham A.F.C. by American actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and the club's struggles to escape the dreaded National League, has become one of the more critically acclaimed sports-documentary series in recent memory. Produced by Boardwalk Pictures - the folks responsible for Netflix's Last Chance U - it has won two Critics Choice Television Awards and five Primetime Emmy Awards. Its second season was completed in November, and its success has spurred emotional investment in this team, the town, and its people around the globe.
[Because of the FX series], you're getting people from all over the world coming to Wrexham every week, says Ellis, noting that he has met visitors from New Zealand to Hawai i during filming. Every week, we're meeting new people. That's not uncommon. They're coming from all over the world because they've become so engrossed in the story. That's what a powerful story can do, isn't it?
Why Shoot on iPhones? It was a strategic decision when Ellis and the Men in Blazers team opted to shoot the series almost exclusively on the latest model of the Apple iPhone, the iPhone 15 Pro. Beyond the obvious budgetary advantages, the choice stems from a desire for intimacy and authenticity in storytelling. The iPhone's picture quality and unassuming profile allow the crew to blend in with the community, capturing ca
