When actors Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds bought a low-level Welsh soccer club in 2021, their goal was not just to save a sports team.

In the FX docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham,” which chronicles the stars’ efforts to revitalize Wrexham AFC, the pair’s been explicit about their hopes to uplift the surrounding community as well.

A new University of Michigan study, published in the journal Communication & Sport, suggests they’ve succeeded—with an assist from the awareness bump generated by the show.

After the first season of “Welcome to Wrexham” was released, in September 2022, Google search results for Wrexham jumped by about 30%. Over the next several years, metrics as wide-ranging as employment rate, GDP per capita, social services spending and mental health improved more significantly in the Wrexham region than in other Welsh counties, even when accounting for other factors that could have influenced the shift, researchers found.

In some cases, the impact was dramatic. To wit: Wrexham had the third-lowest employment rate in Wales when the docuseries came out. By March 2024, it was sitting at the top of the table, with the highest employment rate in the country.

“That was the most staggering takeaway, that Wrexham went from one of the lowest to one of the highest employment rates in Wales exactly through the time period we studied,” said Jan Boehmer, assistant professor of sport management at the U-M School of Kinesiology and first author of the study. “It’s remarkable that sport business and sport media had the power to influence more than just the bottom line of the club.”

Mac, whose team reached out to Boehmer following the release of the study, called these statistics “profoundly moving.” 

“It feels like a dream,” Mac said. “All we did was put a spotlight on a small town in the north of Wales. And they did the rest.”

As far as the authors are aware, this is the first study using government data over an extended timespan to establish relationships between sports content, economic development and the quality of life of local residents.

“Our research shows that sport and media can do far more than entertain,” said study co-author Kyriaki Kaplanidou, chair of the Department of Sport Management at the University of Florida. “In fact, sport storytelling can genuinely transform communities.”

Boehmer and Kaplanidou used government and health board data to create a model of six indicators—number of active businesses, employment rate, hourly wages, GDP per capita and number of mental health assessments per month—from all 22 of Wales’ principal areas (similar to counties in the United States).

“We believe that these areas generally experience the same economic pressures and upticks and downturns, the same COVID restrictions, all of that,” Boehmer said. “So if the employment rate in Wrexham goes up, and we check all the other areas, and it’s gone up everywhere at that time, that’s just a normal trend.

“But starting when Wrexham AFC was purchased and the show aired, we wanted to know: Does the Wrexham region behave differently in all these variables than the rest of Wales? And if so, can we rule out any other variables that might have contributed to this behavior?”

The researchers factored in possibilities like inflation, seasonal variation (e.g., mental health concerns may typically increase during the winter months) and even Wrexham AFC’s performance on the pitch, assuming that whether the team was doing well or not might affect the well-being of the community.

The show seemed to have a significant effect on several indicators.

Boehmer said that a common downside of using investments in sport to try to improve the economic outlook for a city is that “the funds required to support the growth of a team often must be diverted from other areas of a city’s budget that could have been used to benefit the community—most notably, social services.”

In Wrexham, though, 16% more funding had been devoted to social services than what would have been expected had Mac and Reynolds not bought the team and “Welcome to Wrexham” not been produced.

Fewer people, too (7% less), had received evaluations from mental health care providers—which Boehmer said can act as a proxy for the general mood of the community—than what the researchers’ model would have predicted without the release of “Welcome to Wrexham.”

“I’m interested in, yes, the business of sports,” Boehmer said. “But also, we all know that sport has a tremendous power to change societies. So for me, it was important to see not just if people benefit financially but also what sport could do for their mental state.”

The amount of publicly available data may have limited some of the conclusions. For instance, Boehmer said he expected the usage of mental health services to be even lower than it was, but well-being can be difficult to capture in quantitative data. Both income levels and the number of new businesses in Wrexham did not increase significantly after the show, according to the models, but the researchers weren’t able to isolate data from specific areas within Wrexham, like around Wrexham AFC’s stadium, which may have seen a higher concentration of new businesses.

Boehmer said he’d love to conduct follow-up studies that delve further into these topics with residents and leaders of Wrexham.