A little under three years have passed since Milos Balac, a native New Yorker with only a passing interest in soccer at the time, received a work offer that would not only turn his life upside down but also, in time, help transform the fortunes of Wrexham AFC.
“I was told Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney were going to buy this soccer team in Wales and film a documentary,” he explains. “I’ll admit I didn’t know any of the names, other than Ryan and Rob. I’d never heard of Wrexham, for a start.
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“Despite that, I said, ‘Sure, that sounds fun and interesting, I’d love to be a part of it’. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.”
Within two months of that initial meeting in August 2020, Balac, an experienced filmmaker whose previous work included an intimate look at tennis’ multiple grand slam winner Novak Djokovic, was settling into a new home in the Welsh countryside.
For the next two and a half years, he lived and breathed the town as a director and co-executive producer behind the Welcome to Wrexham series. He helped find the stories and characters that have turned the show into a huge worldwide hit and became such a trusted figure in the dressing room he joined the players on last year’s Christmas jolly-up to Dublin, Ireland.
Balac called time on his UK adventure following Wrexham’s promotion to the EFL in April and went home to New York. But this week he’s been happily renewing friendships, having temporarily returned to the fold for the club’s two-week pre-season tour in the United States.
“It’s been great to be working again with the team,” Balac tells The Athletic during a break from filming as the build-up continues to the warm-up game in Los Angeles tomorrow (Saturday) against MLS side LA Galaxy’s B team. “Like a family reunion.
“It’s also been so exciting to see and capture an American audience reacting to the Wrexham team with such adoration. The players deserve it and it shows how much their stories have resonated around the world.
“I had such a wonderful time in Wrexham and that was down to the people. I’ve honestly never been to a place where I’ve felt so welcome as a total outsider. Genuine ‘open arms’ stuff, too. I really felt privileged to be a part of it. The people are what I miss the most. That sense of community.
“I love New York and all the spontaneous opportunities the city presents. But it is a big city and life is a little anonymous. Whereas in Wrexham, I knew everyone. I knew the butcher, the baker. I knew Wayne from The Turf and could call in there any time I wanted for a beer. Other times, I’d pop into (Wrexham manager) Phil Parkinson’s office or go chat with Iwan (Pugh-Jones, Wrexham’s kitman) and Chal (Paul Chaloner, head groundsman).
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“The thing I love about my work — and I’m sure it’s the same at The Athletic — is it takes me to places I’d never normally go and meet people I’d not normally meet. If you’d told me at the start of 2020 that I’d spend nearly three years of my life in Wales, following a football team around and becoming entrenched in the town, I’d have said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’.
“But that town, the team and the people mean so much to me.”
Arriving in a new country with a plan to uncover the characters that make the place tick for a documentary featuring two Hollywood stars can be daunting enough.
Throw in an ongoing pandemic that means your first two weeks in the UK will have to be spent in quarantine and it becomes an even tougher assignment. Balac, though, was unperturbed.
“There was me and (executive producer) John Henion who came across at first,” he says. “We had a plan to divide and conquer. He’d lead the contact with the football team, meaning (board advisor) Shaun Harvey was an early contact, along with Dean Keates, who was manager. (Parkinson wasn’t appointed until the following summer.)
“He (Henion) worked really hard to embed himself with Dean and the players. At the start, my focus was much more on what the stories beyond football were going to be and the people we would follow.
“Someone I have to give a lot of credit to is a local guy called Leighton Cox, a really talented cameraman who ended up working on most of the project. He opened so many doors for me. He’d say, ‘You have to meet so-and-so, he has an interesting story’.
“One of the first people he took me to meet was Rob Clarke, who owns the DVD shop. He featured quite a bit.”
Such was the success of series one, it created umpteen breakout stars, including The Turf’s landlord Wayne Jones, Declan Swans lead singer Michael ‘Scoot’ Hett and Kerry Evans, the club’s inspirational disability liaison officer.
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“Everyone had such rich stories to share,” says Balac. “And they were all so open. Same with the players. Every time one of them let me into their lives, it felt really special and beautiful. Paul Mullin, Jordan Davies, Aaron Hayden, Anthony Forde… such great guys.”
As with any documentary spanning such a lengthy period, plenty of footage inevitably ended up on the cutting-room floor. Among those scenes was a nativity play with a twist based on the club’s takeover, performed by pupils at Wrexham’s Welsh language-speaking Ysgol Plas Coch school at Christmas 2021.
“A boy named Jack played Ryan and a girl named Lexi played Rob – she told me she auditioned for the opportunity to wear a moustache,” recalls Balac with a smile. “The North Star was also represented by one of the floodlights at the stadium. So funny and so cool.”
Working on Welcome to Wrexham, which earlier this month received six Emmy nominations in the U.S., meant getting to know the club’s owners. “Rob and Ryan are genuinely just how they come across on the screen,” Balac adds. “By the time I was working directly with them — that wasn’t my role from day one but it became that over the past year — I found them incredibly trusting.
“We often build celebrities up when, really, they are just people who you can ask a question and they can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We’d suggest ideas, such as, ‘When you’re next in town, this is happening so we thought it might be good to do this’.”
With series two in the can and set for a September release on Disney+ in the UK and FX in the United States, Balac says viewers have plenty more great content to look forward to.
This, of course, will include perhaps the most relentless title race of all time, certainly in non-League football, as Notts County and Wrexham both posted record points tallies last season in pursuit of a single automatic promotion place.
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“Soccer wasn’t my sport before this,” admits Balac. “I’d played maybe a couple of years in middle school and I might have casually enjoyed the World Cup every four years. But, otherwise, I didn’t engage with the game.
“Now, though, I do wish I’d got into it earlier, as football has become such a big part of my life.”
With that in mind, we ask how his emotions were during the filming of last season’s run-in, and in particular ‘that’ pivotal home win over Notts on Easter Monday.
“When Ben Foster saved the penalty (in stoppage time, with Wrexham leading 3-2),” he says, “I actually burst out in tears. I just couldn’t stop myself. My sound guy, Chris Youle-Grayling, couldn’t stop laughing at me!
“Then, as we got closer and closer to promotion, I was preparing myself to be in a similar state. But, actually, I was kind of numb when it happened. I was obviously happy and excited. But, in terms of the magnitude of what the team had achieved, it took a bit of time to sink in.”
Reminders of his time in Wales are never far away. The bus stop outside his home in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, for instance, has featured an advert for Welcome to Wrexham, while an old college friend’s recent wedding on Long Island, just east of New York City, again underlined the show’s popularity.
“I’d not seen most of the guests for a long time,” he says. “This one guy asked if I was still working in film so I started to explain how I’d been working on this show in Wales that they may not have heard of called Welcome to Wrexham.
“Across the board, everyone at this wedding was, like, ‘Are you kidding me? We love that show!’.”
After directing coverage of a tour that began with a game against Chelsea in North Carolina and will also take in San Diego, California (where they face Manchester United on Tuesday) and Philadelphia (vs MLS club Philadelphia Union’s second team, in McElhenney’s hometown, on Friday), Balac has no firm plans as to what to do next for work. But he’ll certainly be following Wrexham’s fortunes in League Two from afar.
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“The main reason I decided to leave the project was wanting to refocus on my life in New York,” he adds, “particularly family and friends. Three years is a long time to be away from home.
“But another reason why it felt to be the right time was the belief it really couldn’t have ended on a better note than winning promotion.”
(Top photo: Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
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