Agent Palmer

Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a Welsh football club, or soccer team if you prefer the American lexicon. It just so happens to be the third oldest professional football club in the world, Wrexham AFC. Why Wrexham? Why Rob and Ryan? Those two questions and many more can be answered, to some degree, in Welcome to Wrexham.

The series Welcome to Wrexham is part business documentary, part travel documentary, part history documentary, and part sports documentary with a throughline of the human condition.

Is the summer of 2021 the greatest Summer of Soccer the world has ever known? I believe it might be, despite not being a World Cup year, it is jam-packed with international tournaments that are unlikely to ever coincide again.

The EUROs (postponed from 2020), the COPA, the Gold Cup, and the Olympics (also postponed to this year), have created a buzz around international soccer, the likes of which we only usually experience during a world cup year, and that is only a fraction of the number of participant nations.

Season One of Amazon Prime’s “This Is Football” six-part documentary is a perfect example of all that is actually beautiful with the beautiful game.

In a world where, on Amazon Prime or Netflix, a search for soccer or football will bring you to documentaries on the FIFA scandals, which is an example of everything that is wrong with the game, this series is about everything that is right with the game.

The United States Women won their third FIFA Women’s World Cup title in Canada, in spite of looking and performing below their World #2 ranking at times.

But before I examine what it all means and what is next in the riddle that is Soccer in America, let’s take a look at how they got the Cup.

Many years ago, back in my college days, I would mindlessly play FIFA 2005 to take my mind off school. Playing FIFA mindlessly meant playing on an easier mode and scoring a ton of goals, and my good friend Chris (a.k.a. Agent Parker), would hear the announcer yell “DONOVAN!” repeatedly as I would maneuver Landon Donovan for a goal.

Well, it appears that the real Landon Donovan has been playing on easy mode for a long time as the career goal-scoring record holder for both the United States Men’s National Team and for Major League Soccer.